A Sign of What Do-Gooders Can Accomplish

[Argus]

Quotes from your article above:

"In as many as 85 to 90 percent of interventions, the addict agrees to enter treatment."

Yes, to avoid prison.

"Although it can be effective, involuntary treatment is not without challenges.

Although it can be effective.

That alone contradicts the statement that involuntary treatment doesn't work.

[ron Young]

Besides all of that it may just be that the "do gooders" aren't looking to completely solve a problem. Maybe they just want to be caring human beings and ease suffering and reduce harm to those that choose to live life as an addict. All along hoping and helping the addict to possibly some day get treatment and start recovery. It has already been stated in this thread that the east side of Vancouver is an attraction to addicts for various reasons. Let's use that to learn how to deal with this problem on a national level. Maybe the entire world can learn something from Vancouver's East side.

[dialamah]

Ah, the overwhelming conceit of the Left Coast rears one of its many heads, while the hand flapping endures.

The former Mayor of Edmonton, Stephen Mandel, took on homelessness in Edmonton a decade ago. He reasoned that the thing most lacking for the homeless was a home. Not clean drug sites, poverty or substance abuse. A place to live. So he built a bunch of inner city developments to provide a cheap place to live. It is not a small thing in a cold climate. It has dropped the number of homeless quite a bit, and the spinoffs on other things is noted. It is really hard to get and hold any kind of job if you don';t have a safe place to sleep eat and clean yourself.

You can't live there if you insist on turning your home into a crack house.

There are still plenty of homeless, but it is a start.

There's a guy in Vancouver who thinks the same, that if you give someone a home the rest will follow. Problem is that there are an awful lot of people who just figure that helping those less fortunate is 'enabling entitlement' or something like that. Anyway, kudos to Edmonton.

I was anti-Insite when it started in Vancouver, but after learning more about it I had to support it. Harper would like to shut it down, though, because I assume for him, saving lives is secondary to punishing people for bad behavior.

[Argus]

Besides all of that it may just be that the "do gooders" aren't looking to completely solve a problem. Maybe they just want to be caring human beings and ease suffering and reduce harm to those that choose to live life as an addict.

Maybe, and it's laudable, but I prefer effective treatment, which saves a lot more lives. And as I said last year, if they won't go voluntarily, then force them into drug treatment programs. If it doesn't work you're no worse off.

[TimG]

Problem is that there are an awful lot of people who just figure that helping those less fortunate is 'enabling entitlement' or something like that.

Problem is in Vancouver real estate prices mean that providing any sort of housing ends up costing the government in the high six figures per unit which means many working people struggling to get by wonder why the the homeless should get something for free which they may never be able to afford.

I was anti-Insite when it started in Vancouver, but after learning more about it I had to support it. Harper would like to shut it down, though, because I assume for him, saving lives is secondary to punishing people for bad behavior.

Insight also needs to walk a fine line between enabling addiction and actually helping people. The judgement on whether it is a good thing or not depends entirely on how effective it is at getting addicts into treatment. If it simply prolongs addition it helps no one.

[dialamah]

Problem is in Vancouver real estate prices mean that providing any sort of housing ends up costing the government in the high six figures per unit which means many working people struggling to get by wonder why the the homeless should get something for free which they may never be able to afford.

Yes, the price of real estate is pretty high in Vancouver.

Insight also needs to walk a fine line between enabling addiction and actually helping people. The judgement on whether it is a good thing or not depends entirely on how effective it is at getting addicts into treatment. If it simply prolongs addition it helps no one.

Between March 2004 and April 2005, 4700 people registered with insight and there were 2,200 referrals to treatment. There were 273 overdoses, and no deaths.

Another study followed 1000 Insite users for 15 months. 185 people entered into detox programs; those who went to Insite at least once a week were 1.7 times more likely to enter into detox than those who used Insite less often. In the year following Insite's opening, use of detox facilities increased by over 30%. Insite clients who enrolled into detox programs were 1.6 times more likely to follow through into a methadone or other addiction treatment.

Edited to add link: http://uhri.cfenet.ubc.ca/images/Documents/insite_report-eng.pdf

Edited October 27, 2015 by dialamah

[Rue]

Let's be clear about one thing. There are people I know who work in drug counseling and rehab who fit the criteria of bleeding heart leftists and they call themselves that and they would be more comfortable talking to Argus or so called red knecks like him then some of you trendy leftists.

