Rethinking Drug Policy, Treatment, and the Criminal Justice System

Today's episode focuses on the evolution and current conversation around drug policy in Massachusetts.

For more information and to share your thoughts, please head over to willbrownsberger.com. 

Transcript

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Matt: 0:00

Welcome to the Will Brownsberger Podcast. Hi, I'm producer Matt Hanna. In every episode, I sit down for a conversation with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger to explore some of the biggest issues facing the Commonwealth and its people. In this episode, Will shares his thoughts on drug policy in Massachusetts, including some of the evolution and approaches to the issue over the decades. And then we get into some of his current views and some of the new ways people are trying to address the issue of treatment and the criminal justice system and how those interact. So here's the conversation with Will. I'm here again today with Senator Will Brownsberger. We're talking today about drug policy and how that's going in the state right now, current trends and kind of how we got where we are. 

Will: 0:46

Yeah. 

Matt: 0:47

So you were mentioning that you've attended a summit recently that was interesting for you, and that's kind of got you digging back in on this topic and thinking about it some more. So want to give us some thoughts on that?

Will: 0:58

Yeah. So there's different parts of the drug policy conversation. The biggest part of it is pretty much set in stone in our thought process and in our culture, which is that the most dangerous drugs are illegal. We don't allow them to be sold: cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl. We have a policy of prohibition for those drugs, and that's not really in question today. There are important public policy questions within that, though. One is sentencing policy, and we had a view that too many young men were getting locked up. Typically, all too many young men of color were getting locked up for crimes related to drug selling. So that overly punitive approach is something that we have backed away from in the Commonwealth. We still sentence people for drug violations for selling those drugs, but not for as long. We don't have mandatory minimum sentences to the same degree we did in the past. That was a big thrust of our criminal justice reform. And it really has made a difference. That's part of the whole reform thing that we did that has reduced incarceration greatly. But given that, and there's not a lot of movement around that today, I mean, those changes were made in a conversation that began almost 30 years ago and really completed for practical purposes in 2018 when we did the big reforms then. Where the conversation still is live is about drug treatment and the relationship between drug treatment and the criminal justice system. That's the biggest issue. There's a conversation about safe injection sites and how do you protect people from overdosing. But I think the issue that affects a lot of people very directly is the use of treatment in the criminal justice system, the use of the continuing threat of punishment to force people into treatment or to force people to abstain from drugs, drug testing, and so forth. And how does that work? And that's the thing that I've given a lot of thought to and sort of evolved a lot on, and you know, I think is still a very much a live conversation right now.

Matt: 3:02

Yeah. So do you want to go back in time and how you saw yourself change on this issue? What were the ideas back in the day when you first got involved with this, and then how you changed your views on it?

Will: 3:14

Well, yeah, I mean, it was cheap drug testing was like the new telescope. It was the new instrument that allowed us to see something that we didn't really know, which was that probably most people using those most dangerous drugs have gotten in trouble with the criminal justice system. Those drugs lead people down a path that's very, very harmful and leads them into a pattern of criminal offending and results in their involvement with the criminal justice system. So if you want to help people with addictions, well, you know where they are. So that led to a focus on treatment in the criminal justice system, on coerced treatment. You know, in the 90s there were different conversations about that. Do you drug test people regularly and sort of send them a message by incarcerating them when they test dirty, or do you just push people into treatment and encourage them to stay there with a threat of incarceration? Or do you get involved in this drug court process where there's this sort of encounter that happens in a session in the drug court? And we can talk about that. And that was all in the context of a very still a very punitive approach, right. This was still the 90s. There was a whole zeitgeist of tough-on crime, and we've backed away from that now. I think the pendulum has swung, and that reflects itself in our sentencing policy. It reflects itself in our declining incarceration rates. But then, you know, it was the big emphasis on using punishment to force people to stay clean or force people to stay in treatment.

Matt: 4:45

So why don't we talk about drug court? Because that seems to be a central player in things that have happened and changes in policies over the years, and currently still is a big player in the scene, right?

