Everyone benefits by ending our criminal approach to drug use

Opioid Overdoes.  Drug Addictions.  Lives Torn Apart.  Those are the headlines today.  These are terrible problems in our society and I think they have been caused in part because we don’t treat drug use and drug addiction as public health crises.  Whenever we hear the word drug, our first response is, “let’s get law enforcement on this.”   Instead, I think we should be calling public health officials.

For decades we’ve taken this public health issue and attached a criminal justice label to it.  And it just hasn’t worked.  In fact, the problems have gotten worse, not better.  Millions of lives have been destroyed by our criminal approach, on top of the lives destroyed by drug use itself. Yet our reaction to the destruction has largely been to enforce our criminal approach more zealously. We’ve ramped up policing and given harsher sentences, but the destruction only gets worse. This is predictable. Doubling the trauma will never produce flourishing. It leaves people crushed and families torn apart.

The criminal justice system certainly has its place. It is the right tool for acts of aggression such as theft, rape, and murder. There are victims in aggressive crimes, and they deserve justice. Policing those acts makes our communities safer. Drug use, though, isn’t aggressive. It has no victim. Yet we are treating it as a crime, which not only fails to address why a person is using drugs, it fails to offer a solution to actually help them.

I’m a politically conservative Christian wife and mother of three young sons. I value strong families and productive citizens. But criminalizing people for drug use is producing broken families and unemployable citizens through the crippling effect of a criminal record. If we really want flourishing people, we will lay down the wrong tools and focus all of our efforts and taxpayer dollars on the right tools – research-based prevention, treatment for addiction, and community support for people in recovery.

Recently I saw a young man in a local court who had been arrested for possession of an illegal drug and been in jail for several months. He had never been in trouble with the law before, and had a wife and young daughter at home. Who are we helping by imprisoning this young man? We’ve traumatized him with jail, destabilized his family, spent thousands of taxpayer dollars, potentially wrecked his employment opportunities for life, and haven’t addressed the health issue of his drug use. We’re losing on every front. Yet this scenario is playing out for thousands of Mississippians every year. Everyone can agree that this man shouldn’t have been using an illegal drug. But if our response to his bad decision only makes life worse for him, for his family, and for the rest of us, that’s the definition of a failed policy.

We should set aside the criminal threats and address the actual issue and offer people treatment, employment, and connection to the community. This won’t fix everything, but it will give more people the chance to get the help they need and live productive lives with their families. We don’t have to crush people who are broken. We can work towards giving every person the best opportunity to thrive. But we can only move towards that when we stop trying to scare people into the behavior we want and traumatizing them when they don’t comply. I supported a criminal approach to drug use for most of my life because I thought it was advancing my conservative values. I realize now that it’s working directly against them. Drug use and addiction are complex issues that demand our engagement, but they’re not criminal ones.

Do you think drugs should be legalized?

That question was first directed at me 6 years ago. My response was typical for my demographic as a politically conservative Christian woman.  Have you lost your mind not to mention your faith? Drugs tear at the fabric of families and society. Why would we legalize them? I knew drugs were dangerous and could really harm you – I still believe that. And I never questioned the message that was culturally drilled into me – that prohibition by law is the answer.

But the presence of danger and harm doesn’t mean that prohibition is the right weapon. What about adultery or pornography? Those are dangerous and harmful. They tear at the fabric of families and society. But if we criminalized both of those in the same way we have drugs, we would be prosecuting as criminals over half the adult population in America. Alcohol can ruin lives too. But we tried alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and it was a colossal disaster. Death, disease, and crime skyrocketed during the 13 years it was in place until it was finally repealed.

I’ve changed my mind about illegal drugs.  And I’m not setting aside my faith to support legalization, but rather acting in response to my faith by seeking the welfare of the world around me and the people in it. The drug war is not working.  Countless lives – including law enforcement officers – are being lost or ruined.

