Forced addiction treatment could be death sentence during COVID-19
Friday, January 22, 2021 We recommend this article from CommonWealth Magazine: Forced addiction treatment could be death sentence during COVID-19.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, people suffered under Massachusetts’s practice of involuntarily committing substance abusers. Massachusetts is perhaps the only state that sends people, who are in need of treatment and have not broken the law, to jails and prisons.
Now, as the pandemic rages, these people face a drastically increased risk of illness. As the article describes, the “pandemic has made a civil commitment for substance use a potential death sentence.” Indeed, every incarcerated person faces a potential death sentence as they must live in epicenters for the virus in conditions that don’t allow for proper hygiene and social distancing.