Will: 4:57

Yeah. The Commonwealth still has a lot of drug courts, in fact, more than it had back in the 90s. It's still a very prevalent form of supervision. The drug court model, it really grew out of the activity of some judges that I think, you know, maybe they were influenced with maybe their own experiences with the AA. I'm not quite sure how that thing originally evolved, but it was a movement, the drug court movement. Judges started running a session. So you've got a judge sitting up elevated above everybody else, and you've got a courtroom session with a clerk and various people sitting in front of the judge. And then you have maybe 10, 20 people who are seated in the courtroom who are participating in the drug court. They come in to that drug court session maybe once a week, maybe more frequently, maybe less frequently. And the court calls them up one by one and says, you know, hey, Will, how are you feeling today? Well, Your Honor, I'm taking it one day at a time and I'm working the program and I'm trying to avoid my triggers. You know, I'm really grateful to be here, Your Honor. And, you know, people step up and say the right thing, and the judge says, Yeah, that's great, Will. You're making wonderful progress. I'm going to put a star on your record. And with the judge sitting up there, you know, it creates a certain majesty to the process. But the heart of the process is, well, you've got a dirty drug test, and then what happens? Part of the process is you're going to do regular drug testing, and you're going to stay most likely in an inpatient treatment program. And so, Will, you've you had a dirty drug test, think you're relapsing, we're going to have to lock you up for a day, or lock you up for a weekend, or we're going to have to lock you up and we're going to hold you until we have a residential treatment bed available to you. So there's this whole model of coercion, which there's this sort of collaborative, warm, fuzzy courtroom process, but also the underlying structure is one of threat. 

Will: 6:52

In that context of threat, there's no such thing as candor. There's no such thing as honesty. I mean, there's no way you're gonna come up to the courtroom and say, How are you doing today, Will? Your Honor, the place I'm in is terrible. You gotta get me out of there. The food's terrible, the beds are dirty, and you know, the counselors have no idea what they're talking about. Uh, Will, it sounds like you're building up to relapse. I don't like the way you're talking. I'm really, really concerned about this. Let's see how you're doing next week, but I want to hear more progress from you. But the truth was a lot of the facilities were terrible. They were terrible. And that's what serious observers of the treatment system had really concluded by then was that just, I remember talking to one expert, quote, I wouldn't send my dog to half the treatment facilities in New York City. This is a New York guy. And that was just true everywhere. And part of the problem was these facilities had no relationship with their patients. Their relationship was with the drug court. And as long as the drug court would send them people, you know, under threat of incarceration, they could stay in business and make money. It's not, it wasn't like the way you and I, you know, free people, if they go to a doctor or they go to a healthcare facility and it's not clean, well, you know, they're gonna try to leave. You know, not everybody has any options, but most of us have some ability to say this place isn't any good. I'm leaving, I'm going to a different place. This place isn't working for me. 

Will: 8:20

So the lack of any accountability, the lack of any market discipline, the lack of any consumer voice in the treatment system allowed the treatment system to continue practices which just really didn't help people, just sort of locking them up and having conversations with them in a way that wasn't helpful. Because the heart of a real conversation with a therapist is when you can actually get honest, right? That's the heart of therapy. You know, what are you really feeling? What are you dealing with? And you can't do that in a drug court. The idea that the judge sort of feels like people are saying things that are truthful to them. But when I finally started working in drug courts and sitting in the back, I'd see, you know, they go up to see the judge and they'd say all the right things, and then they come back and just shake their head or roll their eyes. And you realized, okay, we're going through the motions here. And the same thing would be happening in a treatment facility, because if the manager of the treatment facility was going to go back to the judge and say, you know, look, Will's a problem. Will does not seem to be with the program. Well, I'm frozen, right? I've chosen to avoid being locked up. I don't want to go back to that. 

Will: 9:23

You know, talking about candor between the patient and the provider, there's a story that really drove that home for me. As I began to realize the harms associated with forcing people into treatment, I got interested in the question of how do you persuade people to go into treatment? How do you give them the desire to go into treatment? That's really what good therapy is. It's helping you realize, yeah, I would actually like to change. On the street is not good for me, or I'm doing a lot of harm to my relationships, my job, et cetera. I really should stop using it. It would be better for me if I did. How do you get a person to decide that for themselves? And the way to do that is to explore the consequences with them and for them to sort of say, yeah, I'm fighting with everybody, or whatever, and to realize that it's not good for them. You can't tell them that. They've got to come to it themselves. And the therapy process, they've got to be able to vocalize that and sort of hear themselves saying it and realize, yeah, this isn't good for me. So that depends on candor. You can't stand in front of a judge and say, yeah, I'm fighting with everybody, and you tell things that are embarrassing about your life. You're not going to stand up in court and do that. You need a kind of relationship. 

