EDITORIAL: Altering the course on drug addiction; task force an overdue strategy

Just within the last two weeks, you may have read in this newspaper:

• “Addicts are trapped in their addictions. It can take the threat of jail or prison to force some people to seek treatment.” So said David Powell, head of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council and a former Greene County prosecutor.

• “We’ve tried incarceration for 40 years in the war on drugs, and it’s failed. We know what doesn’t work.” Those words from Larry Landis, head of the Indiana Public Defender Council.

• “All of our counties have an Austin, Indiana, in them,” said Kellie Kelly, public information officers for the Madison County Health Department in Anderson. The reference, of course, is to the small town in Scott County, a stop along Interstate 65 that this year has become ground zero for a frightening spread of HIV — the virus that can lead to AIDS — from a negligible few in previous years to 181 as of last week. 

• “We simply cannot arrest our way out of this problem. We have to recognize that we also have to address the root causes of addiction and focus on treatment,” said Gov. Mike Pence last Tuesday when he appointed a learned task force to study the dimensions of Indiana’s drug problem and to identify real-time steps that state and local officials can take soon to slow the problem.

The task force was, of course, the right move to make. The state needs urgently to gather and employ the best ideas from the best minds on this monstrous topic. The unfortunate part is that it’s a step Pence should have taken years ago, and many who specialize in drug addiction treatment, law enforcement, criminal justice and medicine could have — maybe did — tell him so. Whichever, as drug and alcohol specialist Jerri Lerch told the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne: “It’s never too late.”

The 21-member task force has been charged to assess resources across the state, identify gaps, find examples of effective law enforcement, scrutinize treatment resources, highlight prevention programs that work and to recommend steps that the governor, the legislature, the public and local officials can take.

The task force members (see www.drugtaskforce.in.gov, click on “Members”) represent expected areas of health, policing, medical education, corrections, courts (including the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court), social services, religion and state government. The task force has its own gaps, though. While it has a representative of prosecuting attorneys, it has no representative of public defenders or defense attorneys. Other than medical school education, neither does the task force have membership from higher education, which would seem to have perspectives to add (from, for instance, Indiana State University’s excellent department of criminology). It also is Indianapolis-centric, with little representation from northern and southern Indiana — and none at all from west-central Indiana/Wabash Valley region where you live. 

Perhaps those gaps, and any others, can be remedied at three fact-gathering meetings that have been scheduled: Sept. 16, Oct. 15 and Nov. 19. Each meeting will be conducted in a different region of the state: north, central and south. Exact locations have not been announced.

The task force meetings can be an effective process if people speak up and if the task force listens up.

This may be at least a bit of a sea change for Pence. He seems to have tempered his law-and-order-tough-guy persona for one who now seems to understand that there is much more to the drug addiction problem than arrest them, convict them, jail them and release them. That has been a formula for addicts to return to jail time and time again and being labeled as flawed persons. Instead, there are success stories living around us — maybe within your own family — who have gone clean, with the right kinds of treatment, therapy and support. Addiction never really goes away, but individual and group resolve can keep it at bay. While some addicts will always fail — or backslide after months or years of sobriety — some can succeed. The great majority will not succeed from behind bars.

As CNHI State Reporter Maureen Hayden made clear in a story in Saturday’s Tribune-Star, Indiana needs both more money for addiction treatment and more trained drug counselors. The latter, in fact, may be the greater problem now. This may be a spot in which our state’s colleges and universities can perform true public service by initiating or expanding medical, scientific, social work and criminology training for those who would go on to serve addicts.

The extra money for treatment? It should be expanded in the state’s operating budget, but it also could be immediately infused with a healthy transfusion — let’s say $200 million — from the state’s $2 billion reserve that Pence has so closely guarded. The surplus should be reserved for emergencies. And this one.

This change in approach to drug addictions, if it comes, will coincide with an attempt by some in law enforcement to have the Legislature increase penalties for those who sell drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and prescription painkillers. Some of those sentencing limits were dropped in 2014 and need to go back up. The dealer deserves little mercy. The user often does.

The outcome for the user should be to salvage a life, to restore it to whole, to give it chances to succeed.

How that can be achieved should be the main recommendation coming from Gov. Pence’s task force.