late 1970s, clients from criminal justice began entering I 1 t the system in sizable numbers. Today, with tough new drinking-driving legislation, those clients have begun to > d overwhelm the system. In some cases, counties have not been able to expand their treatment systems sufficiently to handle them, and, as a result, some of the traditional clients have been pushed out. As with health care in general, the demographics of clients are changing as groups of people who cannot pay fees are denied access. Even in counties which have been able to continue subsidizing their publicprograms throughout the fiscal crisis, the influx of the many drinking drivers (DUIs) has greatly affected the treatment system. County alcohol departments have had to create and monitor many new programs, have had to watchdog and influence the evolving legislation and resulting social policy, and, to a large extent, have been held responsible for not solving the drinking-driving problem. In short, drinking-driving has taken over much of the alcohol treatment agenda throughout the state. These changes taking place in California, as well as in other states, have policy implications relevant to other areas of health and human services as well. There has been very little research and even less official acknowledgement of this situation. Research has dealt only with tangential issues such as criminal justice diversion, "net widening" and social control (1-5), outcome measures of coercive treatment (6-8), effectiveness of DUI programs (9-11), and decriminalization of public drunkenness (12,13). This paper looks at the alcohol treatment system in one northern Cali-