As an addiction psychiatrist, I’m often faced with this situation: A desperate person reaches out to ask how they can force their family member into drug or alcohol treatment. A sister has had multiple car crashes, or a husband can’t quit drinking, or a son or daughter keeps overdosing. In New York, where I practice, there’s a simple answer: If they don’t want treatment, there’s no legal way to compel them. That’s how most clinicians practice in the U.S. But with growing nationwide concern about the opioid crisis, some people are rethinking the use of coercion in addiction treatment.

There are only a handful of U.S. states that regularly mandate people with addiction into treatment against their will (that is, outside of the more common drug court approaches, in which, after getting charged with a crime, people might be offered treatment instead of punishment). But recently, lawmakers in other states from New Hampshire to Alabama have crafted new laws expanding compulsory treatment. For example, bills proposed in Pennsylvania would allow families to commit their relatives into locked-down inpatient facilities, or require people to attend treatment after drug overdoses, or else face jail time. As other commentators have noted, on a policy level, these new laws are counterproductive because they would shunt crucial resources away from more effective measures, such as expanding our network of traditional treatments for those seeking help. But the trend toward involuntary treatment points toward an important empirical question: Does coerced treatment actually work?

Be the first to like.

Like

Unlike