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Who benefits from the "Alberta Model"?
74 Plays3 years ago
Jeremy Appel, the author of our recent investigative piece on the "Alberta Model" approach to the opioid crisis, joins the crew over at the Alberta Advantage crew alongside Garth Mullins, the host of Crackdown. They discuss Jeremy's piece as well as the wider sociological and ideological issues around the Alberta government's mishandling of the opioid poisoning crisis that has led to record amounts of death and destruction.
If you like this podcast and you want to support it go to https://www.theprogressreport.ca/patrons and become a monthly patron!
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Transcript
Introduction to Alberta's Drug Policy Shift
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey folks, and welcome to a special holiday edition of the Progress Report podcast. This is a repost of a recent podcast done by the legends over at the Alberta Advantage.
Jeremy Appel's Investigative Work on Recovery Policies
00:00:11
Speaker
And it's about a piece that we just published to the Progress Report titled, The Alberta Model, who benefits from the Alberta government's shift away from harm reduction to abstinence only recovery.
00:00:20
Speaker
The Pod features the person who wrote that piece for us, Jeremy Appel. He's
Crackdown Podcast and Opioid Crisis Coverage
00:00:25
Speaker
the writer who wrote this investigative piece about how recovery capitalism works and who really benefits from Kenny's ideological approach to the carnage caused by the opioid poisoning crisis. The Pod also features Garth Mullins of the Crackdown podcast. That is one of the very, very best podcasts out there.
00:00:42
Speaker
Period
Challenges and Risks in Investigative Journalism
00:00:43
Speaker
just kind of storytelling wise and production wise but also if you if you want to understand the ongoing public health disaster That is the opioid poisoning crisis. The crackdown podcast is the place to be this piece by Jeremy took a long time to come together and Original investigative work like this is expensive and hard to do. It's
Supporting Investigative Journalism Financially
00:01:00
Speaker
also risky you can get sued like it sucks You know, I'm gonna go into that later about our legal stuff. That's a it's a future episode but
00:01:10
Speaker
But anyways, this isn't about that. This is actually a pitch for money. So if you do have a couple of bucks to spare every month so that we can continue to do this kind of work, we would really appreciate it. You know, we want to keep telling these stories. We think they're important. There's no one else out there doing them. So if you could go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, putting your credit card details, you know, and five, 10, 15, $50 a month, whatever you can afford. And some people can afford more than others. And if you can't afford anything, don't feel bad about it. We get it.
00:01:39
Speaker
But yeah, theprogressreport.ca.slash patrons. Become a patron if you can.
Focus on Alberta's Opioid Crisis
00:01:44
Speaker
If you'd like to send a donation by email money transfer or if you want our details about how to send something in the mail, you can reach me via email. The best way to do that is dunkingk at progressalberta.ca. But that's enough of me asking for money. Merry Christmas and onto the pod.
Public Funds and Private Recovery Providers
00:02:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Alberta Advantage. I'm your host, Kate Jacobson. Late on the afternoon of Friday, December 18th, the government of Alberta announced updated numbers regarding the opioid crisis in Alberta. So in today's episode, we are going to talk about addiction recovery capitalism and specifically how Alberta is shoveling public dollars into the pockets of private recovery providers, often with very dubious results.
00:02:26
Speaker
Joining
Discussion with Jeremy Appel and Garth Mullins
00:02:26
Speaker
me here on Team Advantage today is Jeremy Appel, author of a recent Progress Alberta piece titled The Alberta Model, who benefits from the Alberta government's shift away from harm reduction to abstinence-only recovery. Jeremy, thank you for joining me here on the podcast.
COVID-19 vs Opioid Poisoning in Alberta
00:02:40
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Long time, first time. Also joining us today on The Alberta Advantage from Vancouver, British Columbia is activist, writer, broadcaster, musician, and host of the Crackdown podcast Garth Mullins. Garth, we are very big fans of your podcast, so thank you for joining us here on Team Advantage.
00:02:56
Speaker
We'll see you back at you, and thanks for having me again. So to begin, I think we should set the scene for our listeners a bit. As of this recording, there have been 841 deaths from COVID-19 in Alberta. What has received a lot less attention, however, is the fact that there has been 904 deaths from opioid poisoning in Alberta in the first nine months of 2020.
Critique of UCP's Recovery Strategy
00:03:19
Speaker
And this statistic may have our listeners asking themselves, what is Jason Kenney and the government of Alberta doing with a health crisis that is killing more people than COVID-19? Jeremy, since you wrote a piece about it, what has been Jason Kenney and the UCP's attitude towards addiction treatment and the public health crisis surrounding it?
