New academy helps young addicts recover and lead useful lives
Chance to sing: Two-year program offers treatment, room and board, education and skills upgrading
The most interesting things about Western Canada’s largest, long-term, residential addictions treatment centre for young adults don’t include the high-powered guest list for Friday’s official opening in Surrey. Yes, New-Age guru Deepak Chopra will speak at the event.
What truly sets the John Volken Academy apart are its treatment model, the financing and, of course, the man for whom the academy is named.
The nine-acre academy is a therapeutic community that offers 24-hour-a-day residential treatment for a minimum of two years. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Science, the success rate is more than 75 per cent among those who complete the treatment. But even among those who drop out, half had maximum to moderate success rates.
Construction and operation of the $80-million Surrey academy is fully paid for by the John Volken Foundation, and its money comes mostly from the fortune that Volken made when he sold the United Furniture Warehouse chain and has dedicated to addictions treatment.
Many private treatment programs charge up to $20,000 for five weeks.
But at the Surrey academy, “students” aged 19 to 32 only pay an intake fee of $5,000. Beyond that, the foundation pays all of the costs for more than two years of room-and-board, treatment that includes individual and group counselling, high-school completion courses and skills training.
While the academy officially opens Friday, a smaller version called Welcome Home operated for almost 13 years. Its capacity was 32 students. The academy’s new 220,000-square-foot facility will accommodate up to 150.
The aim of the therapeutic community model is to help young addicts recover and prepare them for a healthy, productive life by equipping them with the tools for lifelong sobriety, says Marshall Smith, the academy’s vice-president of programs.
It’s prevention by intervention. By intervening early enough, Smith says people can be prevented from sliding into extreme addiction.
“A lot of these young people will come from the mild category (of addiction disorder) where their life is starting to fall apart,” he said in an interview. “Their family is still intact, but it is in crisis. And when things are getting spotty, that’s when we want to intervene.”
The need for something more than the usual 30-, 60- and 90-day programs for youths and young adults is urgent, according to Smith, who says addiction is “the biggest pediatric health care emergency in Canada.”
Addictive behaviour reduces the body’s natural capacity to produce dopamine, the chemical associated with pleasure, because drugs provide a short cut. As the body loses its ability to produce dopamine, addicts require constantly higher doses. When they quit using, the natural dopamine production remains suppressed, which makes it so hard for addicts to quit.
Reversing those physical changes requires healing time.
But recovery is about more than just abstinence and healing. To be functioning, productive citizens, addicts need to acquire skills to get jobs and build and maintain social connections.
And, that’s where PricePro fits in. In addition to being a revenue-generator, the Volken Foundation’s Costco-sized grocery store on the academy’s site is a training centre.
There, students can get certified in trades like meat cutting, baking and floral arranging. More importantly, they learn how to be good employees.
The other benefit is that, unlike other treatment programs where addicts are hidden away, PricePro helps the students connect to the broader community.
The treatment is intensive and often frustrating and challenging. Volken says there was rarely a student at Welcome Home that didn’t try to quit at least once.
“As addicts, as soon as they were confronted with a challenge, their solution was to stick a needle in their arms,” says Volken, whose life is centred at the academy.
“With us, they’re constantly being challenged. ... I tell them I’m not running a popularity contest. I want to make men and women out of them so that they can have jobs, homes and families.”
When they arrive, most are emotionally dead. They are takers, not givers.
Volken describes them as “People with a song to sing, but they can’t sing it because they’re addicts.”
And, he says, giving them that chance is the most rewarding thing he has ever done.