It sounds like a simple choice: treatment or incarceration. Approve Proposition 36 next month and we help drug addicts get well. Vote against it and we keep sending them to jail.
We can line up one way or the other on the ballot measure and resolve this messy drug abuse problem . . . just as we sent "three strikes" to cut crime, and dispatched Proposition 187 to uncrowd our schools.
This is what politics in California has become--a one-word referendum on social issues. We make policy via initiative in the naive belief that even the most complicated problems can be resolved with a simple "yes" or "no" at the ballot box.
Proposition 36 has a worthy goal: fund treatment slots for thousands more addicts and make sure they get it by prohibiting judges from sending first-time offenders to jail. But it's a solution apt to fail as often as it succeeds. Because salvation can be as elusive for drug addicts as the notion of justice is for us all.
Follow me to court.
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They call it Los Angeles County Drug Court. It's part of America's longest-running, most successful experiment with treatment in lieu of incarceration. Here is where hundreds of drug addicts in trouble with the law get a chance at redemption. The price is high--a yearlong regime of meetings, counseling, classes, drug tests. And so are the stakes--up to a year in jail for anyone who fails to graduate.
The courtroom is already crowded when Judge Stephen Marcus takes the bench.
A trio of young women, studded with hoops and tattoos, sit together on a bench. They've been ferried here from their residential rehab program to try to convince the judge they're ready to go home.
Down the row, a middle-aged woman wearing a tasteful red suit and expensive-looking jewelry sits fingering her purse, glancing anxiously toward the door where her daughter--a mother of four and decade-long drug addict--will be ushered in, handcuffed, from jail.
Behind them, a fellow who looks like a college student sits reading a novel, backpack at his feet. Along the back wall sit half a dozen young men, some lounging, others tapping their feet nervously. Latecomers are greeted heartily as they slide into their seats with a familiarity honed through months of court appearances, counseling sessions and 12-step meetings.
Many do not make it through the stringent regime--they skip out on classes, test dirty, commit new crimes or just disappear and have to be hauled back to court by police.
