The entire article is at:
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/189.html#conferencereport
. . . if the conference, "Drug Policies for a New Millennium," showed the drug reform movement poised to create a sea change in drug policy, it also showed a movement bitterly and vocally divided over "coerced treatment," a term that for many includes California's Prop. 36 reform, where drug possession offenders can choose treatment over jail. Despite the impassioned defenses of Prop. 36 by CNDP staffers who insist it is not "coerced treatment" because defendants do have a choice between jail and treatment, many in attendance were not swayed by that fine distinction.
The rift was the subject of much hallway and barstool argumentation and of private meetings alongside the conference. The battle lines over coerced treatment, however, were articulated most eloquently Saturday morning, when ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser, Lindemith's Deborah Small and addiction specialist Dr. David Lewis squared off before several hundred listeners in the Hyatt Hotel's main ballroom.
"Coerced treatment is an oxymoron," thundered Glasser. "Government intrusion by police and arrest is anti-treatment. I am not against treatment, I am against government compelled treatment."
The about-to-retire but unretiring Glasser warned dramatically about the growth of the "therapeutic state," where public health invades private life. "Fusing the police power of the state with medicine corrupts medicine and makes it a tool of the state," he said. "Then we get the therapeutic state and pretend that is progress. The worst danger is an ever-expanding net of social control. The 'benevolence' of coerced treatment is a trap. It will allow the state to define acceptable treatment," Glasser continued, "and that means abstinence and piss-testing."
The question, said Glasser, is do incremental reforms like coerced treatment get you closer to your goal? Not necessarily, he answered. "I worry that Prop. 36 will undermine our fundamental principles and reinforce greater social controls. In the long run," Glasser concluded, "coerced treatment takes us further from our principles."
But if Glasser's argument was impressive, Deborah Small's counterargument was equally strong. "How can you question anything that gets people out of the living death of prison?" she asked. "We have to engage with what is actually happening in the criminal justice system," Small argued, "and coerced treatment is an alternative to incarceration."
Coerced treatment is an unhappy compromise, Small admitted, calling it a lesser evil than prison, but still evil. "There is something intensely perverse about therapeutic jurisprudence," she noted.
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