W

hile 
perusing 
my 

Facebook feed during 
a study break earlier 

this week, I found myself scrolling 
past New Jersey Gov. 
Chris Christie’s (R) face 
an unusual number of 
times. With the end 
of 
the 
presidential 

election and Christie’s 
replacement 
as 

chairman of President-
elect Donald Trump’s 
transition 
team, 
the 

governor had seemingly 
fallen by the wayside in 
today’s political news 
cycle. However, as I scrolled past 
the video of Christie from October 
2015 for the fourth time, I decided 
I might as well see what the fuss 
was about — and I’m glad I did. 
While Gov. Christie only implored 
his audience to consider attitudes 
about drug addiction, this video 
reminded me of another very 
serious and taboo issue: mental 
health. We must reach across the 
aisle to ensure an open dialogue 
and to vigorously combat these 
two fatal issues.

Gov. 
Christie’s 
mother, 
he 

said, had been a smoker since 
she was 16 years old. When she 
developed lung cancer in her 70s, 
“No one came to me and said, 
‘Don’t treat her ’cause she got what 
she deserved,’ ” Christie stated. 
Nobody refused to treat her and 
nobody abandoned her to cancer. 
Yet, he says, “Somehow, if it’s 
heroin, or cocaine or alcohol, we 
say, ‘Well, they decided. They’re 
getting what they deserved.’ ” 
Instead of treating drug addicts for 
their disease, we jail them or deem 
them to be lost causes.

This 
culture 
surrounding 

drug addiction is not only costly 
in terms of human lives, but is 
also just bad fiscal policy. In the 
United States in 2013, about 85,000 
people died from alcohol abuse, 
20,000 from illicit drug abuse and 
20,000 more from prescription 
drug abuse. While death is one 
extreme, drug abuse often also 
leads to relationship issues, job 
loss, 
homelessness 
and 
other 

devastating social and monetary 
losses. Additionally, according to 
FiveThirtyEight, of the more than 
207,847 inmates in federal prisons 
nationwide, 
48.6 
percent 
are 

incarcerated for drug offenses. To 
put this into perspective, the next 
most pervasive offense in federal 
prisons is for weapons, arson or 
explosives — at a comparatively 
low 16.8 percent.

Substance abuse costs U.S. 

taxpayers more than $600 billion 
annually. The average cost for 
one full year of imprisonment 
is roughly equal to $24,000 per 
person. Yet, the average cost of a 

full year of treatment for opioid 
addicts is about $4,700 per patient. 
The National Institute on Drug 
Abuse also states that “every dollar 

invested in addiction 
treatment 
programs 

yields 
a 
return 
of 

between $4 and $7 in 
reduced drug-related 
crime, criminal justice 
costs, 
and 
theft.” 

Clearly, incarceration 
is not the appropriate 
method for handling 
substance 
abuse. 
If 

we can save lives and 
taxpayer 
dollars 
at 

the same time, it is inconceivable 
that we should continue such an 
inefficient policy.

There are plenty who argue 

drug addiction is not an illness. 
However, 
according 
to 
wide 

swaths of research, addiction is 
indeed an illness — and one that 
is incredibly debilitating if not 
properly handled. The DSM-5 
— the handbook for diagnosis of 
mental disorders used by nearly 
all health care professionals — 
has an entire section devoted to 
substance-related and addiction 
disorders. This includes not only 
tobacco addiction, but also alcohol, 
marijuana, stimulant and opioid 
addiction. Yet, there is still a looming 
stigma clouding our perceptions of 
non-tobacco addiction. Despite the 
evidence, we have a difficult time 
conceptualizing drug addiction as an 
illness and not a choice. To be sure, 
people choose to begin using drugs. 
But just as much as they do not choose 
to become addicted to tobacco, they 
do not choose to become addicted 
to other substances. People turn to 
drugs for a variety of reasons, and 
instead of abandoning them, we 
must treat them. Further, the first 
step in combatting drug addiction 
is to talk about it. We cannot sweep 
such a pervasive issue under the rug 
if we wish to seriously fight it. In 
talking about it, we open the floor to 
discuss solutions that may actually 
address the issue more successfully.

In addition to drug addiction, 

mental health is another horribly 
stigmatized subject. On a personal 
note, mental health has become 
possibly the largest hardship in my 
life to date. While I fortunately do 
not suffer personally from mental 
health issues, I’ve been in the 
passenger seat to the struggles of 
a number of people close to me. 
In the beginning, these problems 
are difficult to detect: long stints 
in bed, withdrawn temperaments, 
unwillingness to attend social 
events and general irritability — all 
of which could look like just a bad 
day or week. But the regression 
often happens quickly, leading to 
outbursts, cuts, irrational behavior 
and worse. And from there, 

psychiatry sessions, medications, 
ruined relationships, job loss, 
police visits, stints in jail, stints 
in rehabilitation centers, stints in 
medical wards at hospitals, failed 
classes, failed suicide attempts 
and suicide actualizations. Mental 
illness — no matter the form — is 
crippling. If left untreated, if left 
ignored, it can destroy everything 
and everyone in its wake.

