Miami Herald - November 1, 2009
Myriam Marquez, mmarquez@MiamiHerald.com

From Liberty City to Little Havana to posh Coral Gables, the results of decades of tough-on-drugs policies have produced a patchwork of laws that are more likely to send the poor crack user to prison and benefit the rich cocaine snorter who can hire a good attorney and get treatment as time served.

Drug courts in Miami-Dade have helped put treatment before prison, but decades of scientific studies tell us that treatment is often too short, without sufficient follow-up -- which leads to a revolving door of addicts who just won't quit.

Drugs -- legal alcohol and tobacco and the illegal kind from marijuana to meth -- hit Hispanics particularly hard.

On Saturday, the National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse concluded a three-day conference in Coconut Grove on substance abuse and how to treat it. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this conference of scientists shared interventions that are working throughout the country. And by March the Obama administration is expected to deliver a comprehensive approach to fight addiction.

About time.

Almost 40 years after Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs -- with a bloated, pill-popping Elvis Presley at his side, no less -- the good science has fast outpaced the bad politics of our war.

It's not about legalizing drugs vs. locking everybody up. It's about policy following the scientific facts about brain development, "how drugs re-engineer the brain," as Dr. Nora D. Volkow of the National Institute put it to me last week.

It's about the genetics of alcohol and drug addiction, about new vaccines being studied to help people quit and stay healthy, and the psychological triggers that people can work through to quit.

Jose Szapocznik, University of Miami medical school associate dean in the department of epidemiology and public health, says it's a "molecule to community" interaction. Unless the community understands the molecular changes that drugs (legal and illegal) produce in the brain, the best policy for treatment won't materialize.

WRONG NOTION

Already, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided not to mess with states that have allowed the medical use of marijuana. The scientists I spoke with scoff at the notion of medicinal use for weed. Better to extract the medicinal properties into a pill -- and not have people choking on smoke and getting high in an effort to stop nausea during chemotherapy, they said.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

But surely the billions of dollars spent these past four decades on a war with no end have been wasted.

Thomas McLellan, the new deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, says a national policy that fosters a community-based prevention system, combined with tripling the number of people getting drug treatment, would do more to reduce consumption than the current state-by-state same old, same old.

NECESSARY URGENCY

Szapocznik says a 15 percent annual increase to the National Institute of Health budget can bring the kind of urgency to drug policy that the fight against HIV accomplished in 20 years. Back when the AIDS epidemic was first diagnosed, the virus was killing people without mercy. Today, thanks to aggressive research, people can live with HIV and die of something else entirely because there are now 30 medications to keep the virus in check.

Just like HIV, drug addiction has no sure cure. It can be treated, monitored, kept at bay. Science has shown us the way. When will politicians follow?

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