Criminalizing addiction
By Jeff Gerritt, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
It happens because many judges don't have sufficient treatment resources in their counties. It also happens because some judges, especially in rural counties, don't understand addiction. Whether addicts and minor drug offenders go to prison depends a lot on where they live.
"Some people, including judges and prosecutors, see addiction as a state in which people have more control than they have,"
From 2000 to 2013, the share of inmates entering
At a symposium on addiction this summer in
"You will do a better job than I will do in turning their lives around," he told hundreds of community drug treatment providers.
Despite the statements of top state officials,
Path to prison
Meet
In
In jail, Morrison relapsed in July after eight months of clean time. Her bunkie had smuggled in
"It's not an excuse, but I just felt like I had no hope," she told me during an interview at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in
In sentencing her to prison,
Morrison's struggle to say no to opioids and heroin raged for six years. During that time, she spent more than 700 days locked up. If incarceration fixed addiction, Morrison would be straight.
Like most of those caught up in this epidemic, Kaylee is young and white. She grew up in
The daughter of a university administrator and a registered nurse, Morrison had an upper-middle-class upbringing. Her parents divorced in 1998, when Morrison was 12. She has a younger brother and sister.
"We went on family vacations every summer," Morrison said. "Everything was pretty much handed to me."
Still, Morrison was troubled. She was diagnosed as bipolar this year and has always suffered bouts of depression and anxiety. She was a poor student but graduated from
In 2008, Morrison's boyfriend introduced her to Percocet, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. The pills rocked her world. The energy and euphoria they gave her made everything right.
As her tolerance for the drug grew, however, Morrison needed more and more pills just to feel normal and avoid the agony of withdrawal.
"It got to the point where I couldn't even get out of bed without a pill," she said. "Until I had my fix, I couldn't do anything."
Morrison was taking 20 Percocets a day, usually 5 or 10 milligrams each. She bought them off the street for
"Everyone was saying, 'Why don't you just do heroin? It's so much cheaper,' " she told me. "Heroin became my priority."
Morrison was using 2 grams of heroin a day, spending
Over the next five years, she quit using and relapsed three times. "You convince yourself that you can do it just one more time," she said. "But you can't."
In jail and prison, Morrison has gained 30 pounds. She doesn't look like the smiling, radiant young woman who appears in earlier photographs.
There are many people in prison who shouldn't be. Morrison is one of them. Before her last relapse -- when drugs dangled in front of her for days -- she had responded well to treatment. Now she can only hope for an early judicial release. Still, she's determined to move forward and take whatever help the prison offers, including education and drug treatment.
After her release, Morrison plans to go to New Beginnings, a Christian recovery center in
"I'm sick and tired," Morrison told me. "I'm going to take this time to work on me. It's going to be a lifetime battle."
Less than 30 miles from
Drug court is about meeting people where they are. On the day I visited,
Typically, drug court lasts 18 months.
It's no walk in the park. Participants must report regularly to the judge and probation officer. They call in -- sometimes daily -- for drug testing, participate in therapy and 12 Step programs, and work or look for employment.
Missteps, such as missing a call-in or even a relapse, are allowed. It's part of recovery. But serious mistakes, such as disappearing for a few days, trigger sanctions, including jail time. The idea is to correct wayward behavior immediately, with shorter sanctions, and keep people on the path to recovery.
"Doing this takes a lot of energy,"
"It's a lot easier to say, just go to prison. There are a lot of incentives and pressures to do that."
His probation officers are not only cops but also counselors and mentors. They push people to succeed. Drug court officer
Chief Probation Officer
It's tough but rewarding work.
He spent most of the last 12 years on probation or locked up, including a one-year bit in prison in 2007 for drug trafficking. On the street, Wood was using two to three grams of heroin a day, spending
It's a familiar story. After graduating from high school in 2003, Wood found construction work. He started popping pills -- Vicodin, Percocet, and OxyContin -- to ease the physical stress of hard labor. When he was 25, Wood graduated to heroin. He's been in treatment three times. Nothing worked.
With 10 felonies, including drug trafficking, possession, and receiving stolen property, he could have gone straight to prison last spring when, on probation for another drug possession charge, he relapsed on heroin.
Wood turned himself in, anyway. He spent a month in jail, including a harrowing 10 days coming off heroin, sweating, vomiting, shivering, and aching so hard he thought his bones would break.
"I was at rock bottom,'' he told me. "I was ready to give up on everything."
But
Wood works full-time in building maintenance, meets with
To help ease his cravings for heroin, he gets a monthly Vivitrol shot. More than half of the people in
"It takes away the triggers, but you still have to do the work."
Wood avoids old friends and familiar spots that could spark a relapse, including
Drug court has even changed Wood's attitude toward cops.
"The probation officers here really care about you," he told me. "They just want to see us do better. If they would have locked me up, I would have just been mad at the system and wouldn't have taken responsibility."
A former high school baseball star, Wood started coaching
"That's like an insurance policy for me," he said. "I've wasted 12 years of my life. I'm not going back. I just take it one day at a time and keep doing the right things."
Across
To flip the script,
No solution is perfect. Opioid addicts may relapse seven or eight times, or more. But the alternative is much worse: continuing to send people -- at a cost of
Like 200,000 Ohioans struggling with opioid and heroin addiction, politicians and policy makers have a choice: They can keep making the same costly and destructive mistakes or, like
Contact him at:[email protected],419-724-6467, or onTwitter @jeffgerritt.
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