In this edition of Street Roots we tried to bring you a mix of perspectives and approaches to addiction and drugs. But we know this is only a small sampling of what this community has to say on the issue. Because we also know that drugs affect everybody, everywhere. There is no single profile of a drug user, no single cause of addiction, and no right by anyone to condemn people who have fallen under such a powerful influence. They are heroin addicts and prescription junkies, living on the streets and in multi-million-dollar homes. The poor tend to go to jail, while others live out lives of uninterrupted affluence.
And yet this country remains hooked to its Puritanical war on drugs, despite abundant reports exposing it as a monumental social and economic failure — to the tune of $15 trillion in unmitigated hypocrisy since it began. While children are hitting the streets, and then the drugs, we’re pushing laws to send them directly to jail (a la mandatory minimum sentencing proposals on the upcoming November ballot).
While people are waiting, struggling for months or more to get into treatment programs, the quickest trip to services is often an arrest record. All the while, federal policies restrict the funding for the very services that empower their transition on their own initiative.
Four decades after President Nixon launched the war on drugs, the federal government remains less interested in taking care of people than waging the war — here and abroad. And yet government reports show that the worldwide narcotics industry continues to thrive, raking in hundreds of billions of dollars of profits for distributors, fueling more violence, poverty and oppression. Meanwhile, U.S. prisons are teeming with people incarcerated for the consequences of their addictions, with a disproportionate number of them minorities.
No one is winning this war except the people being paid to wage it, and they have no interest in ending it soon.
That’s on the national level. Locally, Portland deals with its own battles. Here in Portland, most of us get it. Programs such as our drug treatment court and the street outreach of Central City Concern’s Community Engagement Program are taking the harm-reduction approach, working to nurture people out of drug abuse and addiction and back into society. It is about meeting people where they are and taking them to another level.
Through CCC’s program, people are getting stabilized in housing straight away, with the goal of moving people strung out on the streets into a safe environment surrounded by health care and treatment. Syringe exchange programs, administered through Multnomah County’s health department and Outside In, are buffering our community against an epidemic of hepatitus C, HIV and AIDS. On top of these programs there are many other organizations that are taking a cooperative approach to helping people.
These efforts deserve your support because they are keeping Portland healthier and stronger, fitter for battle against blind judgement — even if the folks in Washington D.C. fail to see the light.
