As it stands, the treatment available ranges from the highly effective to the utterly bogus. It needs to be reformed as well as expanded, and reformed in ways that make it more user-friendly for those who need help and more capable of addressing the complex social needs that addicts bring to treatment. Drug treatment does indeed work under some conditions, but it works much better for some people than for others. It's often worst of all for women and the young. I used to work in a drug treatment program.
Treatment works best when it's linked to broader efforts to improve addicts' lives.
Without that, treatment is all too often a revolving door. So treatment programs need to be linked to job training and placement, to family support, to housing advocacy. My guess is that Massing wouldn't disagree with that, but if I'm right, I wish he'd say so. And I think these caveats are especially crucial now, because we've seen a significant turn toward treatment in the past few years. But the new acceptance of treatment has rarely been backed by much concern for whether the programs we're offering are any good, and if so, for whom.