Lots of judgmental advice on here from folks who do not appear to have lived with/through it. Speaking for only me, law enforcement turned my daughter’s like around. Her arrest and pending trial, along with a hard shove from her lawyer (a friend of mine since JHS), were the combined impetus to get her to rehab. From there, she made the decision to get clean and to change, as all addicts must. Twelve Steps and a year-long incarceration (halfway house the last six months)together with her personal commitment to change were her salvation. She had lived a life largely without consequences to that point (for which I deserve blame), and she needed consequences for her behavior. I am happy law enforcement intervened, and if I could have stopped the court proceedings, I would not have done it.
I have written about her if you are interested enough to read. See “Redemption” on the front page.
I don't think anyone is judging or otherwise belittling your/your daughter's experience. I have read your post about your daughter, and in fact have re-read it multiple times because it gives me the slightest glimmer of hope for my cousin in an otherwise completely hopeless situation. I think we are all glad that your daughter got the wake-up call she needed to get her life right and that she is now thriving.
But I also think that your daughter is pretty close to a best-case scenario in the current US legal/drug policy landscape; there are a lot of people for whom incarceration doesn't work, and they either wind up going in and out of jail and/or they end up dead. My cousin, who has battled addiction for over two decades, is one of them. She went to jail, got clean for a while, then got addicted again, lost custody of her kids, got clean again, then relapsed, etc. For her, jail time and the threat of losing her kids, and then even actually losing her kids, wasn't enough to break her cycle of addiction. She
wanted to get clean but couldn't, and still can't. I think many in my extended family think it's only a matter of time before we hear that she has died of an overdose.
Mental illness seems to be the cause of everything from mass shooting to heroin addiction. No.
Man, I could not disagree more. If we're going to treat alcoholism as an illness worthy of various kinds of treatment (not the least of which is mental health services like counseling and support groups), let's treat drug addiction the same way. (I could also say the same for obesity, but that's another topic for another day.) My cousin lives in a state that's not going to go out of its way to really help her. If you are a junkie then you're getting punished every time because surely the next punishment will set you straight, and if it doesn't then you must just want to remain a junkie. If she ODs then the state won't give a shit.
There's a lot more to her situation that's so fucked up (through no direct fault of her own) I want to punch a hole in my computer screen, but I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say she has never gotten treatment for her
addictive behavior, which to me is ground zero for treating her addiction. I can't help but wonder if things would have, and maybe still could, turn out differently for her if there were a better system in place besides arrest-incarcerate-release-repeat. That's why I asked if your daughter would have reacted positively to something other than just being put in jail.
If you still haven't read Sphinx's article about the Netherlands, I'd really encourage you to do so. I don't know that I agree with their policy 100% either, but the statistics speak for themselves. Even if my cousin remains addicted I'd much rather she be that way in a relatively more controlled, safer manner, with the possibility that she can recover somewhere down the road, as has happened in the Netherlands. As things stand now I can't hold out much hope for her.