I’m hoping that the standards for methadone treatment are slightly higher(if only because you need someone on staff who can legally prescribe the stuff); but in addition to the coercive and mercenary aspects of addiction ‘treatment’; it is atrocious how low the standards are. Particularly with booze, where the historical lack of medical approaches and the massive cultural status of AA hold sway: it varies a bit by state; but in much of the country you can offer ‘treatment’ with basically no qualifications whatsoever, aside from having had an alcohol problem yourself. Sure keeps staffing costs down for the facilities getting their involuntary referrals from the courts; but the fact that you can purport to provide addiction treatment with fewer qualifications than you’d need to land a job as a HS guidance counselor is pretty insane.
Flawed police drug-test kits, railroading prosecutors and racism: the police-stop-to-prison pipeline
Higher than what? What is it about methadone treatment that concerns you? I personally believe that regulations are too strict at the moment.
Two terms BoingBoing needs to start using:
- “White supremacy,” which is woven through the fabric of American culture so deeply we often mistake it for “failed policy”
- “Crime against humanity,” which the Drug War certainly is. Not as metaphor: the War on Drugs is a literal historical-scale racist crime against humanity. The fact that the average BB reader (with a few exceptions, apparently) is not personally abused by this crime makes it hard for us to see it for what it is. We can be outraged by this or that event but not realize that police are literally the executioners for a mass-scale crime against humanity directed at our black and brown brothers and sisters.
White supremacy makes the crime against humanity something we are willing to tolerate. If cops targeted American Jews like they target American blacks the crime against humanity would be plain for all to see. But because we have internalized white supremacy to the very fiber of our cultural being we accept it. Maybe we disagree with it, think it’s terrible, etc. But we allow it to continue without rising up to stop it.
In my psychopharmacologist days, international travel was high-risk. At any given time, it was a safe bet that there would be microscopic traces of heroin/cocaine/methamphetamine/MDMA/etc on my hands.
Okay, pause right there. I’m not going to derail the thread, but I am going to correct your inaccurate rhetorical device.
One: this comes with an unstated assumption that Jews are considered to be implicitly white in America.
This is not the case; while many Ashkenazi Jews are pale skinned, all Jews are threatened by white supremacy and white supremacists, regardless of how pale their skin is. Furthermore, there are many Jews in America that are also African-Americans (Drake and Michael Twitty, to give two examples) or Arabic (the Mizrahi), and this assumption erases and ignores their experiences in having to deal with both antisemitism and racism.
Two: Your rhetoric also comes with the unstated assumption that the Jewish minority is left in peace and unharassed by the White Christian majority.
This is not true. Jews are targeted in America; certainly nowhere near the same scale and with the same virulence, but, despite being only 2% of the US’s population, American Jews are the target for well over half of the reported religiously-motivated hate crimes in the USA, according to the FBI’s statistics–adjusting for population, an American Jew is more likely to be attacked for being a Jew than an American Muslim is for being a Muslim. Those attacks includes kidnapping and murder, as well as other routine harassment and assaults, to the point where the majority of American synagogues and day schools have active security measures that would be unheard of for Christian churches and public schools.
Three: Your statement also comes with the explicit assumption that, if the Jews in the US were being attacked and killed by the police in the same manner as African American men, there would be a vocal outcry by the country and/or world, with the implicit, unstated assumption that the American media and/or populace values Jewish-American lives over that of the lives of African-Americans.
This is both bad rhetoric, in that it sets two threatened minority groups in opposition to each other over “who has it worse”, rather than against the White Supremacist system that threatens both groups (and especially the members that belong to both groups), and is also inaccurate; as I already commented, American Jews are attacked on a routine basis, and I will point out that there is no massive outcry as your argument assumes. The same systemic media silence that existed before the killer cops were being caught on camera is also in effect for antisemitism.
Beyond that correction, yes, I agree with the general direction and attitude of your statement, in that, yes, the War On Drugs was and is a racist system designed to crush an ethnic minority that was getting “uppity”, and most especially with your first point regarding White Supremacy; it is deeply embedded in the fabric of the US’s law, culture, history, and society, to the point where I do not think that it can be removed.
I’m guessing that the UAE was not high on the list of favored destinations for people of your profession?
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear: what I find alarming(especially since the patients in drug treatment programs are both in need of the best help medical science can provide; and often there under dubiously voluntary circumstances) is how low, sometimes nonexistent, the standards for organizations wishing to offer rehab or addiction treatment services, and the staff they hire to do so, are. Not all treatment programs are a disaster by any means; but it is pretty disturbing how little you need to be taken seriously as a treatement program in some jurisdictions: ‘counselors’ with no psychology experience, facilities treating opiate addicts without adequate medical support on site to handle people who overdose because they’ve reduced their tolerance, that sort of thing.
Not all programs are a disaster; but there is some really shoddy work being done; and billed for, and sometimes court ordered, which I find disturbing.
Not that this takes away from your point, but Drake is Canadian.
Thanks for your detailed reply, which makes a good case but ultimately I think misrepresents my point.
Actually I was only using Jews as an example of a minority religious or ethnic group. Because of their history of being persecuted globally (but not by the American government), Jews are a minority that could theoretically be targeted by police and the prison state.
No it doesn’t. I said, “If cops targeted Jews like they target American blacks…” Furthermore, I think the point stands as applied to the larger society. Blacks are targeted for discrimination at every level of the society, from jobs, loans and housing to the massive corporatized criminal justice system. Jews face very little discrimination of this type, and in fact are by every metric among the most economically successful, highly educated “model minorities” in the United States. (See Socioeconomics in: American Jews - Wikipedia)
Yes, absolutely, and I think the facts bear me out. Clearly the American media and populace values white American lives over those of black Americans. The latter are regularly murdered by police and – until phone cams began capturing them again and again and again – such killings have been mostly ignored by the mainstream media. That this could regularly happen to any other minority population in America, including Jews, is unthinkable. America has a white supremacy problem stemming from our history of literally treating black and brown people as possessions rather than people.
I don’t think my statement is setting two minority groups against each other. I never claimed Jews don’t also face discrimination from some sectors of the population. But Jews as a group do not suffer from systemic violence doled out by armed government officials. Nor do they face much significant discrimination in housing, finance and jobs, as their disproportionately high levels of wealth and education demonstrate.
I’m sure you didn’t intend this, but saying I’m “setting” Jews and blacks against each other is a bit like replying to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” No one is saying Jewish lives don’t matter, or that Jews don’t face a lot of societal discrimination. But they don’t have to give their kids “the talk” about what to do when confronted by a police officer so as not to end up dead.
Ah, I see. In my experience, treatment programs that get most of their clients from court mandated referrals are almost always terrible, and concerned with shaking down ‘patients’ for as much cash as possible. The rest of the treatment programs/types are so varied and diverse that it’s really hard to generalize about quality. Judging whether a treatment method/center is legit is kind of like determining whether something is porn or not, you just kind of know it when you see it. As far as opiates go, addicts are very lucky to have methadone. It’s a life saver. Even if a longterm addict needs to be on methadone for life, the harm reduction is so effective that it is a no brainer.
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