Drug prohibition can’t deliver the health, safety, and control that we want. It delivers the exact opposite. When we prohibited drugs, we gave up control of every important factor related to them: control of potency or purity; control of who’s selling them; and control of who’s buying them.  We have learned from alcohol and tobacco that the only solution is legalize, regulate, tax, and restrict.  Drug legalization would certainly not fix all the problems of drug use and addiction. But it would dramatically decrease the crime, disease, death, and mass incarceration that prohibition has caused, and allow us to address the actual issue – drug use as a public health crisis.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced a new crackdown on drugs. This is bad news for those who want peace, freedom, and order in our communities. Cracking down means the risk to transport and sell drugs will go up, which will increase prices. That will increase the violent lengths to which dealers will go in defending their more lucrative turf. An increase in price will also mean some users will commit more crime to come up with the money to support their more expensive habit. Manufacturing will also get more inventive in packing the biggest punch in the smallest size. With every crack down the profits increase.  Sessions’ new war would incentivize more crime, more death, more disease, and more corruption.

Today I’m still a conservative Christian woman. I have three young sons at home. My husband and I will teach them that drugs are dangerous and can be highly addictive. They can destroy your life and your family. I will plead with my sons not to use them. Legalization is not about endorsing use. It’s about treating a national health crisis for what it is. It’s about lowering death and disease. It’s about bringing law and order back to our communities and neighborhoods where the war on drugs is literally playing out on the streets.  Justice is not always done by enforcing the current laws. In the case of drugs, justice is done by admitting when laws are not just, and demanding change.

Pregnant moms using drugs need help, not jail

When we became a foster family three years ago, I was certain of at least one thing: mothers who used drugs while they were pregnant should have their babies taken away. I had never met any of these moms before but I couldn’t conceive how anyone who loved their child could expose them to drugs. Certainly our home would be a better place for their baby, I thought. Ironically, it was fostering a baby exposed to drugs and meeting his mom that made me question our punitive approach to pregnant women struggling with addiction. I’m convinced now that arresting these moms, or categorically putting their babies in foster care without further investigation, is not reducing harm. It’s making things worse for these children.

In November, Nikki Cox-Musgrove from Pearl was sentenced to 15 years in prison for obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and exposing her unborn child to opioids. Her addiction, which led to doctor shopping and using while pregnant, was treated by our laws as criminal activity instead of the serious health crisis it was. And that difference just took a child’s mother away for 15 years.

The best case scenario for babies is that their moms aren’t using drugs. But if they are using, even while pregnant, then our best approach for reducing harm to the child is to help them and get them into treatment immediately. Instead, we use threats of criminal punishment, which only pushes moms AWAY from prenatal care that could reduce harm. How can we expect these moms to seek help when they’re seeing mugshots of moms just like them, on statewide news stories, being imprisoned? That’s terrifying. We can’t terrify and traumatize people out of addiction. We’ve tried that for decades, and it has failed spectacularly while leaving millions of destroyed lives in its wake.

Sometimes when pregnant mothers use drugs, their babies are born dependent on those drugs. The New York Times reported in July that hospitals in Kentucky and New Hampshire are trying a new approach with these newborns, with promising results. Instead of taking dependent babies away from their moms at birth, they’re keeping them together in low-stimulation private rooms and teaching moms how to comfort, nurture, and bond with their babies. They’ve found that surrounding moms and babies with this kind of compassionate support has significantly reduced the number of newborns who need any drugs after they’re born to taper their dependence. We may be separating these babies from the medicine they need most, their mom.

I’ll never forget bringing one of our newborn foster sons to his first visit with his mom and watching her sprint across the parking lot to my van and cover him with kisses. Over time I saw that she was a mom just like me, whose love for her son was as deep as my love for my own sons, even though she couldn’t beat her addiction while she was pregnant. Drug addiction does not equal a lack of love. It is a complex health crisis, and should be handled by doctors and therapists, not the criminal justice system.

Our goal should be reducing harm to babies and reducing harm to parents. Who benefits from Nikki in prison for 15 years? She doesn’t. Her child doesn’t. The taxpayers don’t. Moms like her are driven further from help. And when our policies destabilize families that are already vulnerable, the broader community suffers too. If this was justice by law, then our laws are unjust and we must demand change.