Jail no answer to addiction

Jail no answer to addiction
K.T.S. Tulsi

The worldwide war on drugs seems to have been lost. The US continues to be the world's largest consumer of illegal substances. Law enforcement agencies in the West are showing signs of frustration over the method and strategy of deterrent laws for curbing drug abuse. The realisation is seeping in that it may be better to treat rather than punish drug abuse.

While legalising narcotics remains a distant dream for young addicts, its easy availability in European and American cities tells its own tale. Drug enforcement agencies seem to believe that the energy wasted on trying to prevent the flow of drugs into the US could have been better spent in curbing the demand. The judges increasingly seem to use the carrot and stick policy since substance-abuse treatment has grown 50-fold in the nineties. The law enforcement agencies have realised that treatment is less expensive to society than jail and interdiction.

Is drug addiction more of a disease than a crime? With the help of clues thrown up by science about the `hedonic region' of brain, which offers greater understanding of mental-health problems, country after country is adopting treatment options in preference to jail terms for the addicts. Americans believe that more people are likely to die of a heroin overdose than in car accidents. Therefore, they would like to shift the focus of repressive drug laws to rehabilitating the drug users.

The manner in which drugs affect the human brain is not very different from the manner in which the neurone transmission is flooded by alcohol. Alcohol also disturbs the level of glutamate, which gives a person the alcoholic high.

Chronic use of drugs produces lasting changes in the brain, as it reduces the number of dopamine receptors. With fewer dopamine receptors, there is a greater need of the drug for attaining the same high. Besides, the decline in the dopamine receptors leads to impotence and causes irritability, anxiety and depression. While the initial use may have been about feeling good, its addiction results in abject distress and despair. Gradually, the withdrawal symptoms deprive the addict of the only sense of joy. That is why medical science now likes to define drug addiction as a brain disease. While it may have started as a voluntary act, it is not that easy to give it up. Addiction is all about relapsing and craving because memories of a drug user are too strong and reflect genetic changes.

Counselling therapy and training are the new weapons in the armoury of a drug court. Sixty drugs are now under study as treatment for cocaine addition. Beating addiction requires every weapon and not the draconian sentencing policy.

Unfortunately, the Indian law enforcement agencies have refused to take into account the results of medical science world-wide. In 1985, a stiff legislation was brought in providing for deterrent punishment for drug trafficking offences which were made both non-bailable and cognizable. The legislators came down real hard on the drug addicts, prescribing that no sentence awarded under the Act can be reduced or commuted and even recommended the death penalty for second conviction. More than 15,000 people are languishing in jails in the country, having been accused of drug offences. Sixty three per cent of the prison population of those arrested for drug offences, are undertrial prisoners whose guilt or innocence is yet to be established in a court of law. Thirty four per cent of these are young prisoners whose cases are still under investigation. Out of 15,452 drug prisoners who were in the Indian jails in 1994, only 1245 were convicted and 3165 were acquitted. The rest continued to wait for the courts to findtime to pronounce on their guilt or innocence. In 1998, the prison population of the drug offenders came down to 12061, perhaps because the number of acquittals mounted to 5712.

Indian parliamentarians and policy makers need to take into account recent developments in the field of medical science and the experience of the consumer countries. The law needs to take into account the hardships caused by stiff doses of prison sentences to young people. Even when someone is found in possession of small quantities of opium or poppy husk, which could be used in Indian sweets, they could face long years in prison in the company of hardened criminals without bail or trial. Such harshness of the law having been given up in the West itself, on whose insistence we adopted it, a revaluation of the law is most urgently required.

The writer is a senior advocate of the Supreme Court