Prison drug users

Romania ARQ 2004/05 54.2% 0.4% 0.2% 0.9% 2.6% - 23.2% 1,364 Centres providing medical treatment to addicts Excl. psycho-social services offered to drug users prison medical units, solvents 2004. 

The philosophy behind the law is two-fold. First, it frees up jail and prison space for persons convicted of violent offenses. Second, it mandates treatment and education that a drug user may not get in jail. Prop. 36 s overall goal is to reduce repeat drug use and lower crime rates. Drug policy officials say it is too early to determine if the California program is successful in achieving either of these goals. A similar measure, Proposition 200, was approved by voters in Arizona in 1996. 

Awareness of the need for adequate after-care for drug users leaving treatment or prison — or for those in longterm substitution treatment — has risen considerably. 

A large proportion of the prison population are drug users and treatment is increasingly provided to avoid relapse into illegal drug use and crime. 

Routine data on drug use in prison are rarely collected, and most information comes from local ad hoc studies. While a high proportion — up to 90 % in some cases — of remand and sentenced prisoners are drug users, numbers of problem drug users are lower, ranging from 20 to 50 % of the total prison population in most Member States. 

It is known, however, that drugs are readily available in many prisons, and the rate of adverse incidents and the time and effort spent in detecting smuggling of drugs in has been enough to persuade some authorities that at least the basics of treatment should be available. The most routine option has become to provide a detoxification for opiate misusers, with for instance lofexidine or dihydrocodeine, and also benzodiazepines will often be issued if there is a history of abuse of these and it is intended to avoid the possibility of fits with a short withdrawal course. The adverse incidents in custody and prisons have included some deaths in users of crack cocaine, with physical explanations postulated but no very satisfactory treatment for cocaine withdrawal indicated. Prison services have typically been wary of methadone, and in favouring lofexidine use it was encouraging that a randomized double-blind trial carried out by prison specialists found lofexidine to be as effective as methadone in relief of withdrawal symptoms (Howells et al. 2002). 

Unfortunately, major traffickers are seldom touched by the law, because they arc usually rich enough, smart enough, and powerful enough to stay in business. Instead, drug-law enforcement falls disproportionately on small-scale dealers and users. In recent years, so much enforcement has been directed at these people that our court and prison systems are now overwlielmcd. 

The blanket suppression of LSD and other psychedelics has been a complete disaster in that (1) it has seriously hindered proper research on these drugs (2) it has created a profitable black market as it has raised the price (3) it has embarrassed the police with an impossible assignment (4) it has created the false fascination with fruit that is forbidden (5) it has seriously impeded the normal work of courts of justice, and herded thousands of noncriminal types of people into already overcrowded prisons, which, as everyone knows, are schools of sodomy and for crime as a profession (6) it has made users of psychedelics more susceptible to paranoia more than ever (For purposes of this summary I am including marijuana and hashish as psychedelics, though they do not have the potency of LSD)... The Joyous Cosmology, by Watts, A. 1970... 

---