00:03:39
Speaker
So I would generally characterize it as being actively hostile to people who use drugs and solutions that will keep them alive. At the same time, as we'll see, the government is exceedingly generous towards not-for-profit
00:03:57
Speaker
abstinence only clinics that sort of involves an approach of moralizing to people who do drugs that what they're doing is bad and they need to stop. An
Abstinence Model vs Harm Reduction
00:04:07
Speaker
example of this is the associate minister of addictions and mental health, Jason LaJuan,
00:04:13
Speaker
from an op-ed in the Edmonton Journal where he said, addiction does not exist in drugs. It exists in people. Therefore, the solution exists in people and not in tinkering with the drug supply. And so as I put in the piece, according to this view, the problem is you. And the only way that you can get better is through abstinence. And if you can't abstain, the implication is that you're a failure.
00:04:39
Speaker
This is despite there being clear evidence that drug supply is indeed the issue at hand. That's
BC's Safe Supply vs Alberta's Abstinence Approach
00:04:45
Speaker
what's killing people. The pandemic in particular has led to an increasingly toxic supply as borders close and illicit supply chains are disrupted. In October,
00:04:58
Speaker
For instance, police in Victoria seized a supply of fentanyl that 90% concentration. That's compared with a usual 10% concentration. So that's really powerful fentanyl. And if you look a bit west to BC, they are tackling this issue with safe supply programs and have
00:05:21
Speaker
for quite some time, but to the UCP government, the approach is just out of the question because they've embraced this extreme abstinence focus strategy that runs counter to best practices as there's much evidence to back up.
00:05:42
Speaker
In
Stigma and Addiction in Alberta
00:05:43
Speaker
fact, it's so bad that Luan's Chief of Staff Marshall Smith has stated that, and I quote, I think that there is a certain shroud of stigma that needs to remain around addiction. So I just truly like grotesque way of approaching this issue and one that's really devoid of any compassion and is extremely dangerous.
00:06:03
Speaker
One
Harm Reduction Explained
00:06:03
Speaker
thing I do think might be useful here is to define our terms a bit for our listeners. So what is a safe supply program? And what is the difference between a harm reduction model of addiction recovery versus an abstinence only model of addiction recovery? I came up in the time of dare and you know, to say no, and all that. And I think that's still very much alive in Alberta. And that's abstinence is just like, you should not use drugs. And
00:06:30
Speaker
There are perhaps people who can get there. Um, but when the drug supply is so toxic, it's hard because, um, if you could die from using once, um, you might never get the chance to pursue abstinence.
Effectiveness of 12-step Programs?
00:06:43
Speaker
So it's not appropriate to an overdose crisis. So yeah, abstinence is just no drugs, like a 12 step program that is like no drugs, no methadone. That's it.
00:06:53
Speaker
You know, harm reduction accepts that people do use drugs. This does happen and they try to reduce the harms that come with it. So like, for example, the first harm reduction I experienced in my life was when someone gave me a new needle so that I didn't have to use an old dull one or even worse, potentially share with other people. And at every step of the
Motivations Behind Abstinence-only Clinics
00:07:20
Speaker
way, there have been conservative voices
00:07:22
Speaker
from the federal government or local conservatives in Alberta or in British Columbia saying, no, no, no, we shouldn't give out syringes. No, no, no, we shouldn't prescribe methadone. No, no, no, we shouldn't prescribe what they call safe supply, like other types of opioids that might replace the toxic drug supply.
00:07:41
Speaker
And at every step of the way, the offer is abstinence is just don't do drugs. Don't do drugs. Maybe we'll fund a bed for you to go lion while you go to a 12 step program during the day where you learn don't do drugs. And there are some places in B.C. that are now beginning to offer suboxone or something like that.
00:08:00
Speaker
but this is the primary, still the primary go-to of most places in North America is that you should get a 12 step program. If
Challenges of Abstinence Recovery
00:08:07
Speaker
the Alberta model is to have its way, that would be the only game in town. One thing I'm interested if you could explain to us is why doesn't the abstinence only model work? Like what's wrong with it? Why doesn't it help people? You know, even if you look at the literature produced by some of those same groups, you know, like a 12 step groups,
00:08:27
Speaker
It's kind of a coin toss, whether it's going to stick or not. What they told me, because I spent a long time going to 12-step groups, and they said, well, you'll relapse. This will happen. You've got to keep coming back, keep coming back. And everybody in the group would talk about, oh, they went to 12-step for a while. They went out and used again. They came back, and they said, keep coming back. The system works or the program works if you work it.
Societal Factors Ignored by Abstinence Models
00:08:50
Speaker
The problem with that, though, is now you could die. So some people, it takes years to get there. Some people like me, I never, abstinence never stuck for me. But along the way, in these programs, you are supposed to make a searching and fearless moral inventory.
00:09:07
Speaker
And that means you're to identify your own moral defects. And maybe go apologize to people that you've wronged and all this. And I think there's something to apologizing if you've screwed somebody over. But searching yourself for these problems and trying to delete them.
