UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA LAW — It’s an everyday problem in many a Virginia emergency room: Someone’s intoxication with drugs or alcohol brings out behavior that looks like a mental health crisis. It’s a problem, too, for Virginia’s badly overcrowded state hospitals. State law says they have to take patients held under a 72-hour temporary detention order because the patients are about to hurt themselves or others and need to be assessed to see if they need psychiatric treatment. So when state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, approached the University of Virginia Law School’s State and Local Government Law Clinic seeking a fix, everyone’s initial thought was to extend the time limit on the first step on the path that lands people in a state mental hospital. That would bring Virginia’s eight-hour Emergency Custody Order more in line with the 24-hour period most other states have adopted.