With illicit drug use, homelessness and untreated mental illness reaching a crisis in parts of Canada, the governments of at least three provinces want to treat more people against their will, even as some health experts warn involuntary care for drug use can be ineffective and harmful.
This month, British Columbia’s premier, whose party is in a tight race for reelection in the province, said his government would expand involuntary treatment for people dealing with mental illness combined with addiction and brain injuries due to overdose. Some would be held in a repurposed jail.
The Alberta government is preparing legislation that would allow a family member, police officer or medical professional to petition to force treatment when a person is deemed an imminent danger to themselves or others because of addiction or drug use.
And New Brunswick has said it wants to allow involuntary treatment of people with substance use disorders, although it, too, has yet to propose legislation. A spokesperson for the governing Progressive Conservative party, which is also running for reelection, called this “compassionate intervention.”
This is a very strange take.
It was a strange take in the 1980s when the disease model was the best we had. Today it is well accepted that most drugs alone don’t typically produce addiction. Just not by conservative voters, who still act like addiction is a moral failing, because people choose to do drugs “the first time,” and then become “chemically addicted”.
Please see, for example: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bulletin_1999-01-01_1_page005.html
I understand the view that in rehabilitation from addiction, drugs are not the only factor to consider. But they are absolutely a factor that needs to be considered. Ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking, drinking, or using any drug.
If someone overdoses and almost dies, or harms someone else, I think the state has a responsibility to get that person help that they may not have the ability, knowledge, or desire to seek, as opposed to turning them back out onto the street and waiting for it to happen again. The situation right now where I live is that businesses and homes are stocked with naloxone kits, and citizens are administering lifesaving healthcare to people on death’s door, on the sidewalk. Everyone I know who lives downtown has seen a dead body on the street in the past year. That’s not good, and practical solutions are needed immediately. I’m not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.
Ok. There are hundreds of overdoses EVERY DAY in shelters in my town. Have fun with that.
You can’t just lock people in a room until they are out of physical withdrawal and call them cured. They are still addicts. The causes of the addiction still exist. They will continue to seek drugs to help cope with life. This makes things worse.
But it takes resources away from people who want to get better. In my town, there are two to FIVE YEAR waiting lists for resources. But go ahead, institutionalize every person who a shelter worker has to shoot with Naloxone. You can fuck them and people trying to get better at the same time. Hurting all the right people, perhaps.
You are arguing from a place of ignorance, and that’s exactly what these politicians are counting on. You’re arguing from the needs of people who don’t want to see overdoses in the street, not from the needs of people with addiction. That’s the point of this entire program; addressing the relatively unimportant desires of non-addicts who vote.
This was course material to a post grad university course on the subject of addiction and recovery taught THIS MONTH. It discusses the entire history of opiods.
I think we should both be able to agree that it is more informed than you are.