There is a lost of waste and misguided spending of funds because of unrealistic beliefs that filter into the drug rehab area from arm chair sheltered socialists who have no clue about what they call themselves experts in..

Bottom line I don't totally agree with Argus but when it comes to money being wasted yes he is right.

I personally b believe society has a moral obligation to deal with the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted, a sub-species of mentally ill people.

Mentally ill people, homeless people, drug addicts, alcoholics, run away children fleeing abuse who turn to the streets, hookers, pimps, petty thieves, they are all one inter-connected mosaic. Very few people fit neatly into just one of those categories on the street.

I believe as do many physicians and social workers that needles are used again and again by addicts and spread disease such as aids, hepatitis c, etc. From a purely practical point of view getting those needles off the streets and certainly from being used a second time is seen as disease prevention.

The same drug addicts reusing a needle, have sex with suburban individuals who come downtown for a blow job. Can I be more blunt then that? Then Mr Suburb heads home and spreads it.

We have to understand many if not a majority of drug addicts on the street feed their habit with sex and crime. They spread disease through sex. That is fact.

Vancouver has a lot of heroin because of its geographic location to the Pacific where it comes from. I Montreal has always had lots of drugs being a port city. Halifax as sleepy a university navy town as some think, St. John's in Newfoundland, are port cities and any drug can be found.

Toronto's population size, density and proximity to the drug trade routes whether from inside Canada, New York, Chicago, Detroit, they have the same problems.

Now you can keep such activities underground or deal with them more openly. The choice is there.

There are European cities that have established certain precedents to look at. Amsterdam and all of Holland for that matter because they are so close to Rottderdam and other international trade route ports, have every drug there is. Marseilles, France is still the major transfer point for hash hish and opium from the Midde East and Asia and a city of major heroin addiction, etc.. Any country with major ports has the problem.

In Holland the approach is to offer free methadone clinics and treatment to heroin addicts. Hash hish and marijhuana are legal so is prostitution.

Some say we should look at that approach. Others say no.

Its a complex issue. If you legalize heroin addiction and set up methadone clinics it probably would cut down on both the spread of disease and certain drug related crimes. There are status to show that. The question though is if you legalize dope or prostitution, who now regulates the taxes on it ? Will that money go back into getting addicts and prostitutes off the street and out of the trade, or will it be misspent on other things?

This brings us back to what Argus said. Governments at all three levels do not have a good track record at managing revenue from taxes for social issues.

I personally think the government needs to legalize and control dope and heroin and prostitution through health regulations, taxes and licensing but I don't trust government to do that right and properly reinvest the money in medical treatments and rehab. projects. I think all 3 levels of government show incompetence at handling social engineering and containment issues.

So I am smack in the middle of this. I believe in restorative justice programs that try reroute first time drug offenders to half way homes and drug treatment facilities and treats them not as criminals but drug addicts who commit crime but I have witnessed civil servants screw such programs up..

The problem is as well the majority of first time offenders don't volunteer for these programs.

Also I believe alcoholism and drug addiction in aboriginal communities is an entirely different set of problems than aboriginals in cities or with non aboriginals also getting into drug and alcohol related crimes.

Keep in mind drug and alcohol related addiction is wiping out the entire generation of aboriginal children 7 to 18. We literally have children committing mass suicide in their communities and their drug, alcohol abuse is part of a far more serious problem. We can't get the money to the programs for these children because its being intercepted by corrupt Indian chieftains and council members.

I can tell you this. If you give me say 50 young men with drug addiction and I can bring them out of the city to a ranch-and as part of their treatment have them work with their hands farming, building, repairing, fixing, tending livestock, animals-when they are put to work where they connect their hands to the things they do and see direct results, and you change their diet to one with very little processed food, get them out in clean air, you can clean out of their toxicity so to speak.

The problem then is in re-entry back into our polluted society where all the temptations then await many gravitate back to the same corrupted, polluted environments and addicted friends.

