How Our Vengeful Society Destroys Vulnerable People

‘America’s war on drugs is rife with terrible tactics that succeed in exacerbating the very problems they purport to fix. But even in that rich field of wildly misguided policy, few things are as bad as the treatment of poor people struggling with addiction.

From throwing drug users in jail, to shipping them to court-ordered rehab, to taking kids away from their mothers, standard responses to addiction can trigger trauma and mental health problems that often lead to substance abuse in the first place. And some of the most vulnerable populations—the homeless, or poor and minority women—become ensnared in a system of state control that can wreck any chance they have of pulling their lives back together.’

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