Drug-resistant cases fell even more dramatically, by 87 percent. Mandatory treatment has been so effective and affordable that 41 states now use it for tuberculosis patients who shun treatment. Moreover, medication noncompliance rates for both diseases are nearly identical around 40 percent one year after regular treatment begins. Kendra's Law takes a big step in the right direction. But there's a lot of resistance to passing it, and the same forces that oppose it are going to make it hard to implement, even if it does pass.
Civil libertarians head the list of the bill's enemies.
Their intractable opposition rests on a welter of confusion. But civil libertarians seem unaware that making rational choices the only meaning individual autonomy could sensibly have is impossible if one's brain isn't working. Indeed, rather than robbing the seriously mentally ill of autonomy, mandatory treatment to the extent that it restores their reason through medication helps them achieve autonomy. Krauthammer rightly suggests that the appropriate standard should be helplessness which our current system of mandatory nontreatment utterly ignores. Just as we once thought that malignant swamp vapors caused tuberculosis, today many still think that malignant mothers or a sick society causes schizophrenia.