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READERS RESPOND: War on Drugs (Part 3) |
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From Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs News: I can remember driving by the Ship Channel in Houston in 1952, past row after row of tanks being outfitted with turrets at the Brown and Root plant. I was a year away from heroin addiction, and the U.S. was embarking on generations of war mentality, perhaps fostered by winning what some have called the last just war. When Jerry Jaffe became the first drug czar, I had been "clean" for a couple of years, and Nixon was introducing the rhetoric of war into the field of drug abuse. Treatment was funded, certainly, but always at a far lower rate than enforcement of sometimes arcane laws. It is not for nothing that the Public Health Service is a military organization, which trains its new recruits to become part of a culture that accepts the notion that a disease, a condition, a state of being outside the realm of "normal" is an enemy to be fought and vanquished. Maybe it is time to recognize that our social structure fosters enormous drug markets, a hidden economy that becomes all too visible when adding up the cost of fighting the war. It's a war we all need to fight in behalf of children of addicted parents, an invisible mass of kids (one out of every four in this country) who needs still are not being met, even though they carry the burden of the transgenerational effects of alcoholism and other substance abuse. In the same way that fear of HIV/AIDS fueled the funding of drug treatment in the 1980s, so fear of crime has seen substantial funding for drug treatment during the late 1990s and beyond.
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