A Community Council in the Alton Park area of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is planning on creating an alcohol and drug rehab facility to reduce substance abuse and crime. Alton Park and five adjacent areas, while only accounting for 14.3 percent of the city’s population, is responsible for 43.6 percent of all drug complaints. The city councilman who represents the area says they don’t have money to fund a rehab center – but how are they going to handle the drug-related crime if they can’t get the alcoholics and addicts apparently causing the problems through alcohol and drug rehab?

The chairwoman of the Alton Park Piney Woods Improvement League says the crime is related to lack of education and job training. She said that if the addicts had a job, they wouldn’t have to steal from other people. While it’s true that most people wouldn’t have to steal from others if they had a job, the same isn’t necessarily true for drug addicts. Supporting addiction is expensive. Also, until the people with substance abuse problems get through a drug rehab program, they’re not likely to take advantage of any education or job training that might be available to them, and they’re less likely to hold any job they get.

Fortunately, business owners in the community feel differently, although they’re going to be hard-pressed to come up with the money to build the rehab center when the city’s already made it clear that it won’t be a source of the funding.

It would be interesting to look at the city budget and see exactly how tax revenues and other money is being spent. There’s never really enough to go around but if you want a community worth living in, you sometimes have to change your priorities. And for a city plagued with alcohol, drug abuse and crime, a successful drug rehab program could probably improve things more than other initiatives currently being funded.

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