Nationwide Drug Control Initiatives
Drug abuse is one of the most pervasive problems facing the US, and costing over $275 billion in health care expenditure, related crime, lost productivity, and other social imbalances. United States has developed numerous drug control initiatives since substance abuse took the lead in eroding the social fabric of the US. Various laws have been passed in both the upper and the lower chambers, but still, some people argue that the country has been fighting a losing war against drugs. The budget for drug control initiatives has risen sharply for the past decade yet drug-related problems worsen, and the drug-related incarcerations have consistently reached new records. These new records have elicited mixed reactions from the citizens of the US, and some are questioning the reliability of the drug control initiatives. Several initiatives have been in use in the US, some producing positive outcomes in combating drug abuse, while some need improvements to realize the intended goals. Some of the initiatives have been developed to highlight the best practices in prevention, treatment, and law enforcement strategies. The prevention, treatment, and law enforcement efforts have great help in controlling drug abuse, but they still need more improvement.
The impacts of the drug control initiatives
Preventive Initiatives
Child Development Project (CDP)
The US government developed CDP initiative in 1992 where various schools incorporated effective programs, which teaches the young people to resist drugs. The CDP primarily focused on prevention. The program taught prevention in schools, reaching out to the youths outside schools, and reaching the high-risk groups (Lewis & Lewis, 2012). This intuitive has helped the young generation to develop personal, and social skills, such as sound decision making, social interaction, and communication. The prevention initiative is viable because the teachers often are the first people who can identify the warning signs of drug problems. Developing effective school programs have also enhanced awareness, and resistance skills. Such preventive programs in schools have helped school going children across all the states in the US (Reno et al, 2010). Such children and even the university students have learned that most of their peers do not use drugs, and thus they have learned to recognize social and peer influences on drug use.
The CDP program mainly aimed at teaching prevention in schools, where the target audiences were the school going children and their parents. The CDP mostly used a philosophical approach in interacting with the elementary school children, their families, and teachers by focusing on the entire school rather than focusing on the high-risk students (Lewis & Lewis, 2012). Since its invention in 1992, the CDP program has managed to reach over 100 schools in six states, and its programs now recognized by the Centre for Substance Abuse Prevention as a promising high-risk youth program (Reno et al, 2010). The CDP program led to a decreased substance use among the fifth and the sixth graders in schools that fully implemented the program. An evaluation conducted by researchers from the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland revealed that the CDP led a decrease in alcohol use among children from 48 percent to 37 percent. Cigarette use also declined from 25 percent to 17 percent. The use or marihuana declined from 7 to 5 percent (Lewis & Lewis, 2012). After the program was rolled out, students reported that they enjoyed school more, and were more motivated to learn. The CDP intuitive is thus one of the most useful initiatives ever to be implemented by the US government in the communities of San Francisco, California, New York, Louisville, and Kentucky (Reno et al, 2010).
Law enforcement initiatives
Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS)
The law enforcement initiatives mainly targeted the type of penalties awarded to the drug users and the availability of drugs. Such initiatives included the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), the Drug Interdiction Program (DIP) in the state of Pennsylvania. The CAPS initiative was mainly formed to enhance to cohesion between the police and the public and eventually, enable them to work together with the federal justice system (Lewis & Lewis, 2012). CAPS changed the way the law enforcement agencies operating in Chicago by bringing the city agencies, the police, and the community to identify and solve the neighborhood crime-related problems by eradicating drugs. Before the enrollment of the program, there were backlogs of court cases, which prompted the questions on what type of penalties are awarded to the drug users. Since its formation, CAPS, streamlined the penalties awarded to the drug users, and it consolidated the community and the law enforcement agencies and the police (Reno et al, 2010). Members of the public would easily report drug users to the police who were mainly aiming to correct the behaviors of such individuals rather than pursuing arrests.
Drug Interdiction Program (DIP)
The DIP was a law enforcement initiative which mainly aimed at making the drugs unavailable for the inmate abusers (Marlatt et al, 2011). The initiative was started in 1996 and still continuing to present. The program was first launched by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PDC) and aimed to reduce drug use among the prison inmates and eventually enhance the safety and safety of the staff (Bewley-Taylor, 2012). The intuitive was designed to rid prisons of the illicit drugs by integrating interdiction methods, drug treatment, and drug testing. The National Institute of Justice evaluated the DIP initiative in five prisons both male and female. In this regard urinalysis and hair, tests were conducted on 917 inmates before the program was fully implemented. In 2001, 1,021 inmates were tested for only inmates who had been in prison for the last three months. According to the test results, the positive hair test for marijuana dropped from 9.2 percent to 0.8 percent. For cocaine, there was a drop in consumption from 2.3 to 1.2 percent, and tests positive opiates dropped by 0.2 percent from 0.8 percent (Pottegård et al, 2016). A similar trend was realized when urinalysis was conducted on the inmates except for the opiates test which rose by 0.2 percent to 0.8 percent. In general, the DIP initiative was found viable in controlling drug abuse among the inmates and is still in use to date in most prisons in the US.
