Drug addiction is a problem that "crosses all income lines, ethnic lines, and racial lines," GOP candidate Jeb Bush said Thursday, opening up about his own daughter Noelle and her own struggles.
"This is a national problem," Bush told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "It creates huge demands on government, but more importantly, it just creates real hardship and heartbreak in families."
Bush's daughter, Noelle, was arrested in 2002 when she was 24 years old for attempting to fill a false prescription, and ended up being sentenced to 10 days in jail for contempt of court after she was caught with crack cocaine while she was a resident in a drug rehabilitation center, according to
CNN. At the time of her arrest, Bush was the governor of New York and her uncle, George W. Bush, was president.
"I have the personal, you know, experience of being a dad whose precious daughter has gone through difficult times in a very public way," Bush told Fox News. "She went to drug court. She graduated from drug court and I was the proud dad that saw her do that. She's drug free now."
The United States needs to create an environment where people can recover, as "doing it alone with addiction, as you know, is near impossible," he continued, and if the government "gets this right," the demands of government will be lessened across the board, Bush said.
"Look at our child welfare system, look at the juvenile justice system, dependency courts," he said. "These are overwhelmed by cases of tragedy many times because of alcohol and drug addiction. So this is a problem that cascades out into everyday life, and people just are not reaching their full potential because of their addiction."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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