public policy
CSAM Op-Ed in Press-Enterprise
The following op-ed article ran on August 21 in The Press Enterprise.
Don't gut drug-treatment rules of Prop. 36
The Press Enterprise (Riverside, Inland Southern California) Sunday, August 21, 2005
By PETER BANYSAND DONALD KURTH
Enacted nearly five years ago, Prop. 36 is a voters' initiative that mandates the provision of drug treatment to nonviolent drug offenders convicted for first or second offenses of simple possession.
California voters rocked criminal justice opposition by a 61 percent versus 39 percent margin in overwhelmingly demanding a public-health approach to addictions.
Three years' worth of data has just been analyzed by researchers at UCLA who have found that Prop. 36 is working well. More than a third (34.3 percent) complete their treatment as ordered. Another 7.3 percent are discharged from treatment with a rating of "satisfactory progress." Almost twice as many patients are employed at the end of treatment as were at the beginning, having gone from being tax consumers to taxpayers.
All this at 10 percent of the cost of incarceration. These outcomes are comparable to rates found in diverse treatment and specialized drug court settings.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Prop. 36 saves hundreds of millions of dollars and improves thousands of lives, we physicians find ourselves again disputing police, prosecutors and corrections officers who assisted Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny, D-Chula Vista, in drafting Senate Bill 803 to "improve" Prop. 36. This bill is scheduled for debate Aug. 23 in the Assembly Public Safety Committee, chaired by Mark Leno of San Francisco.
The California Society of Addiction Medicine opposes provisions of SB 803 that would impose jail sanctions on Prop. 36 clients who fail to show up for an appointment with a drug counselor or who submit a dirty drug test. We believe these provisions undermine the public's defining intent to shift from a criminal justice to a public-health model.
Ducheny's bill argues that amendments will modify Prop. 36 to follow the drug court model. While we believe that drug courts can be effective, they have a number of sanctions (community service, court appearances, urine toxicology testing) and structures (liaisons with treatment facilities, social work assessments, probation visits) that other courts don't. In no way will simply returning broad incarceration powers to sitting judges turn their courts into the "drug court model," as has been asserted by some enthusiasts of SB 803.
The state Legislature's own lawyers have written that elements of SB 803 would violate the intent and purpose of Prop. 36. SB 803 is bad medicine, bad policy -- and a repudiation of drug-war-weary California voters.
Peter Banys, M.D., is a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and past president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine. Donald Kurth, M.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Loma Linda University and president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine.
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Online at: http://www.pe.com/localnews/opinion/localviews/stories/PE_OpEd_Opinion_D_op_22_drugs.856d4ac.html
