The work of courts specialized in crimes involving the abuse of illegal drugs Student: Lea Ujčić Mentor: Ljiljana Mikšaj-Todorović, PhD Program/module: Social Pedagogy/Adults Drug addiction is a global social and health issue of the modern world. Crime and criminal behaviour connected with illegal drugs, alongside economic damages and health issues, are some of the most severe consequences for society. The purpose of this paper is to provide information about courts which take in account the connection between felonies and use of illegal drugs. In the USA there is an institution called the Drug Court which connects the judicial system with rehabilitation programs and its purpose is to lower addiction and recidivism rates. This paper brings a short history of creation and development of Drug Courts in the US, from the causes that led to founding of the first drug court in 1989. to over 3000 existing courts today. In the process of creating Drug Courts, the Ministry of Justice – Drug Court office developed a document named “10 key components” giving an overview of the purpose and demands of the courts. This document defines the process of admission for the offenders, the role of judicial and treatment staff as well as their collaboration, the role of the community, means of supervision for the offenders, but also for the Drug Courts. Every key component comes with the explanation of its purpose and performance benchmarks which have been accounted for in this paper. Given that the purpose is to give an overview of the need for implementing these courts in Croatian justice system, this paper brings results of research and epidemiological data about the conditions in the Republic of Croatia. The data includes number of addicts, number of felonies connected with the use of illegal drugs and number of prisoners that are addicts. The author thinks that Drug Courts could facilitate monitoring of cases and give a chance to Croatian judges to specialize in certain fields. They could be regionally organized and deal with the issues most important to the local community. The author thinks their work would be very useful due to the fact they would give a chance to deal better with addiction and recidivism. The next part brings the conclusions reached by the authors of various Drug Court evaluation studies in the USA. They mostly agree that admission to Drug Court is better than jail sentence for the offender but also for the community. They underline the fact that it is difficult to conduct long term evaluation study for the whole USA because of the large number of these courts, but also because of the differences in treatment providing possibilities and community support. The potential role of social pedagogists in Drug Courts is in the process of treatment but also in creating a bridge between the courts and the institutions providing treatment. Giving their specific skills they can act as mediators, educators, evaluators and supervisors in all the processes connected with the wide area of court operations.