The criminal justice route into treatment is founded on drugs tests that cannot discriminate between occasional drug use and dependent drug use. The presumption is that an offender testing positive has committed the crime ‘because of’ his drug use—to fund it, or as a result of intoxication—but there will be many cases where the two are not actually related. The offender may be an occasional recreational drug user who, on the occasion of this particular crime, happened to have taken drugs and neither wants nor needs treatment. To push such people into treatment is a waste of money and the time of skilled professionals. |