00:09:23
Speaker
and actively turning away from the structural forces in your life that may have fucked things up. It seems like gaslighting to me, because every time you try to think about any other structural force that might be going on in somebody's life, you might have a sponsor around this as, well, no, no, you're just rationalizing your drug use. You're
Personal Experiences with Recovery Programs
00:09:40
Speaker
just trying to make up a nice sociological excuse to go get high. And that doesn't work, because when people's lives are going down a certain path,
00:09:50
Speaker
You kind of need something else. To me, it's like first aid. You know, it's like if you have a car crash or something like that and you're like, no, no, no, it's full health only. We don't do first aid at the side of the road. They just have to hit rock bottom. They have to crawl to the hospital or something like that.
00:10:05
Speaker
Harm reduction's first aid, it's triage, you know? It's a super important step. What you said, Garth, about how these abstinence-only clinics encourage you to keep coming back. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I don't think so, but I mean, a lot of these clinics cost a lot of money to attend.
00:10:27
Speaker
So it is in a sense in their own interest to have people relapse and then keep coming back. Now in Alberta, the government made a whole spectacle of
Inappropriateness of Abstinence for Overdose Crisis
00:10:39
Speaker
them eliminating fees for publicly funded beds at private clinics in Alberta. So these companies are still, I mean, they're not for profit, so they're not
00:10:53
Speaker
making profits, they're still in line to get some funding if you keep relapsing and coming back.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this whole thing, the way I saw it is we would all measure our clean time, right? And you would count it in days. And I know some people who've succeeded this way, a few, and they're very proud to have, you know, 10 years or whatever, but you count it. And at the end of a meeting, you come up and you get a key chain that is got color that represents if you've had, you know, days or weeks or months or years or something.
00:11:28
Speaker
And, um, you know, for me, I always just got the white key chain. It's like, it says just for today. And that means that you have no time. Uh, but every, the problem is it's like an odometer on your car. You know, one of those old ones, it goes up and up and up, but then if you use once it flips to zero. And
Harm Reduction Emphasized as Key
00:11:45
Speaker
so it like just puts this huge pressure on you. Like you've completely failed. Like it's digital. It's either your, you're clean or you're not.
00:11:55
Speaker
And it's, it's very hard. Whereas harm reduction just says, well, okay, you've managed to use a safe injection site where someone can give you Narcan and prevent your overdose. If it's too much, you've managed to use a little bit first. You managed to use not alone or maybe your.
00:12:09
Speaker
smoking instead of injecting, or maybe there's some other way, or maybe you're taking methadone so that you don't have to use quite as much of the toxic street drug, those are considered successes, right? It's like the person can define for themselves what their goals are. And I mean, it seems like a very small goal, but the goal of all public health programs first should be to stop the deaths and everything else second. So
Moralistic View of Addiction in Alberta
00:12:33
Speaker
this is the big disconnect in Alberta, is that Jason, the two Jasons,
00:12:38
Speaker
seem to be more worried about people using drugs than people dying so they're aiming squarely at their ideas all on oh my god we don't want people to use drugs we don't want people to get high instead of we want people to be alive and those are completely different things.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, you can't get clean if you're dead. And I think the way the government has approached it is like strictly as a moral issue, like the idea that drug use is morally bad, therefore people who use drugs are morally bad or have some kind of moral defect.
00:13:10
Speaker
And I think what I find so deeply reprehensible about that is not only the direct harm it leads to in terms of people not being able to get help and using drugs that are unsafe, but also just
Opioid Use and Socio-economic Challenges
00:13:27
Speaker
If you look at any research on drug use and on the opioid crisis and the opioid epidemic, opioid use tracks very strongly with deindustrialization, tracks very strongly with the financial crash, with poverty, with not being able to find a job.
00:13:44
Speaker
with our society collapsing around you. Fucking A, absolutely. And yeah, like what I find so frustrating about it is that like, these are the same people who've created all of those problems. And then when people's lives are unbearable, and for whatever reason, they end up using drugs, it's not the society you live in that, you know, created the conditions for drug use, it's that you're morally a bad person. Yeah, I mean, you think of those in UCP. It's just a really upsettingly grotesque way.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, and you think about the UCP, right? They like to pretend to be blue collar resource workers, right? Like they like to have Bernard, the roughneck around them or whatever. And like I call bullshit on that, first of all, but I was a resource worker. Like I would fly to a mine in Northwest Territories out of Edmonton. And I worked in the mill and people worked underground. And when you got off of your two week shift where you worked 12 hours a day and you got out of that camp that was nowhere near a city, you bloody well wanted to party.
00:14:42
Speaker
Right and maybe if you got hurt you want to party a little bit differently like you want to address the pain that you may be got in place and maybe if you got laid off you were doing something different but it's all drug use and so the people that they are stigmatizing.
