Drug treatment courts (DTC’s) are often touted as the solution to a cycle of drug addiction and crime. But are they? That’s the question the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network sought to answer in a 2011 publication that reviews the operations of six federally funded drug courts in Canada (Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Regina). This study is also a detailed primer on drug courts for the uninitiated. The report does not completely dismiss DTC’s but raises some serious questions about how they operate and their effectiveness.
The notion that addiction is the result of a moral failing sometimes gives way to the idea that it’s a chronic illness that will respond to medical treatment. But as this report points out, drug courts operate on a combination of these assumptions.
Promoted as a way to reduce drug use and prevent crime, drug courts embrace the idea that treatment can alleviate addiction.
But they also use quasi-coercive and punishing methods more akin to the criminal justice system. Applicants to a drug court treatment program must plead guilty to a crime and submit to a mandatory urine screening. Failure to adhere to the court ordered treatment program can mean a prison sentence. But if addiction is a chronic relapsing illness as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes suggests it is, how well does it respond to these quasi-coercive techniques used in drug courts? Not that well according to the authors of this report.
This report also raises serious questions about the methodology of research on drug courts. Its authors argue that given the lack of follow-up research on the experiences of participants, and the low retention rates in many DTC programs, it’s difficult to conclude at this stage whether or not drug courts result in decreased drug use and/or recidivism. More alarmingly, these authors found that women are less likely to apply to DTC’s and less likely to graduate at comparable levels to men, partly due to a lack of gender specific programming and program flexibility that accommodates parenting responsibilities. Indigenous women and men are also less likely to complete drug court programs due in part to the lack of Indigenous-specific treatment services.
The report’s authors question how voluntary the entry to treatment is when prison is the alternative and access to other treatments are limited. As stated in the report,
“given the difficulty of obtaining drug treatment and social services without going through the DTC system, it is questionable whether a person is voluntarily entering DTC.”
The authors also point out that a DTC system can potentially undermine some of the safeguards of the traditional judicial system. Drug courts may also violate human rights, specifically, the right to health outlined in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because participants can be denied access to a health service if they do not follow the rules of a DTC program.
Overall, this report questions whether dedicating limited resources to quasi-compulsory drug treatment via the criminal justice system, rather than scaling up access to quality voluntary treatment, is the best way to help people limit their drug use and prevent recidivism.
For more information see: Impaired Judgment: Assessing the Appropriateness of Drug Treatment Courts as a Response to Drug Use in Canada from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. Available at: http://www.aidslaw.ca/publications/publicationsdocEN.php?ref=1302
