ABSTRACT
The therapeutic drug court movement raises a number of important issues from the perspective of traditional philosophic and moral views of punishment and justice. Philosophers since the time of Plato have reflected on the paradoxical character of human evil. Drug treatment courts, according to Rosenthal, are a response to the vast increase in drug-related criminal cases due to the toughening of drug laws in the mid-1980s. Faced with a deluge of cases, and the peculiarities of drug crimes as such, courts in a number of jurisdictions looked for ways to improve and expedite their handling of such cases. In the case of rehabilitation, the issue of "compatibility" is relatively straightforward, inasmuch as drug treatment courts are clearly rehabilitative in their primary intention. Surely the most troubling aspect of drug treatment courts, from a traditional philosophic perspective, lies in their uneasy relation to retribution.
