Homeopathy and Drug Diversion

Compared to antibiotics, homeopathic cold remedies are highly useful in treating the common cold.

That is to say, the homeopathic preparations are just as useless as the antibiotics, but they're useless at much lower cost and with no risk of breeding disease-resistant micobes.

By the same token, drug diversion programs are highly useful in dealing with drug users, compared to jail. Neither does much if any good, but diversion does approximately nothing at lower cost and imposes less suffering. There are good reasons to make selling drugs illegal, and even for making the possession of some drugs illegal. But it's very rarely a good idea to actually put someone behind bars simply for using.

[Using the threat of intermittent short jail terms to force abstinence from drug use on those who have been convicted of committing other crimes under the influence, or to get money to buy drugs, makes much more sense, as I've argued at length elsewhere.]

No diversion program works well. Anywhere from a quarter to a half of those who are sent to drug treatment in lieu of prison or jail will never show up for treatment in the first place, and the typical probation department doesn't have the resources or the will to do anything about it. Another good-sized chunk will show up for treatment for a while, and then drop out, again facing roughly no consequences. That's just what diversion programs are like.

Nor is it obvious that the quality of treatment services provided under the average abstinence program is high enough to make a difference, especially for cocaine and methamphetamine users. (Opiate maintenance — methadone or buprenorphine — will certainly cut down on heroin use, but stimulant maintenance is virtually a contradiction in terms, and the various varieties of talk-therapy are about as useful in dealing with methamphetamine dependence as they would be in dealing with any other bad habit: that is to say, not much at all.)

The futility of coerced treatment — not the futility of treatment, but the futility of trying to use the criminal justice system to coerce treatment — is one reason I prefer coerced abstinence as an approach to dealing with drug-involved offenders. But if the choice is straight-up between diversion to treatment and incarceration, it's the rare user whose criminal record is so heavy that it's worth spending the money to keep him behind bars if all he got caught for this time was using.

Article Author: Mark Kleiman

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