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Jennifer Broxmeyer, June 30, 2008
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 The United States is suffering from what Judge Morris Hoffman has called our “national schizophrenia about drugs.” We simultaneously want drug abuse to be “a crime and . . . a disease.” Our answer to these dueling notions seems to be to chip around the margins of drug policy and to avoid reassessing the larger basis of the War on Drugs. This tendency has played out most clearly in the development and expansion of drug treatment courts, which are courts designed to urge drug offenders into drug rehabilitation programs and re-integrate them into their communities. Drug treatment courts have quietly grown and spread all across the country. And yet, it is the judiciary and not the legislature that has been the driving force behind their remarkable expansion. Why? Drug treatment courts challenge the fundamental tenets upon which the War on Drugs rests. To take up drug treatment courts is to engage in a problem far larger than the courts themselves and to enter politically dangerous territory. It is to question the foundation of the War on Drugs itself.
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