Involuntary Commitment for Substance Use: Addiction Care Professionals Must Reject Enabling Coercion and Patient Harm

Abstract

 

Ethical and epidemiological concerns should mobilize addiction care providers to deploy their expertise and collective influence to challenge the use of state power to coerce people into treatment settings—especially when such settings often diverge from best clinical practices. Troublingly, with few notable exceptions, the voices of professional organizations on this issue have been largely lacking. This issue of the Journal includes a timely manuscript that sheds light on this resounding silence: “Civil Commitment for Substance Use Disorders: A National Survey of Addiction Medicine Physicians” by Jain et al. provides important and novel insights into the beliefs of physicians regarding civil commitment statutes. This study distributed a web-based survey to physician-members of the American Society of Addiction Medicine with questions gauging awareness of, attitudes toward, and experiences with civil commitment for individuals with substance use disorder. Surprisingly, the study found that the overwhelming majority of addiction medicine providers supported the application of civil commitment for substance use disorder—60.7% reported being in favor of its use whereas only 21.5% reported being opposed.