> Isn't there a large middle ground between getting
> coerced by the
> state and becoming "ready" out of the exhaustion and
> ruin of many
> years?
>
> Yoshie
Definitely. Multiple DWIs lead to mandatory AA meetings; a treatment center can lead to dual-diagnosis and prescription drugs; other incentives may present themselves to make using less attractive so one just quits.
All I'm saying is that in principle, from the official medical perspective on addiction as a disease (which incorporates AA, NA, CA, etc.), any coercion other than the "soft" rhetorical kind, and towards sociality with other addicts in a program, isn't favorable to treatment. This is what Dr. Shuckit's "readiness" suggests. This is from the major AMA perspective.
The middle ground is obviously vast between the medical model and the punitive measures of the state. "Addiction" is hardly a strictly medical matter. "Therapeutic jurisprudence" simply highlights the contradictions at work in the way drug use is dealt with once it hits the state correctional level, which takes or leaves the medical model (setting its worths aside) for its own purposes.
By this logic, the "treatment" in "coerced treatment" is not of official AMA origin. By its own principle coerced treatment contradicts itself, insofar as it claims any justification in medicine. This is apart from the matter of civil liberties.
Alec
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