Abstract
This article aims to discuss the compulsory hospitalization of teenagers for drug use, showing its use as a management tool over this population that is used in face of the demand to reestablish the youth, considered deviant/delinquent, to normality. To develop this debate we analyze the emergence of drug abuse as a social problem that summons the fields of knowledge to produce answers to this problem. As a result, we have the creation of “adolescents drugadiccteds” population category and the forms legitimized by these fields to intervene over them. Finally, we bring a case of a character, composed from lawsuits passages that invites us to think about how the compulsory hospitalization will be configured as the primary response from the public policies, even in the face of the lack of results of it and the possible consequences of this sequence of hospitalizations in the lives of these youths.
mental health; children and adolescents; drug use; judicialization process