There is a significant difference in terms of both underlying philosophy and approach. In a usual criminal court, someone is being held accountable for their wrongdoing in a manner that's proportionate to the seriousness of the offence. With people who are addicted, there's an understanding that this type of approach doesn't actually work to discourage them from subsequent criminal activity. There's a real problem in terms of recidivism, because generally their behaviour is motivated by a medical condition of addiction.
It has been thought that you need to completely change the dynamics, and these drug courts allow for a therapeutic regime to be interposed into the justice system so that the judge and the prosecutor both become part of a therapeutic team that is attempting to address the addiction issue. There is constant sampling to ensure there is no reuse of drugs. There's encouragement. The idea is to put them through a program of one year to sixteen months in which their use of illicit drugs is monitored and discouraged in an effort to try to get them past the addiction. If they withdraw from the program or fail in the program, it is certainly possible to proceed against them in a criminal manner for their wrongdoing, in order to hold them accountable for that.
It is an effort to try to deal with a long-standing and difficult problem in the criminal area, which is that some criminal behaviour is motivated by conditions that are not amenable to the usual criminal justice approach.