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VIEWS CHANGE WHEN DRUGS ARE CLOSE BY
ILLINOIS: All illusions about drug use in small-town America should have disappeared some time around the Reagan era.
For hold-outs who hold onto that tired it-can't-happen-here mentality, I take you to Spring Valley, Illinois population 5,200, where 150 people turned out recently for a community meeting on heroin use in the area.
In the last 18 months, heroin has become a problem in the Illinois Valley area of Spring Valley, LaSalle-Peru, Ladd, Depue and surrounding farm towns in Illinois. Illinois authorities have recorded a few heroin-related deaths and made a few heroin-related arrests, which hints at a larger problem. As in the big cities, newer, purer strains are replacing marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine and methamphetamine as the drug of choice.
Spring Valley, Illinois like a lot of places, has been slow to realize what's happening in its backyard. The problems that kept city officials busy tended to be too-tall grass, potholes, barking dogs, and unsightly fences.
"I'll be blunt, a lot of it was just bull," says Jim "Uda" Taliano, the alderman who called the meeting.
But Taliano's tone about the drug problem, and apparently the tone of the meeting, hint at a newer, purer response to that worn-out war on drugs. Surprisingly, reports of Monday's meeting contained absolutely no mention of the military metaphors Peoria, Illinois leaders love to throw around when they're talking about combating drugs.
Nobody talked about lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies. Nobody referred to users as small-town vermin or mentioned taking up small-town warfare against small-town terrorists. Substitute "urban" for "small-town" and you have the tone typically employed by Illinois officials describing inner-city drug problems.
In fact, the Spring Valley, Illinois meeting treated drug use more like a public health problem than a crime problem, which is an amazing turnaround from typical war-on-drugs rhetoric.
The news story described parents devastated by a child's drug use. There was a mother who told of the horror of watching her child go through heroin withdrawal; there was the mother whose child went from straight-A student to straight addict. Most tellingly, there were the small phrases Taliano used during the meeting and later in an interview:
"This is not a witch hunt against users."
"It's like a disease out there."
"I don't know if we can cure this cancer, but we can sure control it."
Taliano's use of terms like "disease" and "cancer" tells me he takes a personal perspective on the area's drug problems. It's not someone else's child in some other neighborhood; it's their children in their neighborhoods and the solutions don't necessarily lie in tougher laws, more police and bigger jails.
We've been down that road and we're paying for it. Dearly. As states grapple with record budget deficits, they're finding they can no longer afford the unprecedented prison-building boom fueled primarily by this war on drugs. So we have newly-built prisons standing empty, construction companies griping about not getting prison construction contracts, lower crime rates and more prisoners than ever before.
Money problems, more than a sudden dose of good sense, are forcing state and federal governments to re-evaluate prevailing strategies in the so-called war on drugs. But old habits are hard to break. Some of that is still evident in the Spring Valley, Illinois area. There's still an undertone of blaming the big bad city, in this case Chicago, Illinois. Taliano would like to see random drug testing in Illinois high schools, albeit with parental consent.
Still, Taliano and Spring Valley, Illinois seem to understand there are no winners in a war against drug use and that's a good sign. But isn't it funny how drug users we know need help and drug users we don't know need jail time?
ILLINOIS: All illusions about drug use in small-town America should have disappeared some time around the Reagan era.
For hold-outs who hold onto that tired it-can't-happen-here mentality, I take you to Spring Valley, Illinois population 5,200, where 150 people turned out recently for a community meeting on heroin use in the area.
In the last 18 months, heroin has become a problem in the Illinois Valley area of Spring Valley, LaSalle-Peru, Ladd, Depue and surrounding farm towns in Illinois. Illinois authorities have recorded a few heroin-related deaths and made a few heroin-related arrests, which hints at a larger problem. As in the big cities, newer, purer strains are replacing marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine and methamphetamine as the drug of choice.
Spring Valley, Illinois like a lot of places, has been slow to realize what's happening in its backyard. The problems that kept city officials busy tended to be too-tall grass, potholes, barking dogs, and unsightly fences.
"I'll be blunt, a lot of it was just bull," says Jim "Uda" Taliano, the alderman who called the meeting.
But Taliano's tone about the drug problem, and apparently the tone of the meeting, hint at a newer, purer response to that worn-out war on drugs. Surprisingly, reports of Monday's meeting contained absolutely no mention of the military metaphors Peoria, Illinois leaders love to throw around when they're talking about combating drugs.
Nobody talked about lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies. Nobody referred to users as small-town vermin or mentioned taking up small-town warfare against small-town terrorists. Substitute "urban" for "small-town" and you have the tone typically employed by Illinois officials describing inner-city drug problems.
In fact, the Spring Valley, Illinois meeting treated drug use more like a public health problem than a crime problem, which is an amazing turnaround from typical war-on-drugs rhetoric.
The news story described parents devastated by a child's drug use. There was a mother who told of the horror of watching her child go through heroin withdrawal; there was the mother whose child went from straight-A student to straight addict. Most tellingly, there were the small phrases Taliano used during the meeting and later in an interview:
"This is not a witch hunt against users."
"It's like a disease out there."
"I don't know if we can cure this cancer, but we can sure control it."
Taliano's use of terms like "disease" and "cancer" tells me he takes a personal perspective on the area's drug problems. It's not someone else's child in some other neighborhood; it's their children in their neighborhoods and the solutions don't necessarily lie in tougher laws, more police and bigger jails.
We've been down that road and we're paying for it. Dearly. As states grapple with record budget deficits, they're finding they can no longer afford the unprecedented prison-building boom fueled primarily by this war on drugs. So we have newly-built prisons standing empty, construction companies griping about not getting prison construction contracts, lower crime rates and more prisoners than ever before.
Money problems, more than a sudden dose of good sense, are forcing state and federal governments to re-evaluate prevailing strategies in the so-called war on drugs. But old habits are hard to break. Some of that is still evident in the Spring Valley, Illinois area. There's still an undertone of blaming the big bad city, in this case Chicago, Illinois. Taliano would like to see random drug testing in Illinois high schools, albeit with parental consent.
Still, Taliano and Spring Valley, Illinois seem to understand there are no winners in a war against drug use and that's a good sign. But isn't it funny how drug users we know need help and drug users we don't know need jail time?