Yet, in public settings we never 

talk about it. We don’t talk about 
it, so we don’t know how to talk 
about it. We don’t talk about it, so 
we don’t know how to prevent it. We 
don’t talk about it, so we don’t know 
how to ask for help. I never learned 
about mental health issues in my 
grade-school health classes. We 
learned about sexual health, physical 
health and, at times, drug and alcohol 
problems, but never mental health. I 
didn’t recognize the warning signs 
at first. And I didn’t know how to 
address them once the problem had 
grown worse. I didn’t understand, 
and therefore didn’t know how to 
help. One in five adults in the United 
States have suffered from a mental 
health issue and the issue is especially 
salient on college campuses. In fact, 
suicide is the second leading cause of 
death in individuals ages 10 to 24. If 
we don’t teach people about mental 
health issues at an early age, the 
warning signs may go undetected 
until it is too late. 

I am not usually one to agree 

with Gov. Christie. In fact, I often 
vehemently 
oppose 
much 
of 

what he stands for. Yet, his video 
reminded me that even after this 
vicious and divisive presidential 
election, liberals and conservatives 
still have common ground. And 
we still have serious work to do. 
Drug addiction and mental health 
are not partisan issues. Matters 
of life and death should not be 
danced around for political gain. 
As Christie said, “I’m pro-life. And 
I think that if you’re pro-life, that 
means you’ve got to be pro-life for 
the whole life, not just for the nine 
months that they’re in the womb. 
… It’s easy to be pro-life for the 
nine months they’re in the womb. 
They haven’t done anything to 
disappoint us yet.”

Democrats and Republicans 

alike — pro-life or not — have 
an obligation to combat drug 
abuse and mental health issues. 
We must work to rid ourselves 
of these stigmas and develop 
education 
and 
treatment 

programs in order to save lives. 
We must alter our thinking — 
together — and devote resources 
to programs that will fix these 
issues instead of punish them.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, December 12, 2016

Stop the stigmas

CLARISSA 
DONNELLY-
DEROVEN

LAURA SCHINAGLE

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

SHOHAM GEVA

Editor in Chief

CLAIRE BRYAN 

and REGAN DETWILER 

Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

Carolyn Ayaub
Claire Bryan

Regan Detwiler
Brett Graham
Caitlin Heenan
Jeremy Kaplan

Ben Keller
Minsoo Kim

Alexis Megdanoff
Madeline Nowicki
Anna Polumbo-Levy 

Jason Rowland

Ali Safawi

Kevin Sweitzer

Rebecca Tarnopol

Ashley Tjhung

Stephanie Trierweiler

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

MELISSA STRAUSS | COLUMN

Melissa Strauss can be reached at 

melstrau@umich.edu.

CLARISSA DONNELLY-DEROVEN | COLUMN
Finding alternatives to police and prison
A 

couple days after President-
elect Donald Trump won, a 
couple days after a woman 

in a hijab on East William Street was 
threatened to be set on 
fire, a couple days after 
a woman on the corner 
of 
South 
University 

Avenue and Washtenaw 
Avenue 
was 
pushed 

down a hill for believing 
her religion and living in 
America, and a couple 
days after the Southern 
Poverty Law Center 
collected evidence of 
more than 900 hate 
crimes in the first 10 days 
of Trump’s America, I 
sat in my feminist thought class. We 
talked about the reported violence, 
we argued about the labeling of the 
violence as “intimidation” and we 
imagined the role the police might 
play in the coming years.

When violence happens, the general 

sentiment is that you’re supposed to 
call the police. The police will solve our 
problems, they will make us safe again. 
This, though, is only true for certain 
groups of people.

Trump and the rhetoric of 

his 
campaign 
normalized 
and 

encouraged angry white people to 
commit violence against people 
of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims, 
Jews, people with disabilities, 
women, etc. Almost none of these 
groups have been treated well 
historically or are treated well 
currently by the police, especially 
people of color. As an institution, 
the 
police 
have 
regularly 

brutalized 
these 
communities 

and/or ignored their needs. Thus, 
the people who are expected to 
have the most violence committed 
against them in the following years 
are put in an impossible position: 
What do you do when the people 
you’re calling on to deal with the 
violence perpetrated against you 
have a history of perpetrating that 
same, or worse, violence against you 
and your community?

There is a very real threat of 

increased civilian violence against 
people of color following Trump’s 
campaign and election, but because the 
police regularly commit acts of violence 
against communities of color, there 
still is no institution or organization 
to properly “deal with” this violence. 
Police 
and 
prison 
abolitionist 

movements are not new, but they feel 
necessary now more than ever.

