Addiction Medicine Practice


  • (856) 663-4447
  • (800) 978-0808
  • Fax: (856) 488-6380

Specializing in Addiction Medicine
One South Centre Street, Merchantville, NJ 08109

RELEVANCE TO THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

 

When treatment for addiction fails, society pays the price.

There's a clear correlation between drug addiction, alcoholism and crime. Our jails and prisons are full of heroin and narcotic addicts, many of them repeat offenders who turn to crime again and again to support their habit. The cost of incarcerating these addicts is, on average, about $25,000 a year. The cost of prosecution for each repeated offense sends the number even higher. And society picks up the tab.

Addicts aren't bad people who need to be made good. They're sick people who need to be made well.

The first step toward more successful treatment of these offenders is to begin to see them as patients, not criminals. They're born with a disease that lasts a lifetime and they're likely to relapse at any time. The disease is treatable, though, by combining medical intervention and follow up with 12-step programs in which one addict supports another.

Seeking a better solution, Lance Gooberman M.D. (now The NaltrexZoneTM) has developed a program that offers a better chance for long-term recovery. It combines opiate detoxification with Naltrexone maintenance therapy and has been used on thousands of our patients. Once on maintenance therapy, all NaltrexZoneTM patients are directed into a 12-step program that we feel is absolutely necessary in addition to medical treatment they receive here.

> see page 2

 

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