Crack addiction not like any other
The following is a Counterpoint:
By Evelyn Taylor
It has been three years since Stan Swofford's stories on the forgotten drug in our community -- crack cocaine -- ran in the News & Record. The Counterpoint in the Nov. 26, 2004, News & Record by the director of the Guilford Center seemed to miss the point that Swofford was trying to make. The crack cocaine problem in our community is more serious and causes more destruction than all the other drugs combined. It now seems that three years later we still want to trivialize it.
I would have hoped that the Guilford Center director and our other substance-abuse treatment professionals would be the ones crying the loudest for a task force and/or long-term residential treatment program to target this problem and not continue to minimize it.
I agreed with Mayor Holliday in November 2004 that a task force was needed and still is. It should include all the community -- agencies, businesses, addicts, family members. Crack needs to be treated differently than any other addiction. In my presentation on crack for the Guilford County Substance Abuse Coalition, I spoke about how this drug is destroying many lives in our community.
As long as we keep putting Band-aids, then pillowcases and now sheets on this problem to cover it up, nothing will ever be done about it. We must face it together.
I have personally been fighting to rid the community of this plague since 1987. Thanks to the News & Record's editorial (Nov. 18) asking questions about the county's new drug-treatment program, it is now time to let the public know what is really going on and enlist their help.
Please let your commissioners know we must have the long-term residential program they had discussed and appropriated money for last year. There is a reason that crack addiction has such a low recovery rate -- it requires much more intensive treatment programs. Outpatient treatment should be considered part of aftercare; long-term residential should come first -- 14 to 21 days is not enough to help most crack addicts, particularly those who have mental health issues also.
Relapse is often not a sign of poor motivation or treatment failure. Relapse often means that there is something wrong with the patient's recovery plan -- not the patient. This is what happened for many years to folks who tried to use treatment services in our community.
We need to be sure we have a treatment program in place that will help the people -- mainly chronically homeless folks who have never had that opportunity in our community before. Turning beds over faster to get more people through treatment will not help. Many of the folks who need appropriate treatment opportunities are the parents of our youth who are turning to gangs.
The program should fit the addiction -- not the addiction fit the program.
The writer is a member of the Guilford County Substance Abuse Coalition and a long-time community activist. She lives in Greensboro.