Addiction and mandatory treatment

This chapter uses ‘mandatory treatment’ to cover both coercive and compulsory treatment modalities. The choice-making dimension within mandatory treatment arguably makes a difference to moral perceptions of treatment. Mandatory treatment of addiction includes detoxification, counselling, education, and various other forms of rehabilitation. In civil commitment an order for treatment occurs by appeal to a state-sanctioned authority specifying strict criteria usually involving harm or the loss of the capacity for decision-making. Civil commitment type cases and coercion type cases target different groups, and their purposes and the differing outcomes from each practice suggest that it would be a mistake to attempt to draw lessons from one practice in support of the other. Mandatory treatment of addiction can be compulsory or coercive, applied within criminal or civil contexts. There is some evidence of its effectiveness as a coercive mode within some criminal contexts, but the successes seem correlated with many other factors, both internal and external to the practices themselves.