The Canadian province of British Columbia has been a widely influential font of libertarian drug policy that decriminalized drug use in private and in public, opposed any formal or social pressure on drug-addicted people to seek treatment, and distributed drugs to addicted individuals for unsupervised use, as I documented in a prior Brookings report. It is thus notable that the liberal premier of the province, David Eby, recently described those policies as a mistake, and he has been trumpeting an expansion of involuntary care capacity for addicted people, particularly for those who are homeless. Similar calls to rethink how to get more people with substance use and other psychiatric disorders into treatment have recently been issued by policymakers as diverse as President Donald Trump, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and the mayors of many cities, including Jacksonville, Florida; San Jose, California; New York, New York; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Accordingly, this article discusses evidence for three strategies that are intended to accomplish this.
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