Berlowitz advocates the adoption of a plan similar to one used in the Netherlands. Addicts are supplied with drugs under the court conditions of supervision and rehabilitation. Not only would we stop making organized crime and drug lords rich, but we would also end the corruption of our government and the governments of other countries. We'd stop forcing addicts into a life of crime to support their habit, and we would end the prison industrial complex. Building, supplying and operating prisons have become big business and in many places.
Convict labor is lucrative, and companies are contracting with prisons to use their cheap labor.
The nation would be a healthier place overall, Joyce Borkin, suggests, if health insurance companies were required to cover mental illness the same way they do physical illness. First we need to stop thinking of mental illness as something other than an illness and start treating it as a brain disease, which it is. Clearly it is time we started covering mental illness as we do other illnesses. Only a sweeping overhaul of current campaign financing mechanisms has a chance of cleansing the moneychangers who serve well-heeled special interest groups from the temple of representative democracy. Comprehensive campaign finance reform is the key to overcoming the pervasive political cynicism that keeps voters away from the polls in droves.