If you add up all the dollars we spend on the fallout from drug abuse and addiction, it is the second largest state budgetary category after elementary and secondary education. Bigger than transportation. Bigger than higher education.
And bigger than the amount of money we spend on prevention. For every hundred dollars we spend on substance abuse, we spend about two bucks on prevention. This is the case even though we know prevention can be effective.
“Under any circumstances, spending more than 95 percent of taxpayer dollars on the crime, health care costs, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and other consequences of tobacco, alcohol and illegal and prescription drug abuse and addiction, and only 2 percent to relieve individuals and taxpayers of these burdens, is a reckless misallocation of public funds,” Joseph Califano Jr., a former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare who founded the addiction center and serves as its chairman, said in the statement. “In these economic times, such upside-down-cake public policy is unconscionable. It’s past time for this fiscal and human waste to end.”
In a cesspool of relentlessly stupid public policy (that somehow continues to still surprise us on the downside), our overall handling of anything related to drugs and addiction could be the most nonsensical - though competition for that honor is stiff indeed.
