Innovative Programs to Slow Abuse May Be Our Best Chance in Drug War

When it comes to the struggle against drugs, Americans have become addicted to despair. The searing movie “Traffic” portrays the flow of drugs into America as virtually a force of nature, as irreversible as gravity or the tides. In a national poll last month, three-fourths of those surveyed said the nation was losing the drug war.

Yet the share of Americans who use illegal drugs is half today what it was in 1979--just 1 in 14 now, compared with 1 in 7 then. That hardly means the problem is solved; since the early 1990s, the numbers have been drifting back up ominously, especially among young people. But it does suggest that--like crime, welfare dependency or teen pregnancy--the level of drug abuse can be affected by changes in public policy and social attitudes. “I don’t see an end in sight,” says Maryland District Judge Jamey H. Weitzman, whose work in Baltimore’s innovative drug court puts her on the front lines. “But what I do see are creative opportunities for solutions.”

By necessity, this weathered city of charming row houses and barren corners has been as aggressive as any in searching for such new ideas. With a population of about 650,000, it has an estimated 60,000 drug addicts; heroin and cocaine are the drugs of choice.

Two important initiatives here are confronting the problem and providing models for other troubled cities. One is the Baltimore drug court that Weitzman helped establish in 1994 and still administers. When Baltimore opened its drug court, fewer than a dozen were operating nationwide; today nearly 600 are in place, with 456 more in development.

Like many of the last decade’s best social policy ideas, the drug court works because it bridges an artificial divide, in this case the gulf between the drug war’s hawks and doves. The hawks emphasize incarceration, the doves focus on treatment; the drug court blends both. It provides drug offenders an alternative to prison and guarantees them access to treatment, thus fulfilling the top priorities of the doves. But it also nods toward the hawks by subjecting participants to regular drug testing and imposing sanctions on those who flunk. Weitzman says she hits the most recalcitrant cases with “generally short bursts of jail to get their attention--kind of like a timeout for a child.”

Almost everywhere that they have been tried, the drug courts draw strong reviews. But they are limited by the conditions of their own success. Drug courts work largely because of the intense supervision the participating judges provide, but that personal attention limits the number of cases the program can handle. In Baltimore, even after a recent expansion, the program this year is scheduled to supervise only about 900 offenders. “Drug courts are wonderful,” says Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug policy expert at UCLA. “But you can’t do them in scale.”

Which is why Maryland has undertaken a second experiment inspired primarily by Kleiman’s work--an idea known as “coerced abstinence.” The coerced abstinence approach targets offenders on probation or parole, a population usually overlooked in discussions about drugs and crime. Yet federal studies show that those on probation and parole consume about half of all the cocaine and heroin used in the United States. That helps explain why about two-thirds of the 550,000 men and women released from state and federal prison each year are rearrested within three years.

Kleiman’s idea was straightforward and radical: Subject probationers and parolees with a history of drug abuse to regular testing and an escalating cycle of swiftly imposed punishments (including jail time) for those who test dirty or duck the exams. Maryland’s Break the Cycle program--championed by Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and the front-runner in the state’s 2002 gubernatorial race)--constitutes the most ambitious effort to implement the idea.

It’s been an undeniably rocky road. The program handles a much larger population than the drug courts--about 9,000 people at a time--and it has strained under the load. Initially, the state failed to even analyze many of the urine samples it collected. And even when samples showed a relapse, probation officers, overwhelmed by large caseloads, rarely imposed sanctions--in 1999, fewer than 4% of participants who tested positive for drugs were penalized. The initiative may have reached its nadir last fall when a participant with 72 unsanctioned probation violations allegedly shot a state trooper.

Slowly, though, the program is stabilizing. Townsend says delays in processing drug tests have been sharply reduced. An academic evaluation in February found that the program now sanctions about 20% of the participants who test positive for drugs. That’s still an anemic number, but even that glancing deterrence seems to be having an effect: The study found that the share of participants who test positive for drugs dropped in half--from one-fourth to one-eighth--after 16 tests. Participants also were less likely than other ex-offenders to be arrested within six months of leaving jail, the same study showed.

The program’s critics have a case: Its absurdly low sanction rates invite defiance. It needs more money, more probation officers and a greater commitment from the courts to swiftly punish those who flout the rules. Yet the assault on Break the Cycle still misses the larger point.

Before the program, hardly anyone on parole or probation in Maryland was tested (much less sanctioned) for drug use. Virtually any participant that Break the Cycle discourages from drugs and crime is one more than the old system reached. This means that, despite its flaws, the program still is better than what most states do to suppress drug use among ex-offenders--which is typically next to nothing. “Maryland is doing about a third of what it ought to be doing to control drug abuse by probationers--but that’s about 20 times what anybody else is doing,” Kleiman says.

What Break the Cycle’s mixed record actually demonstrates is the futility of awaiting a sudden breakthrough in the battle against drugs. In this war, there is no V-2 rocket or atom bomb. It may be that the best we can hope for is to slow the tide of drug abuse, with creative but imperfect initiatives like those in Maryland. Accepting frustration as the inevitable twin of progress may be the only way to lift the fog of despair that blocks new thinking in the unending drug war.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.