Will: 10:36

So an experiment that illustrated how hard it is to do that in the criminal justice context was I introduced the idea of. That sort of process of building motivation, it's called screening, brief intervention, and referral. The brief intervention is that motivational conversation. So we said, let's try that in Dorchester District Court. Instead of ordering people into probation, let's right at the beginning, when they walk in and they're first arraigned, you know, and they say, not guilty, Your Honor, bail is set, or they're released on recognizance. But why don't you just go talk to the people down at the other end of the courthouse in the basement, see if they can be helpful to you. And that was where we were going to try to do these brief interventions and referrals. And they'd worked great in the emergency room context. And there were some people who had been really successful over at Boston City Hospital, who had, were really getting a lot of people into treatment when they came in because they, you know, fell down the stairs or some other bad thing happened to them as a result of their substance abuse. So we had their counselors who had really been successful at Boston City Hospital. They were really effective, pure counselors, kind of people you would tend to trust. But we did the first 150 screening interviews, and out of those 150, exactly one, exactly one admitted any form of substance abuse. Now, all the evidence says that people coming through the system have rates of substance abuse that are much, much higher than that. Most numbers, people would put it north of 50%. So we knew, you know, it just drove home to me. Because they told me, Will, this isn't going to work. It depends on the candor, and there's no way people are going to be candid in the courthouse. And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, let's try it. And boom, they were so right. That candor is such a delicate thing. Trust is such a delicate thing. And so that cemented my perception of the drug court process, that even if you're trying to have a sort of a candid therapeutic conversation, not in a courtroom, but in a private room with a trusted counselor who is there to help you. But if you're in a courthouse, forget it. You can't talk. 

Will: 12:36

So that was, you know, I started off believing in the idea of drug courts. I sort of had the vision, it made sense to me. You know, if you could coerce people into treatment, you take the horse to water, and you can sort of make them drink. If you make somebody, the horse stand next to the pond long enough, they are going to start drinking in the same way, if you're going to take people into treatment, eventually they're going to get a recovery message if they just keep sitting through groups and hearing counselors say that drugs are bad and you're ruining your life and so forth, it's going to sink in. But I moved away from that because I realized the level of bad faith and more importantly, the lack of accountability in the system.

Matt: 13:14

So then it sounded like you've moved on to the policy and trying to address it from that side. So what are some of the things you've been part of or that you've seen happen to try and address the situation with the drug courts and such?

Will: 13:25

Well, when I got to the legislature, I had spent five or six years working as a defense attorney before I got to the legislature. So my thinking had greatly evolved. I'd realized that using the criminal justice system to treat people was sort of like doing brain surgery with a sledgehammer. I mean, it just doesn't really work that way. So I, when I got to the legislature, I pushed back on the drug court budget and people trying to expand the number of drug courts. But you know, there's a powerful narrative that comes out of those, and you have credible people, judges who are sort of feeling like they're doing the right thing. And they do see results because in fact the people who choose to go into drug court are the people who want to get better. Some defendants might just say, look, let me do my time and get out of here, as opposed to, oh no, I'd like to spend two years going to drug court and get that support.

Matt: 14:16

So how does somebody get in there? So someone gets charged for something and then. 

Will: 14:21

Let's say somebody's charged with a crime. They're charged with writing bad checks, or they're charged with, you know, smash and grab, which would be a much more serious offense, breaking into stores or whatever. They go through the process and they have a defense attorney and they get to a point where the case is understood, and the prosecutor and the defense attorney are having a conversation about, with the judge, perhaps, about what would be an appropriate disposition for this case and what are the options. Well, if it's a more serious offense, they need to be incarcerated, or it's really not that serious offense, and they should be on probation, or the case should be resolved some even softer way. But in that sort of intermediate space, drug court is an option. Is this person a candidate for drug court? Is this person suitable for drug court? Is this person somebody who wants to work on their recovery? Well, okay, if you bring people in who want to work on their recovery, then it's going to look like, you know, that's the key thing is, the person who wants to work on their recovery, so it's going to look like the drug court's moving the needle. There's no such thing as like a random controlled trial in the criminal justice process. 

Will: 15:22

So then you have drug treatment providers who kind of hang around the drug court and walk in and say, you know, they'll interview a defendant and say, yeah, I think that person is suitable and I think they should come to my inpatient treatment facility. So it becomes sort of a case-finding mechanism for the treatment provider. And there's this kind of conflict of interest that the treatment provider has in how they talk about the defendant, and the result is no accountability for treatment and the use of outdated modes of treatment. We now know, the things we do have random control trials of, medication-assisted treatment, whether it's methadone or suboxone, that really take the craving away and reduce the offending, reduce the relapse, reduce the health consequences. So these things really do work, but they're not in many drug courts. I mean, I think I'd like to believe a lot of the drug courts are evolving in the right direction on this. But for a long time the drug courts were sort of, oh, that's, you know, you don't use drugs to get off drugs. They sort of preserved some of the old school thinking.

