And we tend to think of this as a moral issue, so it generates a huge amount of blame and denial, in the sense that we don't want people to know if our family has drug problems. And we certainly might not want to know about it ourselves. And that's the kind of conceptual leap that we haven't made yet in this country. That vision of the drug problem has governed our policy for more than 100 years. It might take us another 100 years to get out the other side.
Treatment is vastly more cost-effective than incarceration and enforcement.
Other studies show, for example, that one dollar invested in treatment saves seven dollars in social costs, primarily by reducing prison costs. That study was done in California, which has one of the largest prison populations in the country. In America we still define our drug problem as primarily criminal in nature. We have not yet made the leap into understanding that addiction really is a chronic relapsing disease, and that there are a lot of things we can do, both to prevent the disease from happening, and to treat it once it happens. So, as long as we think about the drug problem in terms of being tough on drugs, thinking of it as a crime, or being soft on drugs and dangerously liberal or touchy-feely, we are going to continue to allocate our money in these really skewed ways that don't make sense in terms of what the research has shown us.