RECOVERY IS THE ANSWER
It has been nearly two decades since the four-pillars drug strategy — prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement — was embraced by Vancouver city council and the Vancouver police. Over that time, the drug problem in Vancouver, and throughout B.C., has grown exponentially from merely bad to catastrophic.
Certainly, the past few years have been the worst, with the proliferation of fentanyl largely responsible for the surge in fatalities. The number of overdose deaths in B.C. in 2008 was 183; in 2017 it was 1,449. The death rate over that period has climbed from 4.2 deaths per 100,000 population to 30.1. The rate so far in 2018 is 30.6.
By any measure, the four-pillars strategy has been a failure. At every step, its proponents tell us to accept that abstinence may not be a realistic goal for some drug users. Harm reduction, they argue, offers achievable, pragmatic goals that can lead to a healthier life for drug users. Abstinence isn’t considered the only measure of success, rather supervised injection sites, reversing overdoses with naloxone, and treatments with methadone and heroin have become best practices.
But a new report, Strategies to Strengthen Recovery in B.C.: The Path Forward, released last week by the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, makes clear that our focus should be on getting addicts clean.
The Vancouver Sun and The Province fivepart series Addictions: The Real Fix, which concluded Wednesday, looked into the issue of recovery from addiction. Some of those who had broken free of their addictions shared their experiences with us, showing that recovery leading to abstinence is not only possible, it is essential. Video of their conversations accompanied our stories.
The responsibility for helping addicts break their habit falls under B.C.’s new Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, but its budget of only $9.9 million is hopelessly inadequate to carry out its mandate, in which addiction treatment is buried under too many other objectives.
Portugal offers a model of what addiction treatment can look like. In the 1990s, its drug epidemic was among the worst in the world, but publicly funded treatment and recovery programs launched in 2001 have led to a dramatic drop in the number of heroin addicts and overdose deaths. Columnist Daphne Bramham will have a full report on Portugal’s addiction program in the coming weeks.
The B.C. Centre on Substance Use and our addiction series arrive at a similar conclusion. It’s not enough to just keep people alive. We must make them well and drug-free.