Source: Rocky Mountain News (CO)

State Sen. Ken Gordon would like to turn a vicious cycle into a virtuous one by reducing the severity of penalties for possession of small amounts of cocaine or heroin and spending the savings on treatment.

We're with him on the second goal, but the first is less obviously a good idea.

This is how he thinks his proposal could work.

The vicious cycle is the downward spiral that pulls drug addicts into long prison terms. Drug possession is a class 3 felony, but a first-time offender who is not selling drugs is likely to get a deferred sentence. But he's still an addict, so he fails a drug test, or maybe he's caught for possession again. Eventually he may end up in prison on the original charge, complicated with probation violations and related offenses.

Gordon believes if enough money were available to ensure that addicts would get treatment before they slid too far down, and they never had to be incarcerated, the savings could generate still more money for treatment. The success of treatment can't be guaranteed -- but failure without it is virtually certain.

But where to get the money to start? Gordon suggests that reducing drug possession to a class 1 misdemeanor, calling for 18 months in jail rather than years in prison, would help get the virtuous cycle under way.

We're not so sure. The fact is that there are very few people in state prison for first-time possession of small amounts of drugs, and very few repeat offenders enduring the sort of long sentences that Gordon's reform would understandably eliminate.

Yes, drug convictions account for a quarter of new prison commitments, as Gordon points out. And yes, 10 percent, or 1,714 of state prisoners, were convicted of drug possession.

For that matter, some 75 percent of Colorado inmates have substance-abuse problems, and only half of them get any treatment at all -- although the state spends $6.8 million on treatment.

Yet it so happens that only 52 of those 1,714 prisoners in for drug-related offenses have no earlier convictions. The others are in prison mostly because they refused to clean up their acts and were arrested again, and often more than once again, on other drug-related charges or a combination of drug and other offenses.

One problem with making drug possession a misdemeanor is that the offense would become the business of county courts, which in some cases do not have the personnel to keep good track of drug users on probation. Another problem is that reducing the potential sentence neutralizes one of the clubs that prosecutors now use to get addicts into treatment. Gordon acknowledges this concern, and says he'd be willing to have the misdemeanor penalty apply only to the first offense.

Gordon also bolsters his case with sobering statistics. In fiscal year 1982-83, Colorado spent $39 million on prisons; in 2001-02, it will be $478 million, a growth rate of 15.3 percent per year. As a share of the general fund, spending on prisons has grown from 2.59 percent to 8.34 percent.

"We could keep doing that," he observes sardonically, "if we eventually give up doing anything else."

Nor is Gordon arguing that the people currently in prison don't belong there; rather, he is saying that intervening earlier could keep at least some addicts from belonging there in the future. We don't disagree.

Treatment programs should be more widely available, and the money to fund them will have to come from somewhere. We're just not sure he's found the right place to go searching for funds.