Matt: 16:24

Gotcha. So back to the policy side of things. So you tried to reduce the funding for drug courts. What are some of the other things to give people better options?

Will: 16:31

Yeah, so to tell the story, I mean, I think where I got going there was, it feels good to judges. It feels good to judges. Judges get tired of being the hammer. It's rewarding for judges to work in drug courts and to sort of feel like they're helping people. But because they feel like they're helping, you know, they’re strong advocates, and so people wanted drug courts. Drug courts expanded, you know, over my objections. I didn't prevail on that. So I stepped away from that and focused on other priorities because there was a whole lot of things that we were doing to people that were harmful. As part of that tough-on-crime zeitgeist in the 90s, there was this overall emphasis on not just forcing people into treatment, but forcing them into various educational programs and don't go out at night and don't talk to your friends and so forth. People would write conditions of probation, that if you do any of these things, you're going to get locked up, and by the way, we're going to be checking in on you on a regular basis. So that sort of intensive supervision was something that led most defendants to fail. So it was conceived of as an alternative to incarceration. By then, many people, even conservative people, were starting to think, you know, this is getting too expensive, we're locking so many people up. Can we keep people on a short leash, but have them in the community and it'd be less expensive than incarceration? Well, the result was basically, first of all, a lot of resentment, because just like the treatment programs, a lot of the education programs were pretty mediocre. And the result was that people didn't comply and ended up locked up anyway.

Will: 18:06

So there has been a broad movement away from that. So my personal evolution on that is basically along with everybody else, in the broadest general sense, people have recognized that we don't want to keep people, make it so easy for people to fail on probation. That movement's gone in a good direction. And so it was part of what we did in the criminal justice reform effort. For me, the one thing that I, and it's also one of the things that bothers defendants most in my experience, is the various fees and charges. So if you're somebody with low income, and by the way, you're just out of prison or you're just recovering from substance abuse or whatever, so you don't have a job, you don't have any money, and you got to go to your grandmother to say, you know, can I have 50 bucks to pay the probation officer? And it was more than that. All the fees together stacked up to quite a bit. So we really tried to get rid of these various fees. By the way, these fees have been introduced. It's kind of an interesting digression. Probation fees were introduced while Dukakis was running for president, and this legislature was sort of trying to paper over the fact that we weren't really having a Massachusetts miracle, that actually Massachusetts was in trouble fiscally. So it was a combination of things of other taxes and so forth. So they say, well, let's tax people who are on probation. It was a revenue-raising idea, and it just sort of fit into the tough and crime thing. But it, that really drove people crazy. It's degrading, and it makes the criminal justice system extractive. It turns it into something that is trying to take money out of your pocket, which is a very big deal if you don't have a lot of money. So we worked hard to get rid of those. Those are gone. The probation fees are abolished entirely, parole fees. A whole bunch of other fees have been abolished or greatly reduced. And so that's a good thing.

Will: 19:54

But the conversation continues. There's legislation pending now that Senator Cindy Friedman sponsored, which would come back to this particular issue of the use of the threat of incarceration. And it would say if you're on probation, a drug test can't be used, relapse isn't gonna send you back to prison. Relapse is part of recovery. Everybody knows that. But in a drug court, if you relapse, relapse could mean, okay, I'm locked up for three days or three weeks. I'm locked up, I lose my job. I lose my job, I can't pay my rent, I lose my apartment. And by the way, you know, when me and my girlfriend don't live together, things don't go as, you know, we're not so close anymore. And pretty soon the little life I was building for myself is busted back to nothing. And why wouldn't I just go back to using? And people do. So that over-supervision carries a lot of potential for harm. And so the legislation would say, no, if you're trying to participate in treatment, any kind of treatment, a relapse is not going to result in you being locked up again. So outpatient treatment is fine. You choose your counselor. So that reintroduces that accountability into the treatment system. So it still says you could put somebody on probation and you could have a conversation about their treatment involvement, but they get to choose the treatment, not the treatment provider that's making money in the drug court setting. I think that would be a big step forward.

