Reject Half Measures; Hard Time Stops Abuse Personal Choice Junkies Can Avoid Jail By Getting Help.

Grand news, crime victims. The medical profession has figured out how to cure drug abuse and save us a lot of money on prisons.

Here’s the plan: We quit building prison cells. Instead, we send all the junkies to sit in waiting rooms for hours on end while the doc plays golf. Eventually, we give the offenders some therapy sessions and some overpriced pills - for which we charge the taxpayers a sum of money large enough to buy every doc in the nation another country club membership and a new golf cart.

This is progress? Snort.

But seriously, folks, a group of the nation’s most impressively credentialed medical academics has calculated that the success rate for treating a drug addict is about the same as the success rate for treating a diabetic. Which is to say, treatment fails with roughly half the patients. That’s good enough to justify treatment of diabetes, so it’s good enough for drug addicts, too. Right?

Wrong. Here’s why:

Diabetics don’t rob convenience stores, burglarize homes, mug little old ladies, embezzle their employers, abuse their stepchildren, machine-gun their rivals or sell cocaine outside school yards when their treatment fails.

But drug abusers do.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the criminal justice system used rehabilitation programs extensively. Criminals with drug problems routinely were paroled on condition they get treatment. Alarming recidivism rates, rising crime and corruption in treatment programs brought this to an end. All around the country, legislators rewrote crime laws.

Today, if you commit a crime, you do hard time. If you want to change, you can, and if you don’t, no amount of treatment will save you. If you keep reoffending, a three-strikes law will lock you up for life.

This works.

The nation’s crime rate has fallen every year - for seven straight years. The aggressive incarceration of crack dealers has cut way down on the theft and violence that made many disadvantaged neighborhoods almost unlivable. From New York to California, from burglary to murder, the get-tough, lock-em-up approach is taking junkies and crime off the streets. This is bad?

Nobody’s stopping offenders from getting help, getting religion, getting an education, getting a job or getting a one-way ticket to the slammer. It’s their choice. And it is that simple.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see headline: Let’s just say no to what doesn’t work

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides CREDIT = John Webster For the editorial board’s dissenters