If one of my children were a drug addict, what would I want for him?
I would want what any parent would: for his addiction to be treated as a health problem, not a criminal matter, and for him to have every kind of help possible to get him off drugs. Until that happened, I would want him to be able to manage his addiction and live a normal life by taking methadone or another substitute opioid. And until that happened, for him to stay as safe as possible from overdosing, developing H.I.V., or going to prison, which would irrevocably alter the course of his post-addiction life.
What’s significant about the question is not how I would answer, but the probability that I might be asked it at all. Because I am white and middle class, society would view my addict child as a sick person who needed help. If I were African-American and poor, he would most likely be seen as a criminal to be locked up. And no one would be interested in what I wanted, or what was best for him.
A few weeks ago, The Times reported on how the new demographics of heroin — nearly 90 percent of new users in the last decade are white — is softening America’s drug policies. Another factor is the new (and extremely belated) awareness among American officials of the toxicity of mass incarceration, with a quarter of American prisoners locked up for drug offenses. While African-Americans are 12 percent of the country’s drug users, they are 59 percent of people in state prisons on drug offenses; reducing race bias in the criminal justice system means ending the war on drugs. Meanwhile, 20 states have decriminalized or legalized marijuana — what happened to viewing it as a gateway drug?
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenberg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...eplaces-prison/?_r=0]
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