Addiction is a sickness, and society needs to treat it as the public health problem it is and effective treatment needs to be made easily and cheaply available

Addiction is a sickness, and society needs to treat it as the public health problem it is and effective treatment needs to be made easily and cheaply available to all who need it. However, incarcerating people against their will, forcing them to take medication against their will, possibly for months, is problematic. We might tolerate that if it worked, but from the evidence we have we don't think it will work for many people with substance misuse. Addiction treatment is hard. I don't know many people working in addiction treatment who are asking for more legal powers to detain people. In England I sometimes speak to people with substance misuse disorders (comorbid with mental illness, or learning disability, or autism, or a mix). Many of them will have been detained for mental illness (they were not detained because of substance misuse). It's fair to say they have mixed views about compulsory treatment. Some of them hate it and think it caused them harm. Some of them think it was transformative. It is complicated.