Forcing drug addicts to get clean can be quite successful, research says

 
 

Healing from substance abuse must start from within... right? Programs like Newsom's CARE Court (which requires severely mentally ill/addicted individuals to enter treatment) are criticized as being inhumane and pointless by folks like Assemblymember Ash Kalra. But Wall Street Journal rebuts these claims, analyzing CA studies on compulsory drug treatment. The results? It's often just as effective as voluntary treatment.

One of the earliest demonstrations of the value of compelled treatment comes from the California Civil Addict program, established in the 1960s for both criminal and non-criminal drug addicts. The program included an average of 18 months in residential treatment. Patients received drug treatment, job training and education with transition services. Upon release, they were to spend up to five additional years being closely monitored and undergoing weekly urine toxicology tests. During the program’s first two years, however, judges and other officials mistakenly released about half the patients from mandatory treatment after only minimal exposure to the initial, residential part of the program.

A natural experiment was born, allowing researchers to compare people who finished treatment with those who were inadvertently released. After reviewing records and interviewing almost 1,000 “out of control” heroin-addicted participants, the researchers found that, seven years after admission to the program, participants who were prematurely released went back to using heroin at more than twice the rate of those who completed 18 months of compulsory residential care.

Today the U.S. has about 4,000 drug courts that offer an alternative to incarceration for addicts who commit nonviolent crimes. Defendants who choose drug court remain in treatment for one to two years under close supervision, including routine urine testing. Once participants complete the treatment program, their record is expunged—a big dangling carrot. A 2002 study in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency looked at 235 arrestees in Baltimore who were randomly assigned to either drug court or typical community supervision, which might include regular meetings with probation officers and referral to drug treatment services. The study found that those in drug court were one-third as likely to be rearrested after a year.

These and other studies show that people who are mandated to undergo addiction treatment fare at least as well as those who volunteer. In the 2000s, a group of Stanford researchers compared a group of patients required by a court attend drug treatment with others who entered care voluntarily. At one year and five years following enrollment, the mandated and voluntary patients made similar improvements in areas such as drug use, criminal activity and employment status. Notably, the groups were equally satisfied with their treatment experience.

Compulsory treatment offers a chance to rescue people earlier in their “careers” of drug addiction, when intervention can produce greater lifetime benefits. And mandated care can ensure that people remain in treatment and don’t drop out, which is consistently shown to be one of the best predictors of a successful outcome. The longer participants stay in care, the more likely they are to internalize the values and goals of recovery.

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing here.

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