Marysville’s new law that allows the city to board up houses for health and safety reasons is causing quite a stir.

The phone is ringing off the hook because people want to get rid of drug houses in their neighborhoods.

After years of not being able to do much the city now can fairly easily get this scourge on society to move on. If the home has no water, sewer or electricity, and neighbors complain, the house can be shut down.

Drug houses are scary to neighbors. You never know what someone on drugs is going to do. There is always a worry that guns could be involved. Crime in neighborhoods often increases because addicts need to get money somehow to feed their addiction. Such houses often have garbage strewn about, which attracts the grossest critters. Children need to be taught to stay away for many reasons, including potential needles tossed about.

So, this new law is empowering.

While this is a great success, let us not forget this problem has deeper roots.

One is these houses are empty usually because of foreclosure. The owners can no longer afford to keep their houses, for various reasons, often economic.

If banks would step up and do what needs to be done, the houses could be resold and squatters would never even have a chance to move in and destroy the place.

Another problem of course is addiction itself.

People can make fun of Drug Addiction Resistance Education all they want, but at least an effort was being made in schools to inform kids about the dangers of drugs. Most of the drug problem starts with young people experimenting with drugs. If they somehow could resist temptation, and see the results and lifestyle before they even start, the drug problem would have a better chance of being resolved.

Once someone is addicted, it is extremely hard for them to come clean. Society has dozens of treatment options, public and private, but addicts can go through them time and time again and still not be successful.

Law enforcement is still trying to figure out how it fits in with all of this. Do police arrest them and put them in jail with criminals? Or should they try to help drug addicts get clean by working with social services.

Marysville Police Chief Rick Smith and police officer Rory Bolter of Arlington are interested in doing the latter. Both want to be able to take people arrested for drugs directly to social service agencies rather than jail. They want them to be able to get them the help they need to really have a chance to beat this plague, rather than just take up space behind bars and continue to bog down the court system.

They probably will end up using something like the Law Enforcement Assistance Diversion program, which has been highly successful in Seattle. Stay tuned for more on that as meetings are scheduled.

In the meantime, we celebrate with the rest of the community that some neighborhoods get to be cleaned up. Just remember, that is just moving the problem somewhere else. This new effort by Smith and Bolter could actually get to the core of the issue.