- cross-posted to:
- harmreduction
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- harmreduction
- [email protected]
For months, columnists at outlets like The Globe and Mail and The National Post have been normalizing government policies that strip people of their autonomy and force them into treatment—all under the guise of compassion.
Some of these opinion pieces come from individuals with ties to private clinics—which stand to profit from forced abstinence policies—who fail to disclose their obvious conflicts of interest.
Despite decades of evidence showing that involuntary treatment increases harm and fails to support long-term abstinence, several provincial legislatures are proposing to forcibly “treat” people for drug use.
Research has shown that people in long-term treatment do best when they enter voluntarily and that there is no sound evidence to support coercion.
So why is the public hearing a chorus of calls to expand this failed approach?
With the increasing visibility of poverty across Canada and a toxic drug crisis that shows no signs of ending, several provincial legislatures are resorting to policies like forced treatment to deflect attention away from their own failures that created these crises in the first place.
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Before having a debate on forced treatment, we should be maximizing volunteer treatment.
Are there treatment spaces available the moment an addict wants help?
Is there awareness amongst addicts on where to get help?
Are there treatment spaces available the moment an addict wants help?
You can easily be on waiting lists years. Then what you get is a group. It’s laughable.
It’s pretty simple to me: the public likes that drug users are being coercively pushed into rehab because it gets them off the streets where they don’t have to see them and know there’s an issue.
I live in Ottawa: there’s at least one person begging for change or hanging out at every intersection, you can’t ignore it. Some people are just relieved to have them go away, they don’t care where or if it’s a good place.
It’s also much easier to round people up and force them to go somewhere else than it is for them to be in the position to seek help for themselves.
It’s pretty simple to me: the public likes that drug users are being coercively pushed into rehab because it gets them off the streets where they don’t have to see them and know there’s an issue.
I think it’s simpler than that. The public likes to see drug users get punished. They like to think of them as bad people and like to see bad things happen to them.
They’re pretty limited here but I think there is significant reason to ban PostMedia posts in this community especially with the future growth.
The concession I think would be reasonable would be to not allow direct links to them and have people use archive links in addition to making the Submitter put a notable point from the article to show that there at least something worthwhile to be discussed.
I think a lot of people imagine drug use as a zombie virus, where as soon as the dependency breaks they’re going to be like “wow thanks, everything is alright again”. In reality, they go back because life isn’t as good or even bearable sober, from what I’ve heard.
It’s the broken “disease model” of addiction. That addiction is purely chemical, and that if you simply force someone to stop taking drugs, once the chemicals leave their system and their body adapts, they will no longer be an addict.
But that’s not how it works. There are reasons beyond chemical addiction that people take drugs, and violent interventions like these only make those reasons stronger. Without addressing the underlying causes, this is just doing more harm to vulnerable people. And that’s no accident.
If you don’t discover and treat the foundational reason for the addiction, nothing good will come out of treatment.
Forcing someone into treatment will have the same outcome.
Assholes who have a vested interest in forcing these policies on addicts should be jailed.
So is this going to be a new (old?) tool for oppressing homeless folk or what
