The Drug War's Littlest Victims

By Nell Bernstein, Salon. Posted November 4, 2002.

The last time Tracy Carter, a longtime drug user, was sent to the county jail, she ran into her mother. Neither woman was surprised. Carter's parents are both longtime heroin addicts. Her sister is a heroin addict. Carter says she herself was born a heroin addict. So were most of her seven children.

Carter (not her real name), 38, has been in and out of jail throughout her long career as an addict, mostly for violating her probation. She has come out each time -- homeless, jobless and full of good intentions -- and started using again within a matter of weeks or months. This grim routine has left her children trapped in a grueling cycle themselves: bouncing from one home to another; vacillating between faith and despair as their mother makes and breaks promise after promise; and, as they grow up without her, drifting into depression, delinquency and addictions of their own.

In November 2000, California voters decided it was time for Tracy Carter, and drug users like her, to try something different. With 61 percent of the vote, they passed Proposition 36, a measure that sends most nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather than to jail. Two years later, similar initiatives are on the ballot in Ohio and the District of Columbia; several more states have implemented or are working on legislative fixes to tough drug laws; and more than 70 percent of Americans are telling pollsters they'd like to see the government ease up on addicts.

This new climate may be based in pragmatism as much as in compassion. The number of drug offenders in state and federal prisons has increased more than tenfold over the past decade, from 40,000 to nearly 500,000. Incarcerating them costs five billion dollars a year. With a faltering economy draining government coffers -- and the war on terrorism competing for dollars formerly reserved for the war on drugs -- the price tag for being the world's largest jailer is starting to look a little steep.

A national shift from incarceration to treatment has the potential to save much more than dollars. More than 8 million of America's 75 million children have a parent or parents addicted to drugs or alcohol. Parental drug addiction fuels the foster care system; it feeds the juvenile justice system. It affects welfare caseloads, school performance and child health. And parental addiction is self-perpetuating: Up to 70 percent of the children of addicts become addicted to drugs themselves.

Might drug treatment slow the staggering growth in the nation's foster care system, which has more than doubled in the past 15 years, to over half a million children? Child welfare workers think so. In a 1997 survey by the Child Welfare League, child welfare workers estimated that 67 percent of the parents they dealt with needed treatment, but only 31 percent got it. According to researchers at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), parental substance abuse is implicated in seven of 10 cases of child abuse and neglect, and is responsible for $10 billion of the $14 billion spent nationally each year on child welfare costs. Nationwide, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 5 million Americans need drug treatment but only 2 million receive it.

Might treatment stem the tide of juvenile incarceration, which has left 125,000 adolescents behind bars at last count -- many of whom have experienced parental drug addiction and incarceration? Might it aid those hardest cases that stymie welfare reformers -- the families that lose their benefits to time limits before they manage to find another means of support, many of whom are thought to have drug problems?

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