CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Nearly all professionals working in the field of addiction consider it a medical problem and not a legal one. Many of their programs rely on "replacement drugs" (e.g. methadone or Suboxone for opiate users) but the 12-step programs which probably have the best track record in treating addicts and alcoholics are unabashedly theistic.

Of course, we don't tell a hard-core junkie that "Jesus Saves" or that submission to Mohammed is the way to recovery but that is basically "how it works."

This is something akin to the Hindu concept in the Bhagavad-Gita that the Lord Krishna created Buddhism to trick the atheists into worshiping something. "Better paying homage to a pot-bellied carving than self."

Dr. Abraham Twerski, founder of the Gateway Clinic in Pittsburgh and an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, tells how he once sponsored an atheist.

"I can't pray," the man said. "I don't believe in God."

"By praying" Twerski told him, "you are admitting you are not God." This is the second stage in AA."

By a general consensus the "War on Drugs" has failed. Drugs have won one of the indicators is that heroin -- the scourge of the African-American for the past 50 years -- has become the drug of choice for Caucasian youth. New Martinsville, a bucolic town of 5,000 or so at the base of West Virginia's northern panhandle has become a virtual "needle-park." My 21-year-old son has become one of the casualties, and seven or eight of his friends have died over the past few years. My son has been one of the "fortunate" ones. He's gone from being a college student working part-time at Best-Buy to the Salvation Army in Pittsburgh. He gets "three hots and a cot" for working in the store there while he awaits the outcome of the four felony charges he picked up in May.

A state trooper assigned to the Federal State Drug Task Force told the Wetzel County prosecutor, "It's like trying to sweep sunshine off the street."

To get and keep federal and state money coming in, these task forces have to produce statistics and a little fish in a small puddle looks just like Pablo Escobar to the number crunchers. The way the numbers are enhanced is by "turning" arrestees into unpaid confidential informants. These "C.I.s" then set up their friends, associates, lovers, et al. This generates more money for the "good guys" if there are any in this business.

"The Throwaways" by Sarah Stillman in the Sept. 3 issue of "The New Yorker" tells what happens when inexperienced kids are turned out as "C.I.s" in the War Against Drugs.

It is time to call a halt on this whole farce by medicalizing our treatment of drug users. This is not the same as decriminalization (although taking the profit out of the business would cripple the cartels -- legitimate and illegitimate -- that blanket Appalachia with heroin and oxycotin.)

A first step would be to treat addicts differently. Even though many addicts of my acquaintance sneer at them, the Drug Courts are a step in the right direction. A much more beneficial step would be to take drug offences out of the criminal justice system altogether.

If addiction is a disease, then we are punishing people for medical affliction. To put it as simply as possible, the disease is that the addict (like the alcoholic) loses the ability to choose. As the cliché has it "one is too many and a thousand is not enough."

As one addict told the Wetzel County prosecutor "It's like poison ivy, Mr. Haught. You know you shouldn't scratch it, but that instantaneously releases pleasure." When the addict (or alcoholic) starts, it's not that they can't quit. They don't want to quit. Their "will power," as it is, has been overcome. In Freudian terms the pleasure principle has obliterated the reality principle.

If one is truly an addict, it is a fatal and invisible disease, and the basic, perhaps the only, remedy is total abstinence.

Ernest Hemmingway said, "No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody-chance." In the same vein, Russ Taylor, who headed "Miracles" in Wheeling, perhaps West Virginia's top treatment center, said "An addict by himself is in bad company."

Maybe there is a pill or drug out there, but until that blessed day, we need to quarantine addicts as one used to do lepers and people with tuberculosis, not incarcerate them and have them play cat and mouse with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The war is over. It is time to come out of the cold.

Rogers is a lawyer in New Martinsville.