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Drug-Taking Behavior, Compulsory Treatment, and Desistance: Implications of Self-Organization and Natural Recovery for Policy and Practice

Abstract The tremendous economic, social, and human costs associated with fighting the war on drugs-in conjunction with its demonstrable lack of success-have led criminologists and policymakers to search for alternative models/strategies with which to understand and confront drug-taking behavior. In recent years, the medical model of substance use has resurfaced. In this paradigm, consumers are diseased, sick, and in need of treatment rather than subjected to wholesale punishment. Given this revival in orientation, drug offenders increasingly are diverted to behavioral and psychopharmacological therapy in lieu of more punitive (and retributive) dispositions. Critics, however, raise ethical as well as pragmatic concerns about such compulsory treatment. This essay reviews these concerns. Drawing on the self-organization, natural recovery, and harm reduction literature, a number of pivotal themes are enumerated that reconfigure what it means to foster ethical drug policy and sound rehabilitative practice as dimensions of an effective desistance strategy.