---Liza Featherstone <lfeather32 at erols.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know about that, I just read that a 1996 U.S. govt study
found that
> treatment (real treatment, residential, counseling, sometimes
vocational
> training) cut hard-core cocaine use by about 50% --
Do you know where I can find this? I'd be very interested. Treatment is obviously preferable to incarceration, and costs something like ten times less I think (anyone know?). But the fact that relapse is built into the program, as you mention below, bothers me. More than half the folks at rehab were there for the second, third, fifth time. Some spend many many years of their lives in and out of treatment centers. Among them there was a kind of disidentification with the whole situation. They would throw gibes at the 12-step way, laugh at the slogans and all, but among some this seemed to strengthen acceptance of the "addict" identity and all the medical model trappings that come with it. Some simply incorporate detox into their habits. This is just anecdotal evidence, and of limited use in drawing conclusions. I still come back to Foucault and others on this, with the social discipline question. AA is a completely depoliticized scene.
I hope to get some time later to address Jeffery Fellows' questions about critical precision with terms like "culture." Even "social discipline" could use some prying open.
the thing is usually a person
> has to go in and relapse and go back in several times, treatment
gets bad press
> because it doesn't fit into US Drug War demonology and it's not as
sexy as
> Mexican smuggling or crackhouse raids
And all that fancy expensive hi-tech equipment employed in the drug war.
-- interesting piece about all this in
> Columbia Journalism Review 11/98 by Mike Massing who no doubt talks
about
> all this in his new book
What's the name of the book? Thanks.
Alec _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com