Waiting for a street addict to reach rock bottom and choose to seek treatment sounds nice in theory. But it ignores the nature of the new drugs on the street. Now, rock bottom is often death. To those facing the epidemic’s grim realities, jail came to be seen as a necessary lever, a tool to force an addict to seek treatment before it was too late. Problem was that each inmate did nothing productive while in jail, waiting three to nine months for his case to resolve—at a cost to taxpayers of $42.45 a day.
