“YOU got to be selfish. You got to do what’s best for you,” says Craig Hannah, a judge in Buffalo, New York, to the young man standing before the bench. “Yeah, I know,” replies Patrick Bruno, “It’s so hard.” Mr Hannah runs the country’s first opioid court. Mr Bruno, who has appeared before him regularly since the court opened in May, is struggling to stay away from friends who are still getting high. “They’re not helping,” the judge says. “I want you to show me you’re serious.”
Buffalo’s experiment began after Jeffrey Smith, who heads the district’s treatment courts, noticed that many of those arrested while high on opiates did not live long enough to make their court dates. The city has a history of developing such specialist courts. In the 1990s it was an early adopter of drug courts, which try to mentor defendants through rehabilitation rather than sending them to prison. Later it introduced mental-health courts. It created the first...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2yzZqSh
EmoticonEmoticon