00:14:59
Speaker
Alberta. The people that Jason Kenney and Jason Lewin do not like are resource workers, are unemployed resource workers. Like my God, same in BC and Alberta. People doing a bunch of coke on the weekend to blow off steam. That's like tradition. So it's not just everyone being wired daily opioid user like me. People just also want to party and half the people who are dying of overdose come to it that way. It's not all
00:15:25
Speaker
this idea of the gritty urban drug user that maybe is in the fevered imaginings of the Premier's office. This is really the people that they claim to care about, and it just shows how shallow that care actually is.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that this moralistic approach is fundamentally connected to neoliberal ideology, that only individuals exist and they make choices and they simply need to make the right choices and everything will be great.
Need for Multiple Strategies in Opioid Crisis
00:15:58
Speaker
Right? There's no context or background that is important to take into account, right? Like 12 step works for some people, but it doesn't for everyone. And I think that's the fundamental issue here.
00:16:15
Speaker
You need a diverse array of strategies to deal with the opioid crisis. For sure. I think about my friend Guy Felicella, and he does TED talks and he's very vocal about his recovery, right? He's abstinent. It worked for him. He takes nothing. I don't think he drinks or anything. But he also says before he got on that path, he overdosed six times and wouldn't be alive had it not been for harm reduction.
00:16:43
Speaker
So he says you cannot have like the Alberta model of abstinence only would have killed him. And he's the guy who sits there and talks about recovery being really important, right? Like that his abstinence life is really great for him. He lived and used drugs and lived partly on the street on the downtown East Side for three decades before he was overdosing and then into recovery and all that.
00:17:06
Speaker
And he's got a house and a wife and three kids and all that, but he says it never would have been possible if not for harm reduction. So Jeremy,
Marshall Smith's Influence on Policies
00:17:15
Speaker
one part of your story involves details about Jason Lamont's chief of staff, Marshall Smith. Could you tell me a bit more about him? Where did he come from? And why is he so into this abstinence only model of addiction recovery?
00:17:28
Speaker
So Marshall Smith is sort of this mysterious figure lurking in the background through all this. His story is quite interesting actually because he was sort of this rising star within the BC Liberal Party, which is a conservative party. He was tasked with assisting in the preparations for the 2010 Paralympic Games. Around that time, he was busted twice for selling cocaine and crystal meth. This is in 2004.
00:17:57
Speaker
Between 2004 and 2007, he was on the streets selling drugs to feed his habit, sleeping in parks, and on the run from police. This was a guy who was a big deal in political circles.
00:18:13
Speaker
in Vancouver. 2007 comes around and he goes to rehab, an abstinence only private recovery clinic and becomes this evangelist for that very model. And this is his personal narrative. All we really know about him is what you read about in like
00:18:33
Speaker
fawning profiles about him. I tried to get comment from him and or Jason Lawan for the story. They didn't respond. That was what I expected. What's interesting is his first place where he worked after rehab, a place called the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community and Farm, which is a men's only recovery clinic. And they received a $1 million grant from the BC government in 2015.
00:19:01
Speaker
Now at the time Smith was employed at another not-for-profit abstinence-oriented rehab clinic called Cedars at Cobble Hill where he became the executive director in 2016.
Critique of Recovery Capital Concept
00:19:16
Speaker
So Smith is or at least he was the chairman of the BC recovery council
00:19:23
Speaker
which I looked into and it doesn't appear to exist beyond mention in op-eds he writes or in these profiles of him or on the recovery capital lecture circuit which is sort of focused around building one's own recovery capital
00:19:44
Speaker
And I think it's like the corporate world where you build up capital so you can invest it and produce more jobs or produce more productivity in your output. It's like that you have to build up this capital in yourself. It's using a sort of a financial metaphor to say you have to build up resources of your ability to recover your emotional and internal resources, your knowledge of the system.
00:20:04
Speaker
It's a very sort of strange metaphor to use. I always react this way when when people describe relationships like with financial metaphors to like, oh, you have to you have to make sure to put some deposits in your love bank or whatever, you know, like people, people try to make financialized relationships when
Lack of Regulation in Recovery Clinics
00:20:22
Speaker
You know, it just seems like a strange thing to do. But yeah, that's, I think, the metaphor they have chosen. And it also speaks to a sort of individualism in the same way that capitalism looks to individuals and even individuals in competition with each other. So too is, I think, recovery capital understood as more like you build that capital up as an individual, not as a community.
00:20:43
Speaker
I do know that it attracts a lot of people. And I should say this in defense of 12 step, that's the thing that I actually liked about it. I really liked the smoke break. I really liked the people that you met around there. It was there was no there was nobody else. Like in 12 step programs, it's just us. There's no social worker or anybody else running the thing. So I did like that about it.
00:21:04
Speaker
And I bet you that people do find each other at those recovery capital events. So I just I think it's worth separating like the rank and file of people who go to those things from maybe the people who are running, which I don't really know. I don't really know much about that. But also what I found interesting about Smith's time at Cedars-Cobble.