On one level drug and alcohol related illnesses are men and women who have lost touch with their inner souls and the environment around them. Whether their disease is genetically inherited or learned or both, that comment remains true and so programs that treat people on an individual level as disconnected from their environment as well as disconnected from their society seen as their family, the treatment works better.

If you take someone who feels disconnected, isolated and alienated from where he lives, and you don't deal with such issues and reconnect him to other humans and the environment, he or she isn't going to get past their addiction.

People who are disconnected from the environment around them turn to booze, drugs. They turn to them to self medicate and temporarily control that which they think they otherwise can not control by blocking and blurring out anything that looks intimidating, chaotic and out of their control.

I am over simplifying it of course, but this is the basic belief of all treatment programs.

Likewise prostitution is seen as the act of someone controlling their sex urge temporarily in a world where they oiherwise feel they can not control it and to get someone out of that life, they have to also deal with drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse related issues, and their disconnect from their own sense of value and their disconnect from any people who acknowledge them as something other then a quick trick.

You get to see this same behavioural phenomena when you do one on one therapy or group therapy facilitation. The problem is treating someone on one one is one thing, treating such people in groups and in relation to society becomes a different thing with no easy answers.

There is no one size fits all approach t therapy. Each person's issues are unique like finger prints. You can engage in certain general principles of treatment but even they have to be tailored to the individual.

The position Argus takes and many take is that they are fed up with social treatment therapies and beliefs that cost taxpayer money and only seem to be making the situation worse. They see crime as an act against society, a germ that has to be contained. In one sense they are right. Anti-social behaviour is contagious and spreads if not contained and it may very well be not possible to treat certain people and the best we can do is contain them. Others though can be rehabilitated..

We have to focus on a system that screens out those who can be helped. Its not easy at all. I do know some of the social workers, doctors, paramedics, front like workers who fight the drug and prostitution wars each day. They are in that sense soldiers fighting a war. I can't give up on them and what they are trying to do. Its like soldiers we send to fight terrorists. They can't end terrorism but they can contain it and make the world a bit more humane and safe. I think we can't give up trying to do that.

80% of people in jail are drug or alcohol related petty criminals. For me I would like to see us take down the huge drug cartels funding the sex trade of children and vulnerable women and young men and terrorists. Its all inter-related.

The problem is these cartels are so huge and wealthy they own so many governments and layers of enforcement agencies.

Edited October 31, 2015 by Rue

[SpankyMcFarland]

Ah, the overwhelming conceit of the Left Coast rears one of its many heads, while the hand flapping endures.

The former Mayor of Edmonton, Stephen Mandel, took on homelessness in Edmonton a decade ago. He reasoned that the thing most lacking for the homeless was a home. Not clean drug sites, poverty or substance abuse. A place to live. So he built a bunch of inner city developments to provide a cheap place to live. It is not a small thing in a cold climate. It has dropped the number of homeless quite a bit, and the spinoffs on other things is noted. It is really hard to get and hold any kind of job if you don';t have a safe place to sleep eat and clean yourself.

You can't live there if you insist on turning your home into a crack house.

There are still plenty of homeless, but it is a start.

I think Portland has done the same. It cuts the police workload considerably.

The other thing is more psychiatric beds. We have cut them back too far.

[Argus]

Problem is in Vancouver real estate prices mean that providing any sort of housing ends up costing the government in the high six figures per unit which means many working people struggling to get by wonder why the the homeless

There's lots of room underground. You could build large rooming centers to house thousands of people for a fraction of what it costs to put them up above ground. And the only thing they'd lack would be a window. Now I grant you, a window is nice to have but I'd take a safe warm, comfortable room which isn't infested with roaches and rats over a crummy rooming house with a window looking out into the alley and the brick wall of the place next door any day.

[Argus]

Besides all of that it may just be that the "do gooders" aren't looking to completely solve a problem. Maybe they just want to be caring human beings and ease suffering and reduce harm to those that choose to live life as an addict.

That would, of course, be their choice. But then they want me to pay for it.

Edited May 26, 2016 by Argus

[PIK]

I was clearly referring to the specific issue of Vancouver being the only one to employ harm reduction strategies aimed at drug use.

Oh look there's another rednecked right-winger flapping his arms.

Letting people shoot up drugs is harm reduction??

[eyeball]

Yes, that the result.