Fear of punishment is a large factor keeping opiate addicts in the shadows instead of coming forward for help. Oswego City Mayor Billy Barlow recently announced a new drug policy called the Rapid Evaluation for Appropriate Placement Program, or REAP, that will allow residents to turn in their drugs to the police station free of charge. 

This new program is meant to curb opiate addiction in the area by enabling addicts seeking help to be admitted into a help center without fear of being arrested. Similar to the Good Sam rule on Oswego State’s campus that protects students contacting authorities about drug or alcohol issues, this initiative is a step in the right direction to rid their anxieties and make it easier for them to defeat addiction. 

Rural communities throughout the Northeast and Midwestern United States have been plagued by heroin and opioid addiction in the last decade. The drugs are often cheap, easily attainable and very addictive, which makes them all the more destructive to lower and middle class communities. Treatment admissions  in Oswegohave gone up 300 percent since 2010. 

It has become increasingly clear that the War on Drugs started by Richard Nixon in the 1970s to crack down on drug users was been an abject failure. Luckily, more programs like Barlow’s have been popping up across the country to deal with drug addiction and have proven to be much more effective than the mass incarceration strategy.

This has led to the situation the mayor’s office is attempting to deal with. When people are dealing with the potentially fatal problem of drug addiction, fear of punishment by the government will deter them from seeking the help they need. It has been proven that rehabilitation centers and treatment evaluations are much more effective in dealing with opiate addiction than simply throwing at risk people in prison. 

Farnham Family Services, a treatment center in Oswego, will be partnering with the city in their effort to admit more people into the addiction facilities. It is important for private and non-profit institutions like Farnham to get onboard with local government initiatives like REAP to have any success. It makes the process of admitting patients much easier when local authorities are willing to offer support. 

This is a terrific new program by the mayor and more people should hope their local government take a similar action to stop the heroin and opioid epidemic from tearing apart more families and overcrowding prisons and hospitals.