Baranyai: Alberta going its own way on opioid crisis

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According to my mother, I was a wilful toddler. When she tried to help me, I often asserted my independence with the phrase, “By own by self!” This determination persisted through adolescence, albeit with an expanded vocabulary.

So it seems with Alberta, which continues to define a good chunk of its identity in mulish opposition to federal authority. Take, for example, the Sovereignty Act – testing the boundaries of provincial refusal to comply with green energy initiatives – and efforts to curb enforcement of federal gun legislation.

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A strain of the same wilful self-determination infuses Alberta’s plan to forge its own path on opioid addiction.

All eyes are on the “Alberta model” of recovery-focused treatment, as the province grapples with a record 2,052 deaths attributed to a toxic drug supply in 2023. A new Crown corporation researching best practices in recovery, the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence (CoRE), is set to launch this fall.

What it won’t research is as revealing as what it will.

Premier Danielle Smith and Mental Health and Addiction Minister Dan Williams both have made it clear they are not interested in research on safer-supply models, like those being piloted in B.C.

In June, Williams appeared before the House of Commons standing committee on health, where he described safe supply and harm reduction as “marketing terms, meant to convince Canadians of something that they intuitively know doesn’t work.”

The word “intuitively” has no place in a policy discussion about a crisis that has claimed more than 44,000 lives since 2016.

Alberta is also determined to go its own way on involuntary treatment. “Compassionate intervention” legislation, expected this fall, would let relatives and police seek court orders to compel people into treatment, if they may pose a threat to themselves or others.

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Expert consensus is moving in the opposite direction. The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has abandoned guidance that once held treatment needn’t be voluntary to be effective. According to director Dr. Nora Volkow, “The data does not show that it’s beneficial to put someone in jail or prison or force them against their will to go to treatment.”

Moms Stop the Harm is an advocacy group supporting families who have lost loved ones to substance abuse. If anyone would be tempted to believe compassionate intervention could have saved lives, it would be these folks. Many spent months or years knee-deep in the daily heartache of watching a child struggle with drug dependency, feeling powerless to help.

Yet the Moms are not on board. “The success rates of abstinence-based treatment, which is what many of these centres offer, is in the single digits,” says the group’s co-founder, Petra Schulz. The group condemns Alberta’s shift away from a health focus and toward policing.

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is reserving judgment on involuntary treatment. “I don’t know if you can take someone off the street that has not committed a prison offence and successfully rehabilitate them. If we can, I’m open to it, but I’d need to see more evidence,” he said last month in London.

He has, however, made up his mind about safer-supply initiatives, which he ploddingly describes as “wacko.” He also has taken aim at supervised consumption sites.

Ben Perrin, a former adviser to Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, used to toe the same line. “I thought supervised consumption sites enabled drug use, and that giving people who were addicted a safe supply of free drugs was an insane policy,” he has said. He now believes those policies cost people’s lives. “I deeply regret that I let my political ideology take the place of evidence.”

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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