Wendy Goggin
Wendy H. Goggin was appointed as Chief Counsel for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on November 1, 2004. As the Chief Counsel, she is responsible for oversight of the legal issues confronting DEA worldwide and for providing legal services and guidance to all components of DEA, and managing DEA’s Office of Chief Counsel. The Office of Chief Counsel is comprised of over 100 attorneys and support staff that provide legal guidance in a wide-range of matters such as criminal law, technology law, international law, intelligence law, administrative law, asset forfeiture, civil litigation, and regulatory litigation and policy. She is the principal advisor to the DEA Administrator and Deputy Administrator on legal and ethical matters.
Questions
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Doctors tend not to talk about "recovered drug addicts," and prefer the term "inactive addicts" those who dont use drugs right at given moment. In your opinion, is it not possible to get rid of this label? Even in the opinion of drug treatment experts, patients remain forever addicted. How can the modern society be taught to have an adequate attitude toward former drug addicts and consider them as a part of the society?
Drug addicts can recover, and they can achieve a lot after being treated. For that reason I don't think we should segregate them this way. I guess that social marketing would be adequate for the alleviation of this situation.
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In you opinion how important is parental education and relationships within the family in preventing drug addiction?
A very important one, although we also have to outline the huge importance of the environment and interactions of the youth.
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What should be in the Internet age and growth of online communities informational methods to combat drug addiction? What do you think, what means will be most effective today, and how the state should behave in order to successfully affect the suffering of drug addiction and to conduct prevention among healthy population?
Internet is a huge sea with lots of sharks, and we need to act in this area too. As a matter of fact, we have been doing so for a long time already. Although I have to admit that we did take preventive actions. Instead we have been pursuing criminals who used the World Wide Web to distribute drugs. Nevertheless, I have to admit that it would not be bad at all to implement preventive measures, such as offering information about drugs.
