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highlights how a network of courts, including one in Detroit's 36th District Court, are steering drug- and alcohol-addicted military vets back to sober and productive lives.
According to statistics provided by the Justice for Vets advocacy program, 81 percent of veterans who had contact with police or a court officer had a substance abuse problem before their incarceration. And more than a third of the veterans were identified as having alcohol dependency. "It's very important for the veterans," said Phil Smith, director of the Vietnam Veterans of America benefits program in Michigan. "Sometimes the judicial system doesn't understand veterans as well as it should. Many veterans have some issue coping … after going to war, especially with drugs and alcohol."
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Lloyd said she saw a need for a Veterans Court because a lot of vets were coming into her courtroom with alcohol and drug-related problems associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues brought on by time in combat.
"When I put veterans in regular court, sometimes it doesn't help," Lloyd said.
"I'm asking them to turn their lives inside out. They have to get out of the cycle of drugs. It's not going to cure PTSD."
The story jumped out at me for two reasons. First, obviously, there's the idea of our evolving recognition of the effects of combat and how they can torment military veterans for years -- decades even -- after they've returned home from battle. I'm not necessarily "anti-war" (though I was adamantly against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), but I firmly believe that this nation's leaders send young men and women into battle too callously, often needlessly and with far too little concern for how living amid mass carnage and bloodshed can warp the spirit and break the mind.
If you've ever watched a loved one struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder -- or "far cry," as my "adopted" little brother (a Marine who's done multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan), sometimes refers to it -- you know that this country can never ever do enough to repay our soldiers for the things we make them do and witness, for the trauma that comes with living with those images and actions for the rest of their lives.
Bad enough that we send them off to fight to open up new markets for asshole billionaires and big corporations, that we watch their limbs get blown off and their minds get wrecked just so some sorry politician can preen on an aircraft carrier and call it "strong leadership." But we only worsen our collective degradation every time we leave some veteran to "self-medicate" or slip off into obscurity under a freeway overpass. Imprisoning these men with no regard to their circumstances only completes that degradation. These courts are an institutional acknowledgment that veterans deserve better.
But the court network is also compelling for its choice to view drug addiction less as a crime than as a debilitating social disease. The afflicted need aid, not arrest. Drug abuse in veterans may be inspired by more horrific circumstances than many other drug abusers see -- but the quality of addiction isn't any different. Yet, for a nation still trying to come down from the intoxicating mythology of the drug war, it has been far too easy to fashion addiction into a crime.
We've sold ourselves on the idea that addicts are "weaker" than the rest of us, that they are somehow morally circumspect and, thus, probably deserving of the harsh sentences. Nearly a century after the failed alcohol prohibition experiment, many of us are still not that substantially different from the Temperance Society kooks who warned that overturning Prohibition would, along with the abuse of demon rum, lead America to hell one crate of whiskey at a time. (It didn't. Instead, it got us Alcoholics Anonymous and a host of other humane responses to a human frailty.)
As the passage of statutes such as Detroit's Proposal M suggest, parts of the country certainly are beginning to recognize the enormity of the failure of our national drug policy. The fear that was ginned up during the 1980s --a largely racialized fear that helped turn the war on drugs into a war on black and brown communities -- has started to give way to sticker shock as the true bill for our pell mell rush to bad policy has come due.
And so we are opening ourselves up to new approaches, new ideas, new ways of viewing the burdens of substance abuse and addiction. Like Prop M, many of these approaches are worth defending and spreading even farther afield — and, in the case of the court network, they also present a fitting way to fight on behalf of so many who've fought for us.
