Compulsory treatment is objectively ineffective and only serves to further a moral crusade against drug use. The vast majority of the social, economic, and health consequences of which arise from its stigmatization and a lack of regulation.

Even voluntary, motivated treatment has much poorer effectiveness than the vast majority of people seem to believe. The most effective treatment for opioid addiction, the global gold standard, is literally giving the individual stable daily doses of opioids to take in place of street opioids. The most effective opioid replacement therapies in terms of quality of life, socioeconomic functioning, and health outcome/preventing deaths are literally the more recreational opiates; buprenorphine < methadone < oral morphine < injectable hydromorphone.