Treatment initiatives
Delaware KEY/ CREST
The Delaware Key was a program, which aimed at rehabilitating criminal offenders by reducing drug use among them, and consequently reducing criminal recidivism. The drug-addicted offenders in four Delaware prisons have access to this program (Berridge, 2012). Even though the initial rollout of the program targeted a small geographical location, programs are still underway to expand the program across the United States (Visher et al, 2017). The criminal offenders in this program receive substance abuse treatment in a therapeutic community setting in prison. This initiative offer treatment to inmates in their last 12 to 18 months of their incarceration. In so doing, the offenders learn to develop behavioral change, which perhaps led them into drug use. The clients for this treatment initiative are housed in separate community settings different from the other inmates. They spend weeks just focusing on treatment (Berridge, 2012). The participants in this program are not allowed to watch televisions or use mobile devices to avoid distractions.
The Delaware KEY/ CREST offers an array of treatment services, which include counseling and vocational training programs provided by the prison. The KEY counselors are assigned 20 clients at any time. The other staffs in the program include the administrative assistants, program directors, and clinical supervisors. When the clients leave the correctional facilities, the KEY participants enter the CREST Outreach Centers, which operate a work-release program considering the therapeutic community model (Visher et al, 2017). The CREST is designed to help the inmate drug abusers make a smooth transition into their society. The residents of CREST receive a six-month intensive substance abuse treatment phases, which in turn help them to adapt to the life outside prison. The Delaware initiative reduced drug abuse among the inmates completing CREST (Berridge, 2012). Sixty-nine percent of the inmates completing CREST remained arrest free from drug-related causes.
New Vision Therapeutic Community (NVTC)
The New Vision initiative was developed to provide substance treatment and other related services to the US citizens and the inmates. The first New Vision initiative was launched in Texas prisons and replicated in Oklahoma and New York (Berridge, 2012). Through the program, the residents would gain the necessary skills to live with one another in society as productive members of the community after prison. The component of the aftercare is a critical factor in maintaining treatment success. After the launch of the program, the first phase of the recidivism rates was promising. The prisons treatment and aftercare accounted for 25 percent, the after dropout 64 percent, and the untreated prisoners 42 percent (Visher et al, 2017). The New Vision program reduced drug and substance abuse among the inmates released from prison as per the statistics as mentioned above.
Recommendations and conclusion
The United States has several drug abuse control initiatives. Some have been rendered functionless by the current government, while others have been upheld since their invention in the early 1990s. Among the current initiatives for controlling drug abuse among the citizens, some are too specific to inmates when other citizens out there also suffer from drug abuse cases. In this regard, the treatment natives such as the New Vision and the Delaware KEY/ CREST should be rolled in out in more than 50 percent of the states in the US. The comprehensive rollout will ensure the programs reach even the citizens on the streets where most drugs are abused. Some of the public drug control initiatives target schools, and especially the preventive initiatives such as the CDP.
Nevertheless, the CDP has a challenge in that it only works if the principal teachers, and staff commit to flowing its design. This calls for simplicity in its design, and cooperation from the targeted staff. For such a program to be effective, most schools in the US need to integrate the CDP in its daily school routine. The program targets the young generation in schools, while the other treatment and law enforcement initiatives tend to focus more on inmates and adults. This implies that such programs have left no avenue for social erosion as far as drug and substance abuse is concerned in the US. Therefore, the government and the whole society must towards embracing, and funding these initiatives because they have proved productive since their invention.
References
Berridge, V. (2012). The rise, fall, and revival of recovery in drug policy. The Lancet, 379(9810), 22-23.
Bewley-Taylor, D. R. (2012). International drug control: Consensus fractured. Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, S., & Lewis, D. A. (2012, May). Examining technology that supports community policing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(pp. 1371-1380). ACM.
Marlatt, G. A., Larimer, M. E., & Witkiewitz, K. (Eds.). (2011). Harm reduction: Pragmatic strategies for managing high-risk behaviors. Guilford Press.
Pottegård, A., Broe, A., Hallas, J., de Muckadell, O. B. S., Lassen, A. T., & Lødrup, A. B. (2016). Use of proton-pump inhibitors among adults: a Danish nationwide drug utilization study. Therapeutic advances in gastroenterology, 9(5), 671-678.
Reno, J., Holder, E. H., & Marcus, D. (2010). Promising strategies to reduce substance abuse: An Office of Justice Programs (OJP) Issues and Practices Report. US Department of Justice, Washington, DC.
Visher, C. A., Lattimore, P. K., Barrick, K., & Tueller, S. (2017). Evaluating the long-term effects of prisoner reentry services on recidivism: What types of services matter?. Justice Quarterly, 34(1), 136-165.
Vuong, T., Ali, R., Baldwin, S., & Mills, S. (2012). Drug policy in Oklahoma: A decade of change?. International journal of drug policy, 23(4), 319-326.