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Stephen Lurie, MD, PhD

JAMA. 2000;283:2644-2645.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Chicago—The last 10 years have witnessed the growth of drug courts in the United States. Instead of being sentenced through the criminal justice system, people who have been convicted of nonviolent drug-related crimes are being given the option of participating in rigorous, court-supervised rehabilitation. This approach relies on the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence, which has been defined as the use of social science to study the extent to which legal processes promote the psychological and physical well-being of the people they affect. These issues received renewed attention at a meeting here last month of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

At a session entitled "Addiction Medicine in the Courtroom," Sidney H. Schnoll, MD, PhD, professor of internal medicine and psychiatry at the Medical College of Virginia, said that the criminal justice system can play a vital and therapeutic role in the treatment of chronic substance . . . [Full Text of this Article]