Let's face it. Addicts can be assholes. Statistics suggest most crime of all kinds is committed by drunks and drug addicts. And crime makes headlines, even if lots of addicts are nonviolent, noncriminal, navel-gazers - or occasionally superstars.
The worst you can say about most former addicts is that they can be chatty and self-absorbed. Why should a past addiction define your life? Still, that's the worst that can be said. True stories of recovery are uplifting and reinforce the sense of hope we all have that, no matter how dire your situation, you can pull yourself up and find redemption.
So now let's talk about the biggest drug rehab program in America, California's Proposition 36, approved by voters in 2000. (Huffington Post readers will find articles on the topic: here, here and here.) In short, by requiring treatment, not jail, for nonviolent drug users, Prop. 36 has helped 75,000 people quit drugs, cut the number of addicts in state prisons by 5,000, and saved $1.5 billion.
But those results are just not good enough, or so you'd think from the relentless wave of negative publicity the program seems to get. This past Sunday, the L.A. Times considered the failures of Prop. 36 to be the A-number-one priority story of the day. (Front page, above the fold, right-hand column - where you normally put news of wars begun or ended.) Then AP ran a slight rewrite of the LAT piece statewide.
How did the LAT skew the Prop. 36 story so negatively? By focusing on addicts who were not in the program (the assholes), instead of those who did enter it or those who succeeded.
Start with the headline: Users Kicking Prop. 36, Not Drugs. Second graf mentions "high failure rates." Before long, we are treated to the preposterous statement that "the lay voter" probably expected "a 75% or higher success rate" in treatment. (Big-time demerits for Judge Ana Maria Luna for that one.) Ah, so anything less spectacular than wiping out the addictions of 3 out of 4 people is going to be a disappointment, eh?
If that's the case, 1 out of 3 must look pretty pathetic. That's right, Prop. 36 graduates just 34% of the people who begin treatment. It's par for the course, but everyone would like to do better - anyway, that's all we've got now.
Did I mention that this means 12,000 people are graduating each year? Twelve thousand who were busted for felony possession, most of them for meth, 60% of them with addictions spanning 11 years or more? Thank heavens the LAT acknowledges that 78% of these graduates were drug-free a year later (i.e., treatment works).
Still, the LAT's focus (and the AP rewrite's) was all on "no-shows" and dropouts. A bit less than 30% of those who initially say they'll go to Prop. 36 don't go. Why not? The LAT entertains just one theory: they're walking away with a "get out of jail free card."
"Too few defendants appear to take Proposition 36 seriously," complain "judges and law enforcement officials." There's a "gaping loophole" that allows Prop. 36 defendants to "slip through the cracks," bellyaches the governor's spokesperson.
But there's no loophole, and folks who don't show aren't getting "out of jail free." L.A. County data show that lots of people who initially say they'll take Prop. 36 treatment later change their minds and choose to accept a jail sentence. That makes sense - why spend a year or more in recovery, with the threat of prison if you fail, when instead you can go dope up with your friends in jail and be out on the street within weeks?
Others who don't make that choice consciously do go to jail for failure to show up for Prop. 36. Probation is terminated and all Prop. 36 protections evaporate. Some come in on bench warrants while others aren't seen again till their next drug bust, but most face the music.
Aren't reality checks boring? See, it's much more interesting to talk about the bad guys (and gals) who blow off treatment than the people who do go in.
If you like to talk about bad guys, you'll love the tiny subpopulation (1.6%) of Prop. 36-eligible druggies referred to by UCLA researchers as "high-cost offenders." These guys, according to the LAT, "racked up so many arrests that their costs to the state were 10 times more than the average Proposition 36 defendant." Really assy.
One of the researchers rushed off a letter-to-the-editor to emphasize that she had "found that eligible offenders who had multiple arrests in the 30 months before entering the program accounted for a relatively large percentage of the crimes subsequently committed." UCLA is in the midst of a state-funded report on this group.
Here's what nobody is saying about these evil-doing 1.6% of Prop. 36-eligible drug offenders: We don't know if a single one of them ever went into Prop. 36.
You have to read the wording carefully. This is 1.6% of the drug offenders who were eligible for Prop. 36 (about 900 people). Eligible. If we're going to bash Prop. 36 with the club of this subpopulation, shouldn't we know if they actually ever went into the program?
As the UCLA researchers know better than anyone, these 900-odd "high-cost offenders" come from a group of more than 60,000 drug offenders that were studied, of whom 36,000 entered Prop. 36 treatment.
Given their aggressive criminal histories, it would be no surprise to find that most of these "high-cost offenders" refused Prop. 36 and continued in the life. The study shows they are costly precisely because they keep getting arrested and jailed or imprisoned. If someone could put them in treatment, maybe that cycle would end.
Instead, the LAT quotes the UCLA researcher saying, "Some people, quite frankly, don't belong in Prop. 36. They're going to fail. They're going to keep failing. We're wasting our money."
Which money, exactly, are we wasting? Our police and jail money, or our treatment money?
If you can't show that these "high-cost offenders" are in treatment, you're not even talking about Prop. 36. It's statistical legerdemain.
What's worse, this confusing and distracting discussion of "no-shows" and the 1.6% of "high-cost offenders" neatly serves the interests of those who hate Prop. 36 and want to rewrite it, starve it or repeal it. The more time we spend talking about people who aren't getting treatment, the less we are talking about what works, and how to make it better.
Why do you suppose the state's top drug treatment agency is paying for a study of addicts who get arrested a lot, while the same agency has refused to publish a study of how much money Prop. 36 really needs to maximize treatment success? Dare I say the agency's brass finds the assholes more interesting than the redeemed?