Our prisons are full and they are full of people who would not be there at all were it not for one addiction or another. It is hard to convince a non-addict/alcoholic that addiction is a disease that is treatable. Looking at the lives of those who have sought treatment and turned their lives around, it is obvious that our punitive reflex to drugs and alcohol related offenses only make the problem worse. We can injure any other part of the body, come down with any cancer or genetic disability and consider the person afflicted to be blameless. However, it seems to be impossible to see addiction/alcoholism as a brain injury equal to the toxic affects on the brain of overexposure to lead or mercury by society. The medical profession has known this for over a century. Today we have M.R.I.'s and other tools that can pin-point where in the brain we are injured by this disease. Whether or not it is a genetic or environmentally induced condition isn't contested because it is often found to be both.Furthermore, the genome having been decoded has found that the genetic disposition of the alcoholic is qualitatively distinct from that of a normal drinker.
Compassionate treatment goes much further than punishment and this too is known by all but politicians who prefer the demagoguery of declaring a War on Drugs and Three Strikes laws to putting the equal funding into medical facilities.Tags such as The War On Drugs peg the emotional buttons that sane efforts don't evoke. It is time for a change.Turning our mental hospitals into compassion care centers for mental disease would go so much further in my opinion.
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