Fact 2: A balanced approach of prevention, enforcement, and treatment is the key in the fight against drugs.

• Over the years, some people have advocated a policy that focuses narrowly on controlling the supply of drugs. Others have said that society should rely on treatment alone. Still others say that prevention is the only viable solution. As the 2002 National Drug Strategy observes, “ What the nation needs is an honest effort to integrate these strategies.”

• Drug treatment courts are a good example of this new balanced approach to fighting drug abuse and addiction in this country. These courts are given a special responsibility to handle cases involving drug-addicted offenders through an extensive supervision and treatment program. Drug court programs use the varied experience and skills of a wide variety of law enforcement and treatment professionals: judges, prosecutors, defense counsels, substance abuse treatment specialists, probation officers, law enforcement and correctional personnel, educational and vocational experts, community leaders and others — all focused on one goal: to help cure addicts of their addiction, and to keep them cured.

• Drug treatment courts are working. Researchers estimate that more than 50 percent of defendants convicted of drug possession will return to criminal behavior within two to three years. Those who graduate from drug treatment courts have far lower rates of recidivism, ranging from 2 to 20 percent. That’s very impressive when you consider that; for addicts who enter a treatment program voluntarily, 80 to 90 percent leave by the end of the first year. Among such dropouts, relapse within a year is generally the rule.

• What makes drug treatment courts so different? Graduates are held accountable for sticking with the program. Unlike other, purely voluntary treatment programs, the addict—who has a physical need for drugs—can’t simply quit treatment whenever he or she feels like it.

• Law enforcement plays an important role in the drug treatment court program. It is especially important in the beginning of the process because it often triggers treatment for people who need it. Most people do not volunteer for drug treatment. It is more often an outside motivator, like an arrest, that gets —and keeps— people in treatment. And it is important for judges to keep people in incarceration if treatment fails.

• There are already more than 123,000 people who use heroin at least once a month, and 1.7 million who use cocaine at least once a month. For them, treatment is the answer. But for most Americans, particularly the young, the solution lies in prevention, which in turn is largely a matter of education and enforcement, which aims at keeping drug pushers away from children and teenagers.

• The role of strong drug enforcement has been analyzed by R. E. Peterson. He has broken down the past four decades into two periods. The first period, from 1960 to1980, was an era of permissive drug laws. During this era, drug incarceration rates fell almost 80 percent. Drug use among teens, meanwhile, climbed by more than 500 percent. The second period, from 1980 to 1995, was an era of stronger drug laws. During this era, drug use by teens dropped by more than a third.

• Enforcement of our laws creates risks that discourage drug use. Charles Van Deventer, a young writer in Los Angeles, wrote about this phenomenon in an article in Newsweek. He said that from his experience as a casual user—and he believes his experience with illegal drugs is “by far the most common” — drugs aren’t nearly as easy to buy as some critics would like people to believe. Being illegal, they are too expensive, their quality is too unpredictable, and their purchase entails too many risks. “The more barriers there are,” he said, “ be they the cops or the hassle or the fear of dying, the less likely you are to get addicted….The road to addiction was just bumpy enough,” he concluded, “ that I chose not to go down it. In this sense, we are winning the war on drugs just by fighting them.”

• The element of risk, created by strong drug enforcement policies, raises the price of drugs, and therefore lowers the demand. A research paper, Marijuana and Youth, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, concludes that changes in the price of marijuana “ contributed significantly to the trends in youth marijuana use between 1982 and 1998, particularly during the contraction in use from 1982 to 1992.” That contraction was a product of many factors, including a concerted effort among federal agencies to disrupt domestic production and distribution; these factors contributed to a doubling of the street price of marijuana in the space of a year.

• The 2002 National Drug Control Strategy states that drug control policy has just two elements: modifying individual behavior to discourage and reduce drug use and addiction, and disrupting the market for illegal drugs. Those two elements call for a balanced approach to drug control, one that uses prevention, enforcement, and treatment in a coordinated policy. This is a simple strategy and an effective one. The enforcement side of the fight against drugs, then, is an integrated part of the overall strategy.