Local drug treatment centers are an important resource, asset, and component of the American landscape in the twenty first century. They also represent a major shift in society\'s perceptions and response to the disease of addiction. Drug addicts, people with the disease of addiction, as well as alcoholism, were originally viewed as outcasts. The common view was that prison or long term hospitalization was the proper institutional response. Nowadays, with the recognition of how large a segment of our society is affected with this disease, the local drug treatment center option has gained much greater acceptance as an appropriate response to attempt the rehabilitation of people and return them to fully productive drug and alcohol free lives. When the local drug treatment center is valued as a place where cures are possible and available to many individuals, the center itself becomes a positive force in the community. Although there are many reasons why this is important; the primary one has to do with drugs, both legal and illegal, and their effects on our society in terms of economics, law, and education. All local drug treatment centers have at least one common goal: to set the individual afflicted with the disease of addiction on a path of recovery, growth and productive self-fulfillment in the local community. Doing so reduces crimes against individuals and property, promotes local community economies, and allows professional health care providers and legal resources to be utilized more effectively. As individuals are healed, so do communities become healed? Learning and teaching are basic tools of the healing process. More and more often the local drug treatment center serves as liaison with the courts and the county jail systems as well as state prisons. It is more widely perceived and accepted that many anti-social and criminal behaviors are actually rooted in addiction and coexisting mental problems that are susceptible to treatment by the broad array of professionals helping at local drug treatment centers. Drugs, including prescribed medications, profoundly affect an individual\'s educational capabilities and practices. Medically supervised anti-depressants, for example, allow many people to further personal education and achieve goals previously unreachable due to fears, anxieties, and phobias commonly suffered by people afflicted with the illness of addiction. Likewise, use of many mind altering substances, inhibits, reduces, delays, and sidetracks the learning based goals and aspirations of many of our high school and college level students.

Having a local drug treatment center in the community helps to educate and orient the general public as to what roles drugs play in our lives. Education on a public community scale has great impact on many individuals. An enlightened community tends to support healthy behaviors and suppress dangerous, unhealthy and self-destructive ones. Glamorizing behaviors displayed by individuals under the influence of drugs becomes socially unacceptable in a community which has and supports a local drug treatment center. Drug free educational and career goal achievement is rewarded with public praise and recognition of accomplishments by a well ingrained community local drug treatment center. Many local media are hungry for and eager to broadcast the accomplishments of those who overcome these obstacles. Local drug treatment centers may not be viewed as a main stream part of the local community by those unaware of the disease concept of addiction, but they are slowly and steadily becoming recognized as a welcome substitute to having prisons built in the local community and for the gains in reducing recidivism among those recently released from prisons located elsewhere. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, is but one example of the growing support the federal government invests in research and treatment of the disease of addiction. The local drug treatment centers found throughout our country are one of the front line resources supported by local, state, and national government agencies and deserve the support of all individuals and groups in our society.