00:21:22
Speaker
Hill. There's a story in 2018 in the Victoria Times colonist which quotes Smith as calling for more funding for recovery centers. This story was sort of pitched as look at these clinics and look how few publicly funded beds they have. And so they quote Smith saying that to that effect. But
00:21:44
Speaker
They don't identify him as the executive director of Cedars, which he was at the time, but the chair of this BC recovery council that isn't registered as a corporation in British Columbia and doesn't even have a website.
Government Funding and Oversight Issues
00:21:59
Speaker
The thing that I could add about the metaphor of recovery capital is that it also was a little bit like capitalism and that really does not want government regulation.
00:22:09
Speaker
So a lot of the people that sort of are attracted to the ideology or might be involved in the industry or running a recovery house or something like that, they prefer for there to not be regulation on what they do at those places.
00:22:21
Speaker
And most of the time in British Columbia anyway, there hasn't been. In fact, regulations had to be added a few years ago to just make sure people got proper food. But in terms of what actually goes on for treatment in these places, there's no regulations about that. So the things that I know that have been offered there are art therapy, music therapy, breathology, energy work, poetry, all kinds of things, all kinds of activities, which a lot of them sound nice, like I like music, but we don't know. You have to prove, does this work? Does this help?
00:22:49
Speaker
And then 12 step and and 12 step is like just exists. Sometimes they have meetings in the place or sometimes people go from the recovery house down the street. But this is not regulated. So what the actual treatment is is not regulated. There's a bed. There's a door. The building's up to code. There's there's food and nutritious. But other than that, at least that's something still to come.
Political Actions Against Harm Reduction Sites
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to me that they want the government's money, but not its oversight.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's very true of a lot of industry. So that's why I think maybe the recovery capital is a fitting metaphor for some of that, you know, maybe they've chosen well. So Jason Kenney campaigned in the spring of 2019 on basically cracking down on safe consumption sites. He argued that harm reduction advocates were and I quote, helping addicts inject poison into their bodies at NDP drug sites.
00:23:45
Speaker
Once elected, he commissioned a very torqued report that examined the social and economic impacts of the sites. So basically what businesses, residents, and people who owned property nearby thought of the site, but didn't actually bother to examine whether or not these sites and these services were saving people's lives.
00:24:05
Speaker
This is particularly awful in the case of Lethbridge Arches, which was shut down despite being North America's busiest supervised consumption service. Could you talk a little bit more about what happened here?
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, there were major issues with regards to management at Arches, right? They had like a $1.6 million shortfall. Management were spending money on travel, unauthorized overtime pay, in like gift cards, like very shady stuff.
00:24:36
Speaker
But I would say that these are the type of things you hear about in government all the time, and we don't just get rid of government.
Impact of Arches Closure
00:24:45
Speaker
If the UCP wanted to actually keep the site open, if this wasn't a politically motivated audit that was intended to find a pretext to shut them down, they could have just gotten rid of management.
00:25:01
Speaker
They could have brought in new management and just allowed the frontline workers to continue delivering the care they were delivering. But instead, they opted to shut it down. Arches shut down in August.
00:25:17
Speaker
Now, the opioid data that was just recently released by the government for the first three quarters of 2020 shows that in Lethbridge, opioid poisoning deaths have more than doubled. In just the first three quarters of 2020, there were 42 this year, and there were 20 in all of 2019.
00:25:42
Speaker
It's even worth looking a little closer at that number too. Like if you think about it, arches had suffered like most harm reduction places under COVID, a reduction in capacity and being all closed at some points. So the numbers you see are a preview of what's to come because they represent those numbers, those stats, those deaths were collected during times when arches was constrained from operating by COVID circumstances and then being shut down entirely will just make it worse.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah,
Community Role of Arches Site
00:26:09
Speaker
exactly. And at his absolutely horrific press conference, Jason Kenney was asked about supervised consumption sites in general and also Lethbridge in particular. And he said, well, what do you mean Lethbridge? There's a replacement. There's a mobile site. But as people who actually worked at Arches pointed out, the mobile site is
00:26:33
Speaker
It's completely insufficient. It has way less capacity. It's not open 24 hours a day. Talking to a couple of people who work there, you start to understand what's going on. Like Tim Slaney and this guy Dubious, who both worked in the Arches, a supervised consumption site in Lethbridge, they've been involved in doing unpaid work afterwards to try and fill the void.
00:26:56
Speaker
Right and this is shows that the frontline workers aren't in it for the big bucks and i think didn't really know about as mostly you don't as a frontline worker you don't know about the management decisions that are happening at the top and this is a site that had no eight hundred people a day going through in a regular business day and that is
00:27:17
Speaker
enormous. That is the biggest number in North America, probably the world, maybe the busiest safe consumption site in the world. And there's no way that a van can replace that. Not just in capacity, but also like people built relationships in this place. I'll tell you about Dubius. He had a little booth in the corner where you could record a hip hop track. And I know that's probably super angering to people to think, oh, these drug users go in there and shoot drugs and then make music.