Matt: 21:25

Now, is there general agreement among policymakers of what is the question, what is the problem we're actually trying to address here? Because you can view this from like trying to help the people, trying to protect the public. You know, there's all those different angles. Is there general agreement on the question or the prong we're trying to attack with that?

Will: 21:42

Well, you know, that's a superb question, right. Because both of those things are important. I think we have to hold both of those things in the mind at the same time. There tend to be folks who are primarily concerned with protecting the public, and then there are other folks that are primarily concerned with the healing of people who've become involved in the system as a result of their own actions or as a result of enforcement decisions made by the police. People tend to look at one part of the elephant, right? We have to struggle to keep those both in mind. So, my view is that we have a set of sentencing levels that have evolved over time. People, either they're enshrined in statute, or people, you know, know sort of the going rate. When people commit certain crimes, there may be incarceration involved, and that's what happens. And that's how we try to protect the public. And that is what it is. But the treatment part should basically be separate. We should be trying to make treatment available inside or outside incarceration. If you get locked up, we want you to have the best possible treatment while you're there. And by the way, that includes medically assisted treatment, so that you're not trying to abuse drugs in prison and there's all too much of that. It's not like we can really keep drugs out of prison. But if we can keep people on suboxone or methadone while they're in prison, then continue that on their release and have a nice handshake, then you've got a chance of helping people move forward to recovery.

Matt: 23:08

How are those drugs working, by the way?

Will: 23:10

Those drugs are working great. I mean, and we've expanded them, we've kind of mandated their availability. And so in most facilities across the state, there's a decent size, a group of people benefiting from those therapies. In some cases, there are limits because we've required that we don't just give people the drugs, we also engage in some kind of cognitive therapy with them. So that's sort of a, that takes more time than just giving the drugs. So that's a capacity limitation in some facilities. But we've made a lot of progress on that. For the people who are outside, though, and that's where the conversation where this legislation would really speak to, somebody's on probation, go get the treatment you want. As opposed to, go to this treatment facility, stay there, or we're going to lock you up. What you want is that candid, unthreatened relationship between the person and their treatment provider, their healthcare provider. You want the relationship to be between the patient and their provider, as opposed to between their provider and the drug court.

Matt: 24:13

And is there enough high-quality treatment options available currently?

Will: 24:17

Well, you know, yes and no. I mean, there's capacity in the system. Most kinds of treatment do have some level of, you know, whether it's inpatient or outpatient, have capacity to handle more patients. The question is quality, and in my view, too much of it has been sort of infected by that low accountability model where there's coercion. But good things are happening in a lot of places, and we're seeing more use of the medically assisted treatment, which does in fact help people. And there are really first-class substance abuse treatment facilities in this state who really do use the best, not only medical assisted treatment, but the best sort of cognitive supportive conversations and the best sort of relationship building between the therapist and the patient.

Matt: 25:01

Is there anything to say on like the last bridge of that? Getting people from the treatment facilities back into the world, you know, those bridge programs?

Will: 25:08

Yeah, well, there's a whole continuum of treatment from the detox to perhaps some inpatient recovery. But I think the most important thing is for those most addictive drugs to get on something that helps people reduce their cravings and get into high-quality treatment that they can continue with as they work back into the community and develop a relationship with provider.

Matt: 25:30

So getting back with the policy, with these bills that are being proposed, is this an uphill battle? Is it 50-50? Is it close? Where do these sit?

Will: 25:38

I think it's still an uphill battle to really change that model. You know, some of the challenges are, and we have to admit this, right? There are some people whose pattern of offending is really pretty egregious. They're knocking out a store window and grabbing all they can once a day. Those people exist. And you can incarcerate them, or you can do something like a drug court model, a really intensive form of supervision. Not with the illusion that it's necessarily, necessarily going to help them, but it may help them. And it's certainly a way to protect the public because you know that if this particular defendant is testing positive for drug use, well, you know how they support their habits. So you know they're back offending. So that's a very bad thing. So you want to pull them back in. And there is some evidence that if you focus drug courts on the most serious offenders, you know, there's a space where they can do better. I don't really buy any of the research because random controlled trials are just too hard to do. But you know, they could be marginally better from a recidivism standpoint if they're engaging in treatment in a drug court context, as opposed to just sitting in prison. I mean, the real question is, what's the alternative in prison? What are they getting in prison? If they're getting MAT, if they're getting cognitive behavioral theory in prison, well, I'm going to guess that that works out at least as well as the drug court model. All of that said, though, there's enough narrative coming from judges. There's enough narrative coming from the people who come through the drug court process and become sort of poster children from it. And there is a modicum of research. So you put those things together, that's a fairly strong thing to push back against. And it's hard to find the defendants to talk about how it hasn't worked for them. I know those people, but them coming forward, you don't want to be a poster child for failure and you don't want to get yourself in trouble again. And so moving the needle on it is difficult. There's some great advocates. Lisa Newman-Polk is one of the attorneys who's really pushed back on this model. She's had a hand on the legislation that I mentioned earlier. So there's a conversation on both sides of it now.

