Financier and philantropist George Soros will announce Wednesday that he is giving $10 million to cities to build comprehensive drug treatment centers. I don't know how far $10 million will go, but it's certainly a generous kick-start by a private individual toward a dealing with America's No. 1 health problem. It also fills what I've long perceived as a big hole in Soros' stance on drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance, which Soros also funds, gives lip service to prevention and treatment, but seems more concerned with making the world safe for those who use drugs than in helping those who want to recover from them.

There's certainly a need for a group that agitates for treatment over incarceration, and for allowing the use of medical marijuana and the like, but I sometimes get the feeling that some anti-drug war crusaders have never been in the trenches with an addiction of their own, or tried to help a friend or loved one who is strung out.

I certainly got that feeling when I recently read some testimony of Craig Reinarman, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, In "The Social Construction of Drug Scares," Reinarman states:

"What I have called drug scares have been a recurring feature of U.S. society for 200 years (Reinarman and Levine, 1989a). They are relatively autonomous from whatever drug-related problems exist or are said to exist. I call them "scares" because, like Red Scares, they are a form of moral panic ideologically constructed so as to construe one or another chemical bogeyman, a la "communists," as the core cause of a wide army of pre-existing public problems."

"Said to exist?"

I agree with Reinarman that it's very easy for politicians to get on the bandwagon of anti-drug crusades, and to build jails instead of treatment centers. But when he claims that "armed with 'drugs' as a generic scapegoat, citizens gain the cognitive satisfaction of having a folk devil on which to blame a range of bizarre behaviors or other conditions they find troubling but difficult to explain in other terms," my first reaction is that he gives pointy-headed intellectualism a bad name. Lives, and neighborhoods, are destroyed by drugs, and the "moral entrepreneurs" he rails against are not engaging in some sort of class war. I don't think it has anything to do with morals, either, but that's a discussion for another day.

Back to Soros, who hit the nail squarely in his statement on the Open Society Institute site.

“Despite the large number of people who suffer from drug addiction, treatment is far from accessible in the United States at present. The sad fact is that the majority of Americans who need treatment do not receive it, even though drug treatment is as effective as treatment for other chronic health disorders.”

At the risk of sounding like a "moral entrepreneur," amen.