00:27:46
Speaker
But it's actually that's how music therapy should work. You know, that it's it's liberating. It's reinforcing something that's a safe public health practice. It lets people have artistic expression and it made great tracks like you can go look that up on I'm pretty sure on SoundCloud.
00:28:01
Speaker
And it made it a really welcoming place. This is the difficulty with public health. You see it all the time in the pandemic. If it's too official, if it's too sterile, it doesn't connect with people and they don't abide by it. They don't buy into it, whether it's COVID-19 or whether it's harm reduction.
00:28:16
Speaker
And so a place like that that they built in Lethbridge that felt like a real center for the community, a real place where people can go for all kinds of things, not just to do a supervised consumption of drugs.
Jason Kenney's Opposition to Safe Injection Sites
00:28:28
Speaker
That's not easy to replace. That's something that's built very carefully and very thoughtfully and wiping it out with a wrecking ball or a stroke of a pen.
00:28:37
Speaker
is just so irresponsible. We shouldn't forget Jason Kenney is a guy who's been trying to shut down safe injection sites or part of a little team for a lot longer than he's been Premier of Alberta. He was with the Harper government, and they sought for pretty much the whole time they were in power to shut down insight. The safe injection site is the first one in North America. It's in Vancouver.
00:28:57
Speaker
And they did not succeed in that. I mean, it took us getting a lawyer, the late Joe Arvey, to represent us all the way to the Supreme Court and try and sort of back off this whole situation, which we managed to in 2011. But the conservative tendency from which Jason Kenney is a part, this is the ghost of Harper in Lethbridge. No
Effectiveness of Supervised Consumption Sites
00:29:15
Speaker
question about it.
00:29:16
Speaker
And I think it's also worth pointing out a piece in the star from August of last year that they sent the reporter to Arches to spend a day there and see what they do. There's some stats they had that I thought were very revealing in that they shred the misconception
00:29:35
Speaker
that SCSs are just reversing overdoses and as some in the UCP would say, are enabling people to use drugs. So they reversed 2500 overdoses from 2018 to 2019. At the same time, they referred 9000 people to various forms of treatment.
00:29:59
Speaker
So those who say that supervised consumption sites are just allowing people to inject drugs and are enabling them are arguing in bad faith because the evidence suggests a much more holistic approach than the political rhetoric would suggest. I want
Government's Attack on Public Services
00:30:20
Speaker
to tie this in a bit to the general approach of the government to public services in Alberta,
00:30:27
Speaker
whether it's the public education system or the public healthcare system more generally. And their approach is frankly stripping the copper out of the walls or more precisely starving the public system of funds in order to subsidize private delivery. And I think it's really important that we kind of see the attack on safe consumption sites as part of like a broader attack on kind of like social goods and as public goods and as things that improve our society.
00:30:56
Speaker
And I feel like here in Alberta, we have a government that says like, that basically says to people, you should die alone and in pain. And we would prefer that instead of having a society where we take care of each other. So we're going to strip the funding from public health care, we're going to strip the funding from long term care, we're going to strip the funding from supervised consumption services, we're going to strip the funding from public education. And it's all part of, you know, creating a society that is meaner,
00:31:25
Speaker
that is more cruel and that, you know, encourages people to be at each other's throats and to perceive the problems in their lives and in the lives of their communities as their own faults or as somehow moral failings of themselves or the people around them.
Private Clinics and Government Funding
00:31:42
Speaker
And I really see it as part of an overall project of, you know, creating a society that is much, much cooler
00:31:49
Speaker
to the benefit of very, very few people who get to sell the copper. They're stripping out the walls of this province. And those are the people who, you know, own these particular models and are able to make money off of it.
00:32:03
Speaker
and I find it profoundly grotesque and upsetting. Yeah, and I think it's also worth pointing out that the money that the government is throwing at these private recovery clinics are people who were appointed to their council on mental health and addictions recovery to, in particular, Stacy Peterson of Fresh Start Recovery Center received
00:32:31
Speaker
$1.56 million to fund 294 beds over three years, which she called a game changer and said that the level of support the government has provided for abstinence-based treatment and long-term recovery is unprecedented.
00:32:51
Speaker
Now, nowhere in the news release announcing that funding commitment did it mention that she sat on the government panel that presumably in part made the decision of where to send this money to. And the same is true of Poundmaker's Lodge, whose executive director Brad Cardinal also sits on that panel.
Inconsistencies in Funding Allocation
00:33:16
Speaker
They received $1.4 million to fund 28 new beds and 7 existing beds in December of last year. Poundmakers is built on the site of a former residential school and
00:33:31
Speaker
It's also under investigation by two police forces in Morendville and Edmonton for allegations of sexual impropriety against staff. So probably not the best place to be throwing money at. And there's also the government has made a commitment of $25 million to build five new recovery centers, making up 400 beds across the province. But it's not clear who's going to own and operate these and
00:34:00
Speaker
given this government's MO, I think we know that it's not going to be Alberta Health Services. I think the images are also powerful in this, right? You think about the unit, the bed, that's how they're measuring this, right? On our side, we're measuring this in deaths.