Matt: 27:54

And is there any other concurrent issues this ties in with just in terms of reducing incarceration, people with mental health problems in incarceration? You know, is there any tie-in between these?

Will: 28:05

Well, I mean, there's a broad tie-in, which is, you know, we have moved in Massachusetts generally away from we were always one of the lowest incarceration states. We're even lower now. We're all about helping people in the community. What that means is the people who are still in prison tend to be people with very strong needs. They tend to be people with strong mental health needs, strong substance abuse needs, or perhaps people that just are very much given to violent behavior and are going to get in trouble kind of wherever they are, and they may not be diagnosable as having a mental illness per se. It's more of a personality thing. So that's who's in prison now, and even down to the lower levels, there's just a huge prevalence of those high-need people. And so that is our, I think, the number one challenge that I'm actually spending even more time on is, how do we create a system of carceral facilities, how do we make the existing system that we have better at providing consistent high-quality mental health care, high-quality substance abuse treatment, including medically assisted treatment as needed.

Matt: 29:13

Was there any areas you feel like we didn't dig deep enough in there?

Will: 29:17

There's one other part of the conversation about drug policy that's pretty active that we haven't touched, which is the issue of safe injection sites or overdose prevention centers. And there's a lot of misunderstanding about those. I hear people calling me and saying it's just wrong to give people drugs. I mean, like, no, nobody's talking about doing that. What they're saying is if somebody has drugs and they're going to use them, don't use them alone. Come into our place and we'll watch it to make sure you don't die while you're doing it. So those overdose prevention centers are really controversial because people perceive them as facilitating the use of drugs. My own perception is they probably don't facilitate the use of drugs because we're not giving people drugs. What we're doing is saying if you're going to use drugs, if you've acquired fentanyl, use it here. And we'll give you a test strip and make sure you know what you're actually doing, and we will offer you treatment while you're there and sort of try to talk to you about it. But you can come in here and use your drugs, and there'll be a nurse someplace that's going to sort of assess what's happening to you as you go into your space with those drugs. The challenge with these facilities is you basically have to locate them someplace near where there's a lot of drug users. I mean, there's no point in putting it out in the middle of a community that doesn't have a lot of drug users or out in the middle of a rural place. So what you end up talking about is putting it down in Mass and Cass or Central Square or someplace where there may be a relatively elevated population of drug users. And that's where the opposition comes back. It's like, look, we're not trying to support and attract drug users here at Mass and Cass. We're trying to disband this neighborhood of intense drug users. So we haven't so far, although I've been a supporter of this concept, we haven't really seen the pieces come together, whether you had a facility, you know, an operator who was ready to do it, a municipality that was ready to accept it. But that's another important part of the policy conversation that's still going on. So to summarize, I think the first question when you start talking about drug policy is, well, prohibition, is that the right thing? And I've kind of long moved past that question in my own thought as it relates to our most dangerous drugs. But then you get into the sentencing, and we've done that. We've greatly reduced the punishment level associated with drug offenses, although drug dealing per se is still illegal and can result in incarceration. Then there's a conversation about the treatment in the criminal justice system. And for me, there's two big parts of that, both of which are important to me moving forward. One is for those who are locked up, are we doing the right thing for them? Are we doing something that's going to move them forward in the best possible way with high quality treatment? And two, for those who are not locked up, let's not chew them up with overly intensive supervision. Let's make sure they can get into good quality treatment on their own. Let's not use the criminal justice system, which is a very blunt instrument, to try to heal them. Let mostly let them heal on their own, separately from the criminal justice process. Crime is one thing, healing is another.

Matt: 32:34

So thank you for sharing your thoughts on that, and hope everyone got some insights into this issue. So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head on over to WillBrownsberger.com. As this is an ongoing conversation, Will would love to hear your thoughts on the issue and how it's affecting you. And you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can know when the next episode is out, where Will will continue to dive into the issues and share his thoughts on them. Thank you for listening and take care.