Before he left the Dudley District Courthouse Wednesday morning for a meeting, Judge Timothy M. Bibaud saw three families trying to civilly commit their children for substance abuse treatment.

He expected that there would be three more at his desk on Thursday morning and maybe even five more on Friday. A few years ago he had maybe one such request a week.

Throughout his lengthy career, first as a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office focusing on drugs and gangs, and now as a superior court judge, Bibaud said he has never seen so many people coming to the court desperate for help and asking to be part of what is commonly known as Section 35.

“Parents come in with a deer in headlights look,” he said. “They wonder how this happened to their kid. It’s not just their kid, though… It’s not a disease that confronts a certain group or demographic.”

Section 35 is a Massachusetts General Law that allows a judge to “involuntarily commit someone whose alcohol or drug use puts themselves, or others, at risk.”

The law allows for the individual to be put into an inpatient substance abuse program for up to 90 days, but the level of commitment and the location of treatment varies. The section allows families and/or the judge to choose a licensed treatment facility. If no beds are available, the individual might be sent to a separate unit at the correctional facility at Bridgewater for men or Framingham for women.

Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. said the section is what he considers to be the route that many families or friends of addicts take when their at their wit’s end.

It happens often enough,” Early said recently. “It’s a last resort. You hope you don’t get to that point, you hope that they acknowledge a problem, but they are completely taken over and live through an overdose or a suicide attempt. They’ve lost control.”

Early said he has special prosecutors who are familiar with substance abuse situations and knows what questions to ask the court and clinician assigned in the Worcester County courts for Section 35 cases. He didn’t know whether the increase in requests occurring in Dudley are also happening throughout the district, although the courts have seen an increase in minor criminal cases related to heroin addiction.

Judge Bibaud said when an 18-year-old woman is standing before him with no criminal record, strung out on heroin, and her parents are with her asking for help, it’s a difficult call to make whether or not to send her to a prison for treatment if no beds are available at another facility.

It’s also difficult for him to help them access the care under the act because so many people are coming to the courts for help now that clinicians or doctors are not available to do an initial assessment because they’re so busy with trying to treat the patients they already have.

The process is not as easy as just popping in on the judge and asking for a Section 35 intervention, though. A spouse, blood relative, guardian or law enforcement official files a petition for court intervention. From there, the court must decide whether there is a likelihood of serious harm to the person or has a medical diagnosis of addiction.

Once a referral to a private or state facility is made, the type and extent of the treatment will vary. If there is also a mental health problem, the individual will most likely be sent to a psychiatric hospital.

For more information about Section 35, the state department of health and human services provides a detailed outline of the process on its website.