00:34:17
Speaker
These are really different kinds of metrics you know the conservative side imagines these places where people are injecting drugs into their arms and they just it's horrifying to them whereas with beds you imagine someone being tucked in there all safe you know not not shooting drugs in their arms not breaking into your car or something like that.
00:34:36
Speaker
And so just the idea of it, it's like you kind of don't need much more than to say bed. And that's what most of the rhetoric is. It's just like this bed. And then you ask what happens in the bed in the space around the bed in the programming around the bed. And that's less regulated and less defined, less evidence based and less tested to see if it's getting results.
00:34:55
Speaker
So I am actually not against beds. I mean, sleeping one every night, but it's like if you declare war on every part of the system except a privately run bed, then you're just going to dig the graves just deeper.
Cuts to Public Recovery Centers
00:35:12
Speaker
There's no way around that.
00:35:15
Speaker
And I'm somewhat puzzled by the cost of each bed because they seem to vary wildly, right? At fresh start, they're getting 1.56 million for 294 beds.
00:35:30
Speaker
At Poundmakers, it's 1.4 million for 35 beds. At Thorpe Recovery Center in Lloydminster, it's 2.2 million a year for 1,722 spaces. And at Sunrise Healing Lodge here in Calgary, it's half a million to fund 150 beds.
00:35:58
Speaker
Why are the costs of beds so different for different clinics? I can tell you in BC.
00:36:06
Speaker
The length of stay, the type of programming, the amount of space each person has, the quality of the place, you know, those all vary a lot. And all of us drug users who have been through those things, people have different opinions about they like this one, they don't like this one, they're hopeful about this one, they're not. And people who've been around for long enough have been through a bunch of them and they're kind of just like,
00:36:29
Speaker
maybe through with that. But we also have the experience here of basically anybody who has a house just putting some mattresses in the basement saying, all right, I'm running a recovery house. And I think we're trying to get away from that complete wild west of just anybody can run one. But certainly, I think what they do in there varies a lot. And then, of course, how much
00:36:52
Speaker
of that is given over to the salaries of management, to administration, to all those other kinds of costs. And
Risks of Monetizing Recovery
00:37:02
Speaker
while the government is lavishing these funds on private
00:37:08
Speaker
recovery clinics. They're also cutting down on AHS operated facilities like the McCullough Center up in Gunn, which was for homeless people specifically and it sort of took them beyond the old school 30-day recovery model to give their patients or clients sufficient time to get their lives on track and that acknowledging that that
00:37:32
Speaker
is different for different people. This defunding, this closing, this center will save the province $3 million, which is nothing in a provincial budget. And as of October, they had 11 of 75 beds filled, but they had a waiting list of 150 people. And the reason they didn't have those beds filled was because the government told them.
00:37:56
Speaker
that they're shutting them down and not to take any new patients. But there is clearly a lot of demand for it. And I've been told anecdotally by someone I know who works in the field that it had a very good success rate. So, again, they are holding up these private clinics as the one true solution while cutting away at everything else
00:38:24
Speaker
especially things that are publicly funded. This is dangerous for us too, right? Like when you remove this stuff out of the public sphere, when you make the time in a bed into a commodity, then you increase the incentive to get people out of that bed so you can get someone else in and double charge for a month. And we have seen that before out here. Not everybody does it, but there are some operators that do. And the more you commoditize and marketize something, the more you incentivize,
00:38:53
Speaker
moving people through, so finding a pretext to kick people out.
Profit in Healthcare vs Service Quality
00:38:57
Speaker
So for example, if you're in a lot of recovery houses and you relapse and use, they can kick you out. So you're there to get treatment for what they'll tell you is a disease, and they'll tell you it's chronic and relapsing.
00:39:08
Speaker
But then if you have a predictable symptom of the disease, you know, I'm not, I'm not convinced of this model of looking at it, but this is what they say. If you have a predictable instance of the disease relapse, you're out, you know? And we know lots of people and I've interviewed lots of people who this has happened to and have been out for lesser reasons too. It's a really dangerous slippery slope to too much marketize or too much commoditize those spaces.
00:39:34
Speaker
Yeah, call me old fashioned. I just personally don't believe that profit should be involved in care because, you know, like every dollar that goes towards generating profits is money that could have been spent.
00:39:47
Speaker
on creating a service that works better for the people that it is intending to serve in some way.
Critique of Kenney's CERB and Drug Use Narrative
00:39:54
Speaker
Okay, I'll do it. You're old-fashioned. You're old-fashioned like Rosa Luxemburg. Garth, you wanted to talk a bit more about the press conference that Jason Kenney gave and some of the ways he was talking about supervised consumption services. What are some of the things that really kind of stood out to you in the parts that you listened to and what you heard? I didn't see the whole press conference, but I did see part of it.
