Outline of Proposals to Win the War on Drug Addiction

The War on Drugs was lost. Reforms are set forth in my new book, Get Tough & Smart - How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction (Get Tough & Smart - How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction). We must attack the demand for addictive drugs and fight crime. Punishing crime supports the War on Drug Addiction and vice versa.  The Opioid Crisis is bringing matters to a head.  Here is a list of new proposals:
·      Create the legal status of “addict,” attainable at various junctures such as overdose admissions to hospitals, conviction of drug-related crime, parental designation, physician designation, etc. Government, annuity, workers’ compensation and other regular checks might be re-directed to support recovery rather than addiction.
·      Relax privacy, confidentiality, secrecy and non-disclosure laws enough to facilitate law enforcement and forced recovery, such as requiring police to be notified when addicts are preparing to leave a hospital at the end of detox or rehab facility prematurely.  
·      Emphatically and graphically dissuade and deter teenagers from trying drugs, by subjecting addicts’ overdoses, problems and punishment, particularly PJCP, to much more photographic and video disclosure on the internet;
·      Create a legal duty on the part of the addict to make reasonable progress towards abstinence; methadone and buprenorphine maintenance participants would be ideal for enforcing this procedure, since those medications take away craving for opioids;
·      In the name of public health, expand civil commitment statutes and proceedings to bring more addicts into drug abuse treatment or other controlled environment involuntarily, for placement: (1) in the homes of their empowered parents; (2) in jail initially to start methadone and buprenorphine maintenance therapy; (3) in drug-free work environments to labor productively for multiple years in exchange for treatment (i.e. indentured servitude);
·      Make addicts stay in evidence-based outpatient or residential treatment and make them complete that treatment on pain of punishment;
·      If they fail to pass regular urine tests, subject methadone & buprenorphine maintenance patients to progressive discipline and punishment, civilly, administratively and/or criminally; and roll this procedure out to other addicts and addictions when successful;
·      Reduce incarceration and drug addiction by allowing parolees and some drug addicts to wear color-coded metal collars, with or without various electronic enhancements, adjusted in weight according to the post-release conduct of the offender and abstinence of the recovering addict; adopt policies and punishments should a collared individual be found out at night or in a prohibited place;
·      Increase medication-assisted drug abuse treatment in prisons, especially in the 30 days before release;
·      Expand the State of Vermont’s Hub & Spoke program to other states, and use mobile drug treatment vans to distribute methadone and other medications in rural areas;
·     Revitalize prison industries and labor under a laissez-faire model paying negotiated wages without application of laws applicable to regular citizens, even below minimum wages, in accordance with How to Create American Manufacturing Jobs;
·      Punish many crimes with the progressive discipline and punishment of the stocks, pillory, tattoos/branding and ultimately public judicial corporal punishment (hereinafter referred to as “PJCP”) as set forth in Deuteronomy 25:1-3, in lieu of (or in addition to) incarceration, especially by employing PJCP on drug dealers, gang-related criminal offenders and thieves.
·      If they re-offend on parole, instead of sending parolees back to prison, punish them with PJCP;
·     To fight addiction after the addict has completed initial drug treatment, use credible abstinence reinforcers such as PJCP indefinitely for many years, rather than the trinkets, vouchers, cash and drawings we now call our abstinence reinforcers during the short time addicts are in treatment; destroy the addicts’ denial, if necessary, with these abstinence reinforcers;
·      Collar, yoke, surgically castrate or brand rapists and child molesters.

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