Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
The goal of treatment is to treat the person's addiction to fentanyl so that they don't use fentanyl (recognizing that relapses and set backs are inevitable and part of the process). Every time someone uses fentanyl, they risk their lives. That is not an overstatement.
And the whole point of involuntary treatment (as opposed to just involuntary detention) is to treat the illness (not just detain the person). I'm no expert in what that treatment looks like or how effective it is (and I certainly appreciate that treating opiate addiction is incredibly difficult), but I come back to... it must be better than doing nothing and just letting people suffer and die on the streets.
I don't know. I don't have the answers. I've spent many, many sleepless nights thinking about this. I know people who have lost children and siblings to this crisis. I've spent hundreds of hours drafting affidavits, cross-examining affiants, cobbling together arguments in facta and in court. I still don't have the answers. But, in this moment, I feel like the status quo is not acceptable.
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I am going to jump on this one late and maybe it has been addressed already but maybe we should be funding social services agencies, building multiple supervised consumption sites, and working to alleviate the reasons why people actually start using drugs in the first place.
Look at the statistics, the Indigenous population is significantly more likely to use opioids, become hospitalized due to opioids, and die due to opioids. There are clear socioeconomic and social determinate of health factors associated with substance misuse whether it be alcohol, meth, or fentanyl.
The approach of policing our way out of this or forcing people into rehabilitation facilities to then send them back into the same situation where they were using before is absolutely backwards and doesn't appreciate the complexity of the issue. Substance abuse isn't a personal failing but rather a societal one and one that isn't able to be easily treated.
Personally I think that having a decriminalized approach, trying to have a safer drug supply with smaller supervised consumption sites in strategic locations in all cities. We need to understand that people aren't going to stop using drugs because they are bad for them but we can take a harm reduction approach in combination with actually investing money in early childhood development, education, and social support systems for people who are at risk of developing drug problems. Or we could just keep taking the same approach and build bigger walls while we ignore the scope of the problem.