Fifty years of treating addiction as a crime has produced records, not recoveries. Here is the case for treating it as what it is.
The name of the program is an argument, and we chose it on purpose. “Recovery Over Criminalization” is a claim that one of these approaches works and the other does not, and that we have enough evidence now to stop pretending it is a close call.
Start with what a drug conviction does to a person after the sentence ends. It follows them into housing applications, job applications, and professional licensing. It can affect access to student aid and, in some circumstances, public benefits. In other words, the response we chose systematically strips away stable housing, steady income, and professional prospects — the three things that most reliably predict whether someone stays in recovery.
We built a system that makes the condition harder to recover from, and then we express surprise at the recidivism rate.
It is also expensive. Estimates from the Vera Institute of Justice and state corrections agencies put the cost of incarcerating one person at well over $30,000 a year, considerably more in some states. That is public money, spent per person, per year, to generate an outcome that makes the underlying problem worse.
The research here is not new or contested at the margins. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has long held that treatment for substance use disorder reduces drug use and associated criminal activity, and that it is cost-effective relative to incarceration. Medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder in particular has strong evidence behind it for reducing overdose deaths.
There is a more encouraging data point too. After years of rising overdose deaths, CDC provisional data has shown deaths declining from their peak. That decline did not come from tougher sentencing. It came from naloxone reaching more hands, treatment reaching more people, and harm reduction being treated as a legitimate public health tool rather than a moral concession.
People sometimes read anti-stigma work as a matter of manners — being nicer about a sensitive subject. It is not. Stigma has direct, measurable consequences:
Every one of those is a person not getting help at the moment help would have worked. That is why we deliver sensitivity training rather than just publishing statements. Changing how people speak about addiction changes who feels able to ask.
Not that nothing has consequences. That the default response to a health condition should be health care:
And in the meantime, the unglamorous part: helping the specific person who wrote to us this week find a program they can get into.
If that is you, or someone you love, our Recovery Over Criminalization page explains what we can do. If you want it to keep happening, you can fund it.
Published August 5, 2026 by All4Aries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Austin, Texas. This article is general information, not legal, medical, or financial advice.
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