The Long, Hard Roads

Over at the Gazette, there’s a story entitled, Walworth County officials hope drug court for heroin addicts will start in June (subscription required).  The story, from reporter Andrea Anderson, is about a hoped-for program of rehabilitation for heroin addicts.  

The program would apply to Walworth County residents, addicted to, and charged with possession of, heroin. If part of the program, they would receive a jail term that would allow for detoxification, a months-long program of after-care, and mandatory, periodic testing and counseling in exchange for the possibility of becoming clean and avoiding a felony conviction.

It’s a program that Walworth County should pursue, with the goal of restoring addicts to health, preventing a relapse into addiction, forestalling other crimes in furtherance of addiction, and to demonstrate to others similarly addicted that rehabilitation is possible for their own conditions.   

I’ve no personal experience with addiction, but like many others (right, center, left, libertarian), I can see that punishment alone – without treatment – is an invitation to relapse into addiction and crime – an invitation to an increasingly expensive recidivism.  

Many libertarians read widely about crimes of addiction because that topic highlights the harm from obsessive government punishment alone. The state fails often, but of addicts and their victims more so than many others.  

No manner of punishment alone has been enough to prevent addiction; no manner of punishment alone could ever be enough.   

There are, in fact, two long roads ahead, for this better idea and those (including the community, generally) who would benefit from it.  

Immediately, there’s the hard path that addicts will have to walk, albeit with necessary assistance, to become sober again.  Their sobriety would be both a personal and a social gain.  All Walworth County would benefit.  

There’s another hard road for this program.  One can expect that for a few, unreconstructed in their politics and grandstanding in their manner, opposition to a program like this will be a reflex. They’ve insisted on waging war against some of their fellow citizens over narcotics, and using that decades-long war as a means to political and institutional power. 

That war has achieved too little, and cost too much, but for the unreconstructed there’s no admitting any of that – they’ll insist on more of the same (but failing) approach as they only imaginable course. 

There is a better way – indeed, there has to be a better way than repeated addiction, unchecked crime, and perpetual waste.  

One hopes the best for this limited program, knowing full well that it will be a hard path, made occasionally harder still through a stubborn, unthinking opposition.