On June 18, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that everyone who cares about dignity, freedom, and the values that shape American life should be paying attention to.
This is a shot across the bow.
The opinion sharply narrows the government’s view of Olmstead v. L.C., the landmark Supreme Court decision that helped usher in a new era of disability rights by affirming that people with disabilities have the right to receive services in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs, rather than being unnecessarily segregated or institutionalized.
For decades, Olmstead has stood as one of the strongest legal protections against warehousing people in institutions.
That foundational protection is now being fundamentally challenged.
This does not come out of nowhere.
Last year’s executive order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, signaled a shocking willingness to challenge court decisions that stand in the way of more restrictive, institutional responses to people with serious mental illness, substance use disorder, and homelessness.
The DOJ now appears to be laying the groundwork for something deeply troubling: a return to a shameful era when society responded to social challenges by removing people from community life, often for years or decades, and placing them in institutions, despite overwhelming evidence that this approach is costly, harmful, and ineffective.
The DOJ’s role is to enforce the law, not to lay the groundwork for dismantling it.
At its core, this is about how we respond to people in crisis and what kind of society we want to build.
For those of us in the addiction space, this should feel especially familiar.
Too often, our response to substance use disorder has been exclusion.
We segregate people into jails, shelters, and revolving-door crisis systems.
The uncomfortable truth is that much of what passes for care in America is still organized around containment.
Containment may not look like the large psychiatric institutions of the past. It may look like jail, coercive treatment, or other restrictive settings.
But too often, our systems still rely on the same basic logic.
When faced with complexity, separation becomes the default response.
And when all we have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Separate the difficult people.
Manage risk.
Reduce visibility.
That is not recovery-oriented care designed to lead us collectively toward a stronger society.
That is social control.
These debates are not only about disability or mental illness.
Recovery is not simply the cessation of chaotic drug use.
Recovery is about building a life: purpose, relationships, dignity, and belonging.
Community integration is not a luxury that comes after treatment.
For many people, community is the intervention.
When people cycle among ERs, jails, shelters, and the street, that is not evidence that community-based care has failed.
It is evidence that we have failed to build the infrastructure community-based care requires.
We fund crisis but not continuity.
Acute care but not recovery capital.
Episodes of treatment but not ecosystems of support.
And current federal policy choices are poised to widen those gaps, not close them.
Major changes to the Medicaid program now on the horizon will make it easier for people to lose health care coverage and harder to maintain access to the very treatment and support that helps them live in the community.
Untreated mental illness, public drug use, and system failure are real.
But we should be careful about what problem we think we are solving.
The debate over Olmstead reflects a much broader societal crossroads.
Across America, we are increasingly responding to visible suffering by moving people out of sight into separate systems, separate buildings, and separate categories.
Segregation can create the appearance of order.
It can reduce visibility.
It can make complexity feel more manageable.
But it does not solve the underlying problem.
The question is not whether community integration is hard.
Of course it is.
The question is what kind of society do we want to be?
History offers a warning.
Societies rarely justify exclusion by calling it cruelty.
They justify it by calling it safety.
Efficiency.
Pragmatism.
That is what makes this moment so consequential.
There is a disturbing historical echo here.
Long before modern disability rights law, American policy was shaped by explicit beliefs about who was fit for full participation in society and who was not.
Olmstead helped reject that logic by recognizing that unnecessary segregation is itself a form of discrimination.
That principle should not be weakened.
For addiction policy, the implications are enormous.
The question is not where we put people when they are in crisis.
The question is whether we are willing to build systems organized around dignity, support, and real community participation, or whether we will continue defaulting to exclusion when support feels too difficult.
Recovery does not happen through containment.
It happens when people have a real chance to build a life.
