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April 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, April 17 (HealthDay News) — The Obama Administration
has chosen the middle ground with its new drug control policy, advocating
treatment over tough sentencing.
The approach, unveiled Tuesday, rejects both the harsh “war on drugs”
approach, characterized by maximum sentences for drug offenses, and the
push to legalize illegal drugs.
Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, said during a news conference Tuesday that both
approaches were “not humane or realistic, and not grounded in scientific
evidence.”
Instead, he said, the new blueprint calls for more community programs
along with changes to the probation-and-parole system that would send
non-violent offenders to substance abuse treatment.
“This is nothing short of a revolution in how we approach drug abuse,”
Kerlikowske said.
Although overall drug use is down in the United States, more Americans
than ever are dying from drug-induced death, even more than from gunshot
wounds, said Kerlikowske.
At the same time, more than 7 million people are under the supervision
of the criminal justice system, either incarcerated or on probation or
parole. Many have drug offenses, he noted.
“This underscores the need for different approaches for drug control,
one that treats drug addiction as a disease, in which drug-related crime
is addressed in a fair and equitable manner,” Kerlikowske said. “We can’t
arrest our way out of the drug problem.”
With that in mind, the new policy embraces three concepts, according to
Kerlikowske’s office: addiction is a disease that can be treated; people
with substance use disorders can recover; and criminal justice reforms can
stop the revolving door of drug use, crime, incarceration and
re-arrest.
The new strategy builds on previous Obama Administration innovations,
such as the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which rolled back a mandatory
100-to-1 minimum sentence disparity between powder and crack cocaine, put
non-violent offenders into treatment via drug court and emphasized
prevention, Kerlikowske said.
The new plan outlines more than 100 specific actions involving
screening, brief interventions and referral to treatment and the
Affordable Care Act, “which will make drug treatment a required benefit
from all that suffer from substance abuse,” Kerlikowske noted.
Much of the new plan centered on new strategies for dealing with parole
and probation violations related to drug use.
Currently, people on probation and parole have 16 or 17 violations
before they receive sanctions, said Angela Hawken, an associate professor
of economics and policy analysis at Pepperdine University’s School of
Public Policy in Los Angeles.
A new program in Hawaii has shown success in arresting parole violators
immediately and sentencing them to short periods of jail time followed by
mandatory drug testing, the officials noted.
“Drug use is down 80 to 90 percent over baseline, arrests are down and
there is a large reduction in costly probation revocations,” Hawken
said.
The new administration plan also emphasizes community-based programs,
such as drug-free communities and youth campaigns.
“Our goal is to reform the public health system so we can learn to
recognize the signs of drug addiction and intervene appropriately before
the justice system becomes involved,” Kerlikowske said. “There’s a real
reason to be optimistic with these reform efforts.”
More information
Visit the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy for
more on the new strategy.
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