Evidence against the War on Drugs

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wasted no time reversing his predecessor's efforts to bring some sense and proportion to the nation's war on drugs. Fortunately, not everyone in the GOP takes such a backward view on the question; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for instance, has drawn praise for his thoughtful approach to the question.

President Trump named Christie to head a panel on the opioid crisis. Let us hope he takes careful note of a letter on the subject from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Over 13 heavily footnoted pages, it makes a strong case against the lock'-em-up school of thought.

"There is no statistically significant relationship between state drug offender imprisonment rates and three measures of state drug problems: rates of illicit drug use, drug overdose deaths, and drug arrests," Pew writes. That's a more formal way to say this: Putting drug users in prison doesn't reduce drug use.

Yet the United States has been operating on the opposite assumption for many years - and at great cost. Over the past 35 years the number of federal drug prisoners has risen nearly 20-fold; almost half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses. Federal prison spending has grown six-fold during the same period. Much the same holds true in the states. Yet rates of drug use, and the availability of illicit drugs, are higher now. Pew notes that "more than 33,000 Americans died from an [opioid] overdose in 2015," and heroin deaths that year jumped 20 percent.

To back up its central claim, Pew offers some stark contrasts. For instance: "Tennessee imprisons drug offenders at a rate more than three times greater than New Jersey, but the illicit drug use rate in the two states is virtually the same" - even after adjusting for demographic variables such as education and race.

And: "Michigan, New York, and Rhode Island ... significantly decreased drug sentences. ... Each of these states reduced both their prison populations and their crime rates."Other states have experienced similar phenomena.

This should not come as a great surprise. Individuals struggling with addiction are, at least metaphorically, already in chains. They need to be set free from it - which threatening them with another form of incarceration does not do.

What does? Pew finds - just as Virginia has - that drug courts can help many addicts: "A systematic review of drug courts in 30 states concluded that a combination of comprehensive services and individualized care is an effective way to treat offenders with serious addictions. Mean while, supervision strategies that provide swift, certain, and graduated sanctions have demonstrated a reduction in both recidivism and costs. Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina have saved hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by taking this approach."

Virginia is no stranger to drug courts; the first one took root in Roanoke two decades ago, and 38 of them now dot the commonwealth. A 2008 Virginia legislative study found that those graduating from the state's drug courts were three times as likely to be earning a paycheck as non-participants; non-participants also have a felony recidivism rate five times higher than participants do.

Figures like those - and the data from Pew - draw a bright neon arrow in the direction of smarter drug policy. It points toward treatment, not a prison cell.