Lawyers and politicians in Puerto Rico debate medicating confined criminals
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| Published on Friday, July 4, 2008 |
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By MM Sierra
Caribbean Net News Puerto Rico Correspondent
Email: miranda@caribbeannetnews.com
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: The Puerto Rico Bar Association’s Governing Board on Thursday called on all Commonwealth politicians to set aside their political partisan differences when considering the “alternative of medicating confined criminals on the island.”
The Bar Association’s Governing Board made their statements, after holding a meeting last month where the board approved a resolution supporting the alternative to medicate and stop criminalizing confined criminals in an attempt to solve the island’s drug addiction problem and drug related crime incidents.
According to government statistics 80 percent of the islands crimes are drug related.
The resolution calls on all Puerto Rican politicians; lawmakers and all four political parties to consider the alternative of medicating confined criminals that are drug addicts.
“If this happens, they will be better serving their country and this will lead to the general well being of our people,” states the resolution.
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| Anibal Acevedo Vila, governor of Puerto Rico. Photo: Bloomberg News |
Earlier this week Governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá said that he was planning on establishing a plan aimed at treating drug addicts as people that have an illness rather than merely seeing them as delinquents.
The governor made his announcement after meeting with a number of health practitioners, where he asked them to offer input aimed at establishing a plan that allows the government to be more effective when implementing measures used to treat drug addicts.
The Commonwealth’s government has had much success with a program that has already been implemented which offers medical treatment for heroin dependents by prescribing them methadone and buprenorphine .
Among the health professionals that met with Acevedo Vilá was Dr. Carmen Albizu García a professor from the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Public Health Center of Investigation and Social-Medical Evaluation at the Medical Sciences Campus, who has already made a study on treating confined criminals that are “opiod” or heroin dependent.
The two-year program was implemented at the Zarzal Penal Institution in Río Grande and some 45 prisoners participated in it.
According to the study, the buprenorphine treatment helped the heroin addict prisoners as they did not relapse nor did they commit criminal acts after serving time and re-integrating with society.
Acevedo Vilá said that drug addicts should be treated like the sick and not only as delinquents.
“Medication shouldn’t be at the government’s end of the list [of priorities] it needs to be at the top of the list,” Acevedo Vilá said.
Others present at the meeting were professors from the UPR’s Graduate School of Public Health, Health Department Deputy Secretary Aida González Gregory, Mental Health and Anti-Addiction Services Administration Director José Galarza, Corrections Department Secretary Miguel Pereira and the governor’s health and public safety aids Julia García and Guillermo San Antonio, respectively.
Acevedo Vilá asked the health experts to consolidate efforts with the Corrections Department and the Mental Health and Anti-Addiction Services Administration and come up with a short-term action plan aimed at improving the treatment offered to drug addicts.
“What I am asking them is to help us [the government] draft an action plan that will help us get started and see if once and for all we can begin to win a fight that should have been dealt with differently in the past,” Acevedo Vilá said. “Drug addiction is the biggest social problem in Puerto Rico today…and we need to recognize that as a country we have been unable to take care of this problem effectively.”
Acevedo Vilá added that new strategies that provide positive results need to be further explored.
The governor said that Puerto Ricans need to understand that drug addiction is a public health problem and added that if new strategies are not explored and implemented to take care of the problem “the same discussion will be held again in 20 years and the issue will never be resolved.” |
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