Phish Front Man Backs Drug Courts

Trey tells Congress about his addiction.

Trey Anastasio, lead guitarist and singer with the recently reunited rock band Phish, testified before Congress that drug courts may have saved his life. Without drug courts, he said, there might not have been a Phish reunion tour. Their lead guitarist might have been dead or in jail.

“My name is Trey Anastasio, and I’m a recovering alcoholic and a proud graduate of the Washington drug court program,” the musician testified, according to a Huffington Post report by Ryan Grim. “My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three a.m. that morning saved my life.”

Anastasio, on behalf of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP), called for drug courts as an alternative to prison for every American in need. Participants in drug courts receive mandated addiction treatment and other services, while submitting to regular drug tests. Those who fail their drug tests spend time in prison. Moreover, participants appear regularly before a specially trained judge to access their progress. A system of rewards and sanctions, plus treatment, replaces a lengthy jail sentence and little hope for effective treatment while imprisoned.

In the past, while supporting the concept, Congress has made only meager sums available for the establishment of drug courts. “I would like every community in America to have the option of sentencing drug offenders to drug court,” Anastasio told members of Congress. “When we imprison people for minor drug offences, we waste money—and we waste lives. Prison will turn a person with a substance abuse problem into a lifetime felon.”

According to NADCP chief executive officer West Huddleston, “The scientific community has put drug courts under the microscope and concluded that drug courts significantly reduce drug abuse and crime and do so at less expense than any other justice strategy.”

Anastasio, who spend more than a year in drug court, told the congressional assembly that he had been sober for two and half years. “In August, my wife and I will celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary. My band is back together with a sold-out tour. And in September I’ll play a solo concert at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic.”

Photo Credit: WPT

addiction drugs

Obama on Drugs

Will he do anything about the Drug War?

One issue largely missing in action during the presidential campaign has been the Drug War, and all the policy implications for addiction treatment that go with it. Our thanks go out to OnTheIssues blog for compiling the admittedly skimpy record of public statements about drug policy by both candidates. In this post, we examine the on-the-record views of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

The official Obama plan, as outlined in his campaign booklet, Blueprint for Change, calls for greater use of drug courts, job training for ex-offenders, and the elimination of sentencing disparities like the crack/powdered cocaine inequities. He does not favor lowering the current drinking age from 21 to 18, despite a collective push to do so by dozens of university presidents.

In an AP report posted at Drug WarRant, Obama said, “I’m not interested in legalizing drugs.” His focus, he said, was on emphasizing the public health approach to drugs over the prison approach. “All we do is give them a master’s degree in criminology.”

In a speech at Howard University, he told the crowd that “it’s time to take a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first-time, non-violent drug users for decades.... We will review these sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive warehousing of non-violent offenders.... So let’s reform this system. Let’s do what’s smart. Let’s do what’s just.”

In reference to the HIV/AIDS crisis, Obama has said that “we have to look at drastic measures, potentially like needle exchange in order to insure that drug users are not transmitting the disease to each other. And we’ve got to expand on treatment.”

Obama himself--a former cigarette smoker--is no complete stranger to drugs, having admitted to high school and college drug use in his book, Dreams from My Father. On page 87, he writes that he used to get high as a way to “push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.... Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.”

On a Tonight Show appearance with Jay Leno, when reference was made to President Bill Clinton’s famous claim that he “didn’t inhale,” Obama responded, “That was the point.”

As Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, wrote: “The relative silence by presidential candidates about the War on Drugs has been disappointing but not surprising. The next president will be in office when we commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which many consider to the beginning of the war on drugs. Hopefully, the new president will listen to the voices of reform....”

It appears that Senator Obama is at least partially receptive to the goal of changing national drug policy “to make the war on drugs a public health battle rather than a criminal justice war,” as Schmoke wrote.