Red Alert reported yesterday on the Pew Charitable Trust study (PCT) which showed that incarceration of drug abusers does nothing to bring down the rate of drug abuse. As millennials will be the ones paying the bill for those incarcerated drug abusers, criminal justice reform is an issue which influences their bank account directly.
Stanford Neuroscientists and legal scholars have come out with a study whose findings support that of PCT. In the new Science journal out yesterday, Stanford experts coauthored an article entitled “Brains, Environments and Policy Responses to Addiction.” Stanford experts argue that U.S. policies on drug abuse are not practical or based in scientific research.
According to Robert Malenka Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science who helped to co-author the paper: “Drug policy has never been based on our scientific understanding…Instead, it is based mostly on culture and economic necessities – and a misguided desire to punish drug users harshly.”
“[T]he criminal justice system handles drug addiction in almost exactly opposite of what neuroscience and other behavioral sciences would suggest,” said Keith Humphrey’s a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and one of the leaders of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute’s Neurochoice Big Idea initiative.
The authors of the study found that, “Within the criminal justice system, the threat or experience of a long prison term does not remove addiction, but offender monitoring programs that directly and repeatedly offer modest rewards or penalties in response to cessation or continuation of substance use can be effective.”
The authors argue that one of the central problems with U.S. drug policy is that drugs warp the abusers brain to focus on the short term not the long term, whereas U.S. drug policy is crafted for long-term consequences.
“We have relied heavily on the length of a prison term as our primary lever for trying to influence drug use and drug-related crime…But such sanction enhancements are psychologically remote and premised on an unrealistic model of rational planning with a long time horizon, which just isn’t consistent with how drug users behave,” said Robert MacCoun, professor of law.
Humphrey’s proposed a policy that could be a viable alternative to current policies in place: “more immediate incentives and punishments – perhaps a meal voucher in exchange for passing a drug test, along with daily monitoring.” Living environment is also a key factor in the equation especially when many abusers live in an environment promoting cigarette, drug, and alcohol abuse.
The authors hope that the Neurochoice Initiative brings together a team of experts to focus on making changes in pragmatic public policy. In one example of work the Neurochoice Initiative is doing Professor Brian Knutson of Psychology and his colleagues produced a study showing that brain scans could help to predict adolescents who would engage in excessive drug use in the future.
The authors argue that a more pragmatic policy would be based on science rather than on punishing addicts. Such a policy would improve the lives of not only the abusers but the victims of the abusers as well.
