What seems to be most difficult is getting the patients matched up with the treatment programs. Very few people enter treatment truly voluntarily. There's a myth out there that you have to want drug treatment in order for it to work. That's not true. And the best predictor of success is the length of time that you're in treatment.
Voluntary treatment is good.
But if you have someone under the control of the criminal justice system, two things are true. One, you can use that control to get a person into treatment, and they'll likely have a good outcome. We didn't know anything about crack . We knew about addiction, and we did have an array of effective treatments in the clinical toolbox. The most important clinical lesson is that even if all crack addicts look the same, you can't treat them all the same.