Access to treatment key in fighting meth
How should Indiana respond to methamphetamine use? During the crack cocaine epidemic of the ’80s, New York City chose the zero tolerance approach, opting to arrest and incarcerate as many offenders as possible. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was smoking crack and America’s capital had the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Yet crack use declined in both cities simultaneously.
Simply put, the younger generation saw firsthand what crack was doing to their older brothers and sisters and decided for themselves that crack was bad news. This is not to say nothing can be done about meth. Access to drug treatment is critical for the current generation of meth users. Diverting resources away from prisons and into cost-effective treatment would save both tax dollars and lives.
The following U.S. Department of Justice research brief confirms my claims regarding the spontaneous decline of crack cocaine: www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/
187490.txt
— Robert Sharpe
Policy Analyst
Common Sense
for Drug Policy
Washington, DC 20012
Everyone deserves a little dignity
After getting my medical degree from Calcutta in 1953, I practiced for a year in my native town of Gopalganj, which by then became a part of East Pakistan. One day a quack practitioner asked me to go with him to see a patient, who happened to be an old prostitute, who along with a few others were living in utter poverty. She had pneumonities and other infections and I treated her with the help of the quack and accepted no fee.
It is hard to hold tears whenever I think of those poor women, who were born at a time as sweet little girls, but later misfortune denied them husbands, homes or children and they were used for sex pleasure of the civilized males.
Once beyond their youth, they are thrown out as dirty linens and hated by the society as something filthy. Sometimes I try to think, how those unfortunate members of our human family may be feeling. Denied a family, children or grandchildren, and hated by the society, how miserable they must be. Our civilized society rarely talks about them and millions of our young girls are turned into prostitutes every year, who in older age are to live most miserably until they die.
Cannot our civilized society spend even a tiny fraction of the money it uses in wars to kill other human beings, to give these unfortunate members of our human family, food, clothes, shelter and a little dignity?
— Anil K. Sarkar, M.D.
Terre Haute
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