editorial comment Come on Sara! You dont sound like you are supporting the troops!

BY SARA BOATRIGHT
KEEP 'EM ON THEIR TOES
October 25, 2005

Marijuana, apparently, loads unloaded guns.

That’s what the public service announcements would have you think, with dramatized scenes and stern voice-overs nearly culminating in a satire of themselves. The 30-second plot lines are familiar by now: Teenagers get high in a father’s office, one finds a gun and in his cloudy cannabis haze is somehow able to accidentally shoot the other.

Never mind, of course, that marijuana-related deaths are almost unheard of. And overlook the fact that while the “war on drugs” spews forth public service announcements such as bitter drafted soldiers, the war’s true casualties remain bleeding in the shadows, their addiction spawning disease.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has appropriated nearly $38 million for the 2006 fiscal year not to treat recovering addicts or safeguard youth, but to “collect and analyze drug trafficking and related financial investigative information.” The strategy appears to be one of nipping drugs in the hydroponic bud, with drug agents bustling like angry nannies into Central America and beyond. An international slap on the wrist, it seems, will cure the nation’s fondness for mind alteration.

But while blameless voices waft from the White House, citing ruined lives and troubled youth, those lives are still lying in ruin — and the youth have yet to find solace or salvation.

The iron fist of current drug policy has adopted a zero-tolerance approach that wastes time and resources on the harmless, deflecting desperately needed attention from the already harmed.

Some of the nation’s finest are persecuting marijuana mules while heroin addicts drift beyond the narrow scope of bureaucratic concern, leaving fading trails of dirty needles. And when a single pinprick can deliver any number of death sentences, teenagers with bongs seem the least of our national worries. Still, the war on drugs has attacked image before importance, lumping marijuana and methamphetamines together into an incoherent, forbidden stew.

The first step toward an unscathed nation, however, is not to cover its scars but to prevent new wounds. The shields could be as simple as clean syringes.

North Carolina is among the states contemplating needle exchange programs, which, if approved in selected counties, would allow injecting drug users to trade used syringes for clean ones. For opponents, the proposition is little more than a permission slip, a measure not only approving of drugs but making them easier to administer.

Yet for all the years that the drug war has been raging, the only certainty is that some addicts will remain addicts, despite handcuffs and handholds alike. If they must be drug users, the prevention of infectious diseases among them is a logical first step.

It also could be an effective step, as a 1997 survey demonstrated that HIV rates among injecting drug users in cities with needle exchange programs dropped nearly 6 percent per year. For an addict, the prevention of HIV and other diseases is not merely a precaution — it is a chance for redemption.

A life left unlimited by deadly infection is a life that might yet recover and revive, potentially gathering others in its ascent back toward normalcy. The possibility for such a chain reaction, or at minimum the containment of a pandemic, does not require millions of dollars’ worth of “investigation.” It begins, amply and simply, with a box of fresh needles.

Similar hope lies buried in the red tape of recovery resources, overworked nonprofits and harried volunteers often limping along without a federal support system.

The chances for effective healing are often predetermined by a grim equation: Those with money can rehabilitate, those without it cannot.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated outpatient drug treatment costs to be more than $1,400 per course, a sum that low-income families simply cannot afford.

The only way to be guaranteed affordable treatment by the federal government is to go to prison, where both methadone and tax dollars often disappear to no avail.

Still, the “investigative” budget of the war on drugs outpaces that of disease prevention and treatment programs, and federal agents chase trafficking ghosts while addicts go on dying. There is no moral redemption in this, no tangible justice to offer to America’s drug-torn families.

Those who see their children, their parents, their siblings and their spouses fallen beneath dirty needles and fractured federal systems cannot fathom the logic of chasing paltry marijuana dealers, nor should they. In its tunnel-vision obsession with the war on drugs, the American government has forgotten how to battle.



Contact Sara Boatright, a junior public relations major,

at scb419@email.unc.edu.

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