Another Democrat that is a NIMBY.
Via Baltimore Sun:
Mayor Catherine Pugh’s recent musings that drug addicts should be put “on a plane to Timbuktu or somewhere” rather than receive treatment where they live misunderstands the nature of addiction and recovery, and, whether intentionally or not, it connotes an attitude that addicts should be put out of sight and out of mind rather than cared for as members of our community. We sincerely hope it does not become policy in a city where we need to be doing everything possible to make treatment more available and accessible, not less.
The mayor’s theory makes a certain amount of sense if you don’t think it through too carefully. One might imagine it would be hard for drug abusers to get clean in the environment where they first became addicted and where the pressures and temptations that led to their problems remain. Why not ship them away to an environment where it might be easier to kick the habit?
But checking in to Betty Ford is simply not an option for most of those struggling to get help. And even if it were, what happens when the month of treatment is up and the now recovering addict is back in the community? Addiction, particularly to opioids, is not typically the kind of thing that can be “cured” with a stint in rehab; it is a chronic condition that must be managed over a period of years, often involving treatment with methadone or buprenorphine, the former of which requires regular access to a clinic. Even if the mayor means that drug treatment should be concentrated around hospitals rather than literally in Mali, moving such clinics away from the homes of those who need them means adding to what is often already a struggle to get from home to work to child care on a daily basis.
What seems more likely to be driving Ms. Pugh’s view is the frequent complaint that drug treatment centers (and particularly methadone clinics) are magnets for crime. She has suggested that they are attractive places for drug dealers to hang out, hoping to snare people prone to relapse. We don’t dispute that some poorly run treatment centers have had problems, but the data overall contradict the theory that they attract crime. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs written by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Hopkins School of Medicine and Wayne State University in Detroit found that their effect on crime was much smaller than that of liquor stores or corner stores and about equivalent to that of a 7-Eleven or Royal Farms.