The Efficacy of Civil Commitment in Treating Narcotics Addiction

The California Civil Addict Program (CAP) was established by the state legislature in 1961 to control and rehabilitate narcotics addicts. In the first two years of the program, a number of legal and procedural errors occurred which produced a situation wherein a natural experiment could be conducted to evaluate the program. This article describes the CAP and presents information that substantiates its effectiveness. The outcome effects of civil commitment, alone and in combination with methadone maintenance (for a subsample of CAP admissions), are presented. In the 1970s, civil commitment in California was supplanted by other legal coercion efforts involving the emerging system of community drug treatment programs. The impact of this social policy change on the behavior of California narcotics addicts is assessed and the implications for further policy development are discussed. The reader is referred to other articles in this issue for discussion of the implementation history and results of alternate civil commitment programs in the United States.