00:40:16
Speaker
Federal Serb income benefit, while very well intentioned and very helpful to millions of Canadians, had the unintended consequence of significantly increasing the ability of people trapped in addiction to purchase dangerous drugs. The increased income available to people whose first and last dollar sometimes goes to feed a dangerous addiction.
00:40:38
Speaker
through the SERB and other income support programs by many accounts. It also helped to drive up the opioid deaths this spring and summer. The part of the press conference that really struck me is that Jason Kenney was blaming SERB. You know, he was having a press conference responding to the overdose statistics and he was saying that part of the problem was that people were getting money from the Canadian emergency response benefits.
00:41:05
Speaker
And it's true that probably a bunch of drug users have gotten Serb checks, and that's more money than people would usually have just on social assistance. But let me tell you from personal experience, if you're wired, your support part of your social assistance check, like that little bit of your dole check is not covering your habit. You got to get that money from doing other shit, sometimes which is risky or sometimes even illegal. And I know this, I've lived this.
00:41:34
Speaker
when you have another source of income, you can replace that and you can do less risky and less illegal shit. But it's not just like people are sitting there doing very little amount of drugs and then all of a sudden, Serb is jacking that up and that explains the overdoses. In fact, I would think Serb can allow people to have a little bit less of a stressful and chaotic life as someone who's wired or as someone who's using every day.
Resistance Against Harmful Policies
00:42:00
Speaker
And certainly these programs should continue at a bare minimum. But you can see it's not just that Jason Kenney doesn't like drug users having access to Serb. I think he probably doesn't like the program in general. At least that's the feeling I got from the press conference.
00:42:21
Speaker
You know, I live in B.C., so on the one hand, I don't know what it's like to have Jason Kenney as a premier. And so I really, I really feel free for you all. But I have lived through the entirety of the Harper regime. So I do know a little bit what it's like to have conservatives trying to shut down harm reduction. And I could say the only thing that works is to fight back. The only way that worked for us was to organize as drug users and allies and
00:42:49
Speaker
You know people who supported harm reduction and to fight back and I see that happening in Alberta I see that happening in Lethbridge amongst the people who used to work there at archers and I see it happening in other places and I just want to have Like I just want to give a huge shout out to those those comrades who are like in the trenches fighting back and I just like
00:43:10
Speaker
tons of respect. When I was watching that press conference, I just was kind of feeling it through what I thought might be their feelings. And I know just how fucking hard that is. And just like, I am there. I'm there with you. Like I'm feeling it. And like more power to you.
Promoting Sensible Drug Policies
00:43:28
Speaker
Yeah, shout out to Mom Stop the Harm and HIV Community Link and other organizations in this province that are promoting a sensible, evidence-based, holistic drug policy. Yeah, and congratulations, Jason, on being able to fuck up two public health emergencies at the same time. They make them different in Alberta. That's the Alberta advantage.
00:43:56
Speaker
Thank
Conclusion and Resources
00:43:57
Speaker
you for joining us here on the Alberta Advantage to walk through your piece in The Progress Report. If our listeners want to read your piece and follow you and your work, where should they look? They should go to theprogressreport.ca to read my piece, as well as many other great articles from a pretty wide array of authors.
00:44:17
Speaker
I can also be found on Twitter at JeremyAppell1025. I also am the City Hall reporter for The Sprawl, and you can sign up to my weekly newsletter, which is on a brief hiatus for the holidays, at sprawlcalgary.com. I also write the passage newsletter a couple times a week.
00:44:41
Speaker
which you can subscribe to at readpassage.com. And finally, I co-host two podcasts, Big Shiny Takes, which sort of takes a humorous look at some of the really bad punditry here in Canada and The Forgotten Corner, which is more of an interview podcast where we sit down with people we find interesting
00:45:06
Speaker
Garth, it was a real pleasure finally having you here on the Alberta Advantage and a real privilege for us. If our listeners want to follow you and your work, where can they go? They can just follow me on Crackdown. We're on Twitter at Crackdown Pod. The podcast comes out, like, sort of irregularly. It tries to be monthly. And I'm at Garth Mullins on Twitter.
00:45:26
Speaker
Incredible. Thanks to both of you for joining us here on the Alberta Advantage. And thank you to our listeners for joining us for another episode of the podcast. Take care out there. Thank you. See you. Bye. Be safe. Keep six. If you liked today's episode, you should check out the Harbinger Media Network featuring shows like the popular biweekly Toronto eco socialist podcast, Oats for Breakfast, which approaches questions related to socialist strategy from an open, non-dogmatic perspective with posts, Umar, Sadia, and a rotating panel of guests.
00:45:55
Speaker
Find out more about the Harbinger Media Network and the entire cross-country line-up of podcasts at harbingermedianetwork.com.