ACLU National Call For Medical Response to Addiction

ACLU National's Rebecca McCray blogs about celebrity bad-boy Cameron Douglass in order to develop a point: Criminalizing addiction is a costly mistake.

Our counterproductive drug policies have swept thousands of nonviolent drug offenders into the net of our criminal justice system. Once they are there, they are likely to stay: data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that 66.7% of drug offenders return to prison within three years of their release. These high rates of recidivism could be avoided if we recognized the ample evidence that treatment is far more cost-effective than incarceration.