Editor's note:  We received an unprecedented number of passionate, thoughtful responses to "Mission Accomplished" in War on Drugs?  A representative sampling continues below, the second in a three-part series.

Cancer a Better Analogy for Drug Problem
It's easy to characterize overcoming an evil entity as a war; that notion makes the fight righteous. Unfortunately, the battle against drugs abuse can't be won; rather, it can only be managed, just like a cancer. 

I think that is a better analogy. Cancer is preventable in many cases, it can be treated, treatment often works for a while as the cancer goes into remission, but there is relapse. There are numerous methods of treatment: pharmaceutical, spiritual, holistic. 

Cancer can affect anyone at any time: it has affected every family in our nation, just as addiction, and there are tremendous costs in human life. 

Over the past 35 years, we have made good strides in overcoming substance abuse. There have been reductions in use by teens, improvements in treatment options, better societal attitudes towards addiction.

This is not a war against an enemy that we can destroy, lock up, terminate. The enemy lives in our loved ones; we need to use prevention and treatment to overcome this scourge.

For us to say Mission Accomplished reminds me of how ridiculous that sounded when the president stood on that aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If it's the same Mission Accomplished, we certainly have a long way to go.

Carl Alves
New Bedford, MA

Waiting to Surrender
What would we say about a war in which our military tells enemies who want to surrender, "You'll have to wait?  We are too busy to accept your surrender." 

What would we say about a war in which our military tells enemies who want to join our side, "You'll have to wait?  We must focus our resources elsewhere in this war, so you'll just have to go back to fighting us for a while."

What would we say? Absurd? Foolish? Nonsensical?    

Every day, hundreds of Americans offer to surrender in the war on drugs by seeking treatment. They may wait for weeks and months. Some die while waiting. 

Today's treatment works. It is more scientific and more consistent. It is effective in helping the "enemy" to surrender and join our side.

We need a major policy shift to emphasize treatment in this war on drugs. We need to put the resources into treatment so we can accept everyone's "surrender" when they are ready. Let's make treatment for substance-use disorders available on demand. 

Otto B. Schultz
Lincoln, Nebraska

End of the Drug War? Not for Children of Addicts
The War on Drugs started with a bang when the managed-care industry trashed treatment, and ended with a whimper with an article in a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio last week.

I'm glad it's over, because there's another war to be fought and won before another generation slides by. It's a war we all need to fight on behalf of children of addicted parents, an invisible mass of kids (one out of every four in this country) whose needs still are not being met, even though they carry the burden of the transgenerational effects of alcoholism and other substance abuse.   

They are the group of children most at risk of becoming alcohol and drug abusers due to genetic and family-environment factors.  They live with emotional and/or physical violence, learn to not talk about it, not trust anyone.

They get neglected and abused consistently, exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety more than other children, have more physical and mental-health problems, have higher rates of ADHD and ODD, and have trouble expressing themselves (and therefore don't do as well in school). They believe they will be failures because they think that what's happening at home is their fault, and they live with the legacy of silent shame they have inherited -- believing it because our society reinforces the shame with silence. 

I'm so ready to take this one on. And I've got the ammunition right here in my office. Anyone interested in signing up can give me a call.

Maureen McGlame
Director, COASA (Children of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse)
Boston, MA
617-227-4183

Humans Are Biologically Prone to Substance Abuse
The very tiny impact that billions of dollars and decades of attempts at regulating and suppressing human substance use has had underscores the important fact that drug warriors want to ignore: that human beings are genetically predisposed to want the altered states that drugs (including caffeine, nicotine and alcohol) produce.

Many will go to extraordinary lengths and expense to obtain those substances, and no system of laws yet devised has had any impact at all on the incidence of substance-use disorders in American society.

When only a single human society on the planet has been identified that does not use psychoactive substances in some way, isn't it time we stopped trying to circumvent our own genes and started taking a more realistic and humane approach -- recognizing that this is a human problem, not a criminal problem?

Even increased availability and attractiveness of treatment will be unlikely to have the sort of utopian impact the drug warriors claim is their goal. Over the course of the last third of the 20th century, treatment delivery became an industry, yet there has been no change in the incidence of substance-use disorders!

Isn't it time we, as a society, accepted the reality that the criminal-justice approach touted by the drug czars, dating back to Prohibition, has never accomplished that noble goal -- to reduce the percentage of the population whose substance use is harmful to them – to any degree? Why? Because we are all biologically prone to substance use. It's part of being human. We even produce our own psychoactive substances in our brains!

Isn't it time we took a new tack?

Frederick Rotgers, Psy.D.
Philadelphia, PA

Student Drug Testing Can Win War on Drugs
The war on drugs will not be won until we have a president who has the will and political courage to do what works to prevent the disease of addiction where it almost always starts: among kids aged 11 to 17. 

If we keep spending 99.5 percent of our collective resources trying to interdict supply and mopping up the huge human and economic toll of drug abuse, we will be no further ahead in the future than we are today.

We cannot continue to rely on parents to solve this problem.  56 percent of kids in America are at moderate-to-high risk because their family situation is in chaos.

We cannot rely on local politicians.  Even those who haven't been influenced by campaign contributions from pro-drug forces don't have the knowledge or courage to do what is necessary to protect young people.

The answer is clear. "We know that a child who gets through age 21 without smoking, abusing alcohol or using illegal drugs is virtually certain never to do so," says Joseph Califano Jr. The best, and perhaps only, way to achieve that end is a federal mandate for non-punitive, random drug testing for all students, administered with military efficiency. 

Drugs kill an estimated 2,500 Americans weekly and cost $200 billion per annum. Certainly, that justifies a federal mandate for all schools to use the best known tool to protect our nation's greatest assets: young people. 

Roger D. Morgan
Bonita, CA

Please view Part 1 in the series of responses to "Mission Accomplished" in War on Drugs?