In July of this year, Fox News 

invited community activist Jessica 
Disu, among other folks, to come 
onto “The Kelly File” to discuss 

the murders of Alton Sterling, 
Philando Castile and the Dallas 
police officers. The conversation was 
gross. It involved lots of white people 

yelling racist shit and 
Disu rolling her eyes, 
visibly uncomfortable. 
Eventually 
Disu 

chimed 
in, 
saying 

to an array of boos, 
“We need to abolish 
the police.” “Abolish 
the 
police?!” 
Megyn 

Kelly repeated back, in 
horror. Disu continued, 
”Demilitarize the police, 
disarm the police, we 
need to come up with 
community solutions for 

transformative justice.”

In an interview with the Chicago 

Reader — which is really amazing 
and I recommend you read it — 
Disu compares the abolition of the 
police to the abolition of slavery: 
“I’m sure when someone first said, 
‘We have to abolish slavery,’ it was 
like, ‘Whoa, that’s the stupidest idea, 
we’re making all of this money off of 
free labor, and you’re saying abolish? 
Like, that sounds ridiculous.’”

Police (and prison) abolition is 

far from the acceptable discourse 
concerning police reform you 
might hear on news outlets like 
CNN, Fox or even MSNBC. But 
many 
communities, 
especially 

poor communities of color, where 
the police are either not helpful 
or actively violent, have created 
and implemented police-free and 
prison-free ways of dealing with 
harm and violence.

You can read about lots of 

examples in the Chicago Reader, 
and I’ll summarize one for the sake 
of space. Ethan Ucker, co-founder 
of a restorative justice program in 
Chicago called Circles and Ciphers, 
tells a story about a robbery: A 
young guy stole from a store in the 
community. “One of the people at 
the store whose stuff was taken 
said, ‘Look, I don’t want to call the 
cops. Is there anything we can 
do?’” Somehow they found out that 
the young guy was selling some 
of the stolen stuff on Facebook, 
and they also found out that the 
young guy went to school at a place 
where Ucker had done some of his 
restorative justice work with Circles 
and Ciphers. So, Ucker was able to 
contact a teacher and get in touch 
with the young guy who had stolen 
the stuff and eventually brought the 
young guy who stole back together 
with the person he had stolen from. 
The young guy returned the stuff 
he hadn’t sold, and “in restitution 

for everything else” the young guy 
worked at the store. After he had 
worked as much as he needed, he 
realized he actually liked working 
there, so he went back after he was 
done to work and volunteer. He 
formed a relationship with the store, 
the owners, the patrons, etc.

Restorative 
justice 
is 
based 

on the principle that crime and 
violence 
are 
offenses 
against 

communities 
and 
individuals, 

instead of offenses against “the 
state.” This makes the approach and 
the reparations necessarily more 
intimate and personal. Studies have 
shown that in general, restorative 
justice approaches “reduce crime 
more effectively with more … 
serious crime,” especially violent 
crime. Restorative justice makes 
perpetrators of crime much more 
active in accepting responsibility 
than they’re made to be in the 
traditional, 
impersonal 
justice 

system; you committed X crime, the 
punishment for which is Y numbers 
of years in prison, here you go, accept 
it and then you’ve paid your debt to 
society — but not really even because 
our prisons are mostly a racialized 
caste system that once you get stuck 
in, you can never really escape.

We’ve been severely misled about 

the function of police and prison 
in society today. A world without 
police and a world without prisons 
doesn’t mean a world without 
protection or safety, nor a world 
plagued by violence. The police 
force as we know it was not created 
in response to rising crime rates, 
rather as a means of social control, “a 
response to ‘disorder.’ ” In southern 
states, the police were deliberately 
established as a slave patrol, whose 
responsibilities included: “(1) to 
chase down, apprehend, and return 
to their owners, runaway slaves; 
(2) to provide a form of organized 
terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) 
to maintain a form of discipline for 
slave-workers who were subject to 
summary justice, outside of the law, 
if they violated any plantation rules.”

A world without police and 

prisons means a de-prioritizing 
of a certain understanding of 
“order,” it means community based 
solutions to problems and it means a 
redistribution of funding to support 
these new efforts. The presumption 
is not that crime will stop, but that 
we will find ways to deal with crime 
that do not necessitate more 
violence nor one-size-fits-all 
impersonal punishment.

Clarissa Donnelly-DeRoven can be 

reached at cedon@umich.edu.

