Designated Drivers and Crack Heads
A very smart friend told me he was unable to understand how one could compare drunk driving and crack.  I imagine there are many others who had a similar response.  I completely understand your perspective and I do not want to suggest that there is only one clear and uncontroversial way to look at this question.  Here is how I am thinking about it.

When we decide as a society to say this harm-causing behavior is a crime (and another is best treated as a public health problem), we usually have reasons.  I am suggesting here that one reason might be to choose on the basis of the level of harm caused. 

This is why I was surprised to hear the rest of the story on crack… the level of harm associated with crack is more comparable than media story lines suggested to the harm associated with another addiction-related crime, drunk driving.  This made me pause.

We all lived through the headlines about crack.  Several good studies show that, like crime coverage in general, the mass media reporting on crack (and TV shows that built on this) distorted our perspective in ways that amplified the harms, leaving us with a new term, ‘crack head.’  At the same time, media coverage of drunk driving (and later meth) more often framed these stories as public health problems (and less often framed them as violence problems), leaving us with a new term, ‘designated driver.’  A stark contrast.

Of course, in reality, both cases are both about harm and addiction.  That is the point.  When the harms caused are great in both cases, why choose to help the offender recover his life in one case and create one of the most punitive regimes possible for the other offender, making it less likely he will pay taxes and parent responsibly after recovering from his addiction?  (Note:  my preference would be to treat both cases as public health problems, rather than treat both with extreme punitiveness, but that is another conversation.)

So we need to consider other explanations, beyond the level of harm caused, for treating one harm-causing activity as an addiction (erasing the choice a drunk makes to take his first drink) and the other as street crime (erasing the behavior under the influence that blurs the choice making). 

Maybe harm caused is not the criteria we should use.  But if that is the case, then we need to justify the War on Drugs without reference to any desire to keep our families or communities safer, and identify what other criteria we are using. 

In this case, unraveling this question makes it more difficult to see our five decade long incarceration explosion as simply (or perhaps even primarily) about crime control, as Michelle Alexander persuasively argues.  If the harms caused by an entire generation of young black men are disproportionately targeted by the War on Drugs and media stereotypes, an entire generation of fathers get felony records (while other harm-causing fathers do not) preventing them from voting, blocking job opportunities, and marking them for extra attention by law enforcement and in our media-distorted imaginations about the sources of harms most likely to hurt our families.