Like An Old Dutch Uncle

Another cause of hopelessness is addiction to drugs. Addiction crowds out friendship, ambition, moral conviction, and reduces all the richness of life to a single destructive desire.

As a government, we are fighting illegal drugs by cutting off supplies, and reducing demand through anti-drug education programs. Yet for those already addicted, the fight against drugs is a fight for their own lives.

Too many Americans in search of treatment cannot get it. So tonight I propose a new 600 million dollar program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive treatment over the next three years.

I expect at least $100 million of that will get used up by Noelle Bush alone, but I'm happy to see the President keeping it all in the family. And more heartened that the speech contained no new proposals for drug interdiction, prosecution or other escalation. Go, George, Go!

Full transcript of the SOTU here.

Full transcript of Governor Locke's rebuttal here.

Comments

[Brian Kelley]

On behalf of those who spend more time working to pay taxes than getting stoned, let me demur. The federal government should not be financing drug treatment, especially if the Reason crowd gets its druthers and the Drug War is halted before the welfare state is dismantled. Americans rightly have more to fear from the IRS than the DEA and this policy does not help.

[tim]

Brian, to clear up any misunderstanding: I was applauding the lack of new drug war proposals, not the proposal for drug treatment, which I was pretty clearly mocking. Was that not obvious? Is there anything I can do to make it more obvious? To help you with anything else?

[harry tuttle]

Reading the dems response,

>>It took our family a 100 years to travel that mile

This guy is definitely government material!

[Anonymous]

Another sinkhole. Know the costs, do the math, and you can tell that this is just another scam to funnel money through "dependency counselors" who don't really do much of anything but give morality lectures and bad science education. Serious detoxification and psychiatric care is going to cost way over $2,000 per patient, that's the first clue that this "program" isn't really designed to address real addiction/dependency.

The problem with this is now you will see states (with budget crises of their own) step up their arrest rates to identify those additional 300,000 people who need treatment. It's not like there's 300,000 people banging on the doors of rehab centers being turned away. Any new federal money will not be doled out directly to patients or even private clinics, but will be doled out to states on a basis of arests made (see, we have so many people who need help in our state!) and will be administered by state bureaucracies and you can bet that most of that money will be doled out to organizations like MADD which don't really do anything.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but a big government looks at it and says "Well, then 2 million tons of prevention must REALLY be good." That's the same logic that makes people take a handful of aspirin instead of two. So I guess if anybody knows first-hand about dependency and addiction, it's the government.