ASHLEY ZHANG | COLUMN

First semester reflection

T

hough the semblance may 
not be obvious at first glance, 
an academic semester can 

actually quite feasibly be compared to 
an orchestral piece — Edvard Grieg’s 
In the Hall of the Mountain King to 
be exact. If you’re not 
familiar with the song, it 
starts slowly and quietly 
in the lower registers of 
the orchestra: the cellos, 
basses and bassoons 
calm and steady. As the 
music progresses, the 
tempo gradually builds 
as more instruments 
in different keys are 
added. Over the course 
of the next two and a 
half minutes or so, the “accelerando” 
and “crescendo” snowball until the 
“prestissimo” finale, at which point 
the music has reached new heights 
of frenzy and volume. To listen to it is 
to ride an uncontrollable train until, 
all of a sudden, it ends with a crash.

As the end of my first semester 

in college nears with unbelievable 
speed, I feel as though I’m in the 
midst of Greig’s masterpiece — 
the sheer volume of assignments, 
projects and tests thrown at me 
provokes whiplash and swallows 
me whole. In the middle of such 
a frenetic time, it can be difficult 
to find a moment to breathe and 
reflect on the past semester. It can 
be harder still to believe that a mere 
three months ago, college was all 
shiny and new, the semester was as 
lax as the beginning of In the Hall 
of the Mountain King and I was 
just another bright-eyed and bushy-
tailed freshman. I should note: I am 
still a freshman, but my eyes not as 
bright and my metaphorical tail not 
as bushy.

Although to upperclassmen I may 

still be green, in my mind, I — a soon-
to-be second-semester freshman 
— am as wise and seasoned as they 
come. I no longer get lost on the 
way to the Undergraduate Science 
Building. I know the Bursley-Baits 

Route as well as I know all the football 
chants. I’ve learned that meeting 
someone in class or at a party does 
not change the chances that they’ll 
remember your name the next time 
you meet. I know that independence 

is dangerous in that you 
can, and will, spend all 
your 
Dining 
Dollars 

on overpriced chips, 
ramen and coffee. I’ve 
realized that, despite 
high school starting at 
7:20 a.m., 8 a.m. classes 
(and 
even 
9 
a.m. 

classes) start too early.

And that’s just the 

surface-level stuff. As 
cheesy as it sounds, 

college has taught me so much about 
myself. For example, I’ve come to 
realize that my mind is much more 
suited to sciences than math, despite 
any contrasting notions I harbored in 
high school. I’ve learned that I don’t 
love parties as much as I thought I 
would. I’ve realized that I cannot 
function without sleep, not even 
with exorbitant amounts of coffee.

Even more than that, college has 

given me the ability to experience 
so many things for the first time 
and has, in turn, changed me. In 
September, I was terrified to move 
out and live without my family for 
the first time. Three months later, I 
love the freedom and independence 
I have in college. Back home, I’d be 
mortified of the thought of eating 
alone. Now, I cherish whatever alone 
time I have in the dining hall, free to 
check my emails and just rest while I 
eat. However, the largest change has 
been catalyzed by the opportunity of 
writing this very column.

I applied to be a columnist for 

the Daily on a whim with zero 
expectations 
given 
my 
limited 

experience with journalism. So 
when I was accepted, I received the 
news with a mix of surprise and 
trepidation. In fact, here’s an excerpt 
of my journal entry from Sept. 1, 
2016, the day I was accepted:

“Holy crap. I was just accepted as 

a columnist for The Michigan Daily! 
While on one hand, I’m excited that 
I was accepted, on the other hand, 
I’m terrified … I just can’t believe that 
people will be actually reading what 
I write. I’m not qualified to have 
people listen to me!! My writing has 
always been something I’m proud 
of, but kept hidden, because I’m 
embarrassed for people I know to 
read my stuff … and judge it. My heart 
is already pounding with anxiety.”

It’s hard to believe that I wrote 

that only three months ago, but the 
seven columns I’ve written between 
then and now are evidence of how 
my confidence in my writing has 
grown. Over the course of seven 
columns, I’ve learned how to use 
this small voice I have to bring 
attention to issues that are important 
to me: Asian representation in 
media, oppressive period culture, 
the unpretty reality of being a girl, 
the ridiculousness that is sleep 
deprivation competition and so 
much more. The kind and thought-
provoking emails and comments 
I’ve received because of them have 
mitigated any doubts I had about 
my credibility. I once thought no 
one cared about my opinion, but I’ve 
learned that if you have something 
worthwhile to say, people will listen.

This column has given me a 

platform to speak my voice. Yet, even 
without such a platform, college as a 
whole provides many opportunities 
to be yourself and follow your 
interests without fear of judgment. 
There are far too many people on 
campus to worry about all their 
opinions and judgments. Thus, to 
any miserable high schoolers who 
may be reading this, let me tell you 
one thing: It gets better.

Ashley Zhang can be reached at 

ashleyzh@umich.edu.

ANNIE TURPIN | CONTACT ANNIE AT ASTURPIN@UMICH.EDU

MELISSA 
STRAUSS

ASHLEY 
ZHANG

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