Juno News - Alberta minister slams ＂harm production＂ approach to drugs

00:00:00.960 Rachel Emanuel brings the news each day on Alberta Roundup. She has her say.

00:00:11.600 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Alberta Roundup. I'm your host Rachel Emanuel.

00:00:14.960 Today I am joined for the first time by Alberta's Mental Health and Addictions Minister

00:00:19.360 Dan Williams. Minister Williams, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:00:22.400 Thanks Rachel. Minister Williams and I have actually gotten to know each other a little

00:00:26.480 bit at the Calgary Stampede. So it's great to see you here in maybe a more formal setting.

00:00:30.400 So one of the things that we're going to be taking a look at today is our friends over in BC. We know

00:00:34.080 that BC has a drastically different drug policy from Alberta. They have sought to decriminalize drugs.

00:00:40.800 For the last two years they had a pilot project that allowed adults to carry two and a half grams

00:00:44.880 of drugs for personal use without facing any criminal charges and that was made possible

00:00:49.200 through an exemption granted by Health Canada under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

00:00:54.000 Just recently, BC Premier David Eby asked for an adjustment to that exemption to recriminalize

00:00:59.440 the use of those drugs in public spaces such as hospitals and restaurants.

00:01:03.280 So one of the things that Alberta Premier Daniel Smith has been saying is, look,

00:01:06.160 I understand that BC can control its own policies, but there's issues where we are worried that these

00:01:10.720 drugs are going to be flowing into Alberta and I know she's gotten the RCMP involved in that. 1.00

00:01:15.120 So this change, it's just a minor change. Do you think that this is going to improve the situation here in Alberta?

00:01:19.520 Well, I don't think it's minor. Obviously, it's good for the country,

00:01:23.520 and I think that's good for Alberta. A few things I want to highlight about how we got here.

00:01:28.320 So BC decriminalized, which it's not just when they decriminalize, there's no criminal consequences

00:01:36.320 to drug use, to public drug use that could endanger others. What they have are no consequences. No one

00:01:44.080 apprehends the drugs and takes them. There's no administrative penalties. Most of this decriminalization

00:01:49.520 that we see in places like BC and Oregon, both of whom have reversed their policy,

00:01:53.760 come out of a misinformed understanding of what happened in Portugal in the early 2000s,

00:01:59.120 where they decriminalized. But what they did in Portugal was heavily burdened administratively

00:02:05.760 somebody who uses drugs. So you go to a mandatory dissuasion commission if you're using even marijuana

00:02:12.720 recreationally, never mind hard drugs like opioids. And if somebody's an addiction in their system in

00:02:19.040 Portugal with the decriminalization, they can take away your social assistance, they can take away your

00:02:24.400 social housing, they can take away your passport. These things are unconstitutional in Canada. I'm not

00:02:28.800 suggesting we do that. But I'm saying they're trying to take a very complex situation that was built and

00:02:35.520 made for another country in another decade with no fentanyl and a completely different legal system and a

00:02:41.520 totally different culture and take a child's understanding of it and pose it onto our societies 0.87

00:02:48.000 here in North America, whether it be Oregon or BC. And it's been devastating, which is why BC went not

00:02:53.440 even halfway through the three month trial pilot for decriminalization. I can tell you all the reasons

00:03:00.320 why and my experience as a minister of mental health addiction in Alberta, why decriminalization is a bad

00:03:05.680 idea. But I think your viewers probably know it already. You don't need to be a minister of mental

00:03:10.560 health addiction. And you don't need a PhD in addiction medicine or social policy to understand

00:03:18.560 that if there are no consequences for devastating, harmful and life ending drug use, that the drug

00:03:24.880 use is going to expand and extrapolate. And so this is one of the big problems that we are facing in our

00:03:33.360 society is a tragic addiction crisis. There is a response to it. There is a healthy human and

00:03:41.920 compassionate response. It's not allowing addiction to just proliferate and facilitate everywhere it goes

00:03:48.800 when it interfaces with government. It's governments and families and communities that need to intervene

00:03:54.160 and say, no, there's a way to get healthy. There's a way to deal with this addiction. And we're calling

00:03:59.200 that the Alberta model. It's focused on recovery. It's getting people off of the addiction to pathway,

00:04:06.320 which leads addiction run its course ends in only one of two ways, Rachel, it can only end in pain,

00:04:11.280 misery and eventually death. Or it ends in treatment, recovery, and a second lease on life. Now,

00:04:18.800 as a minister of mental health and addiction, I feel like I have a moral obligation to do all I can to

00:04:23.680 get people into that second path, that one of hope, that one of recovery, the one that gets people

00:04:28.080 healthy again, when they're faced with that, that disease of addiction. Sure. So when we take a look

00:04:33.760 specifically at the BC policy here, and now they're kind of walking some of it back, I know that your

00:04:39.040 government has actually asked the federal government to put chemical tracers in some of these drugs that

00:04:43.120 BC was given out, that request was rejected, government said that it wouldn't be possible. So I know we

00:04:47.440 can't specifically track which drugs might be flowing into Alberta from BC. But if you had to just sort of

00:04:52.960 speculate, I mean, what do you think the impact of BC safe supply is on Alberta and the addictions

00:04:57.840 that we're seeing here? Great question. And it's really consequential. So we need to highlight the

00:05:02.080 difference between two different devastating policies. One is the decriminalization. That one

00:05:07.760 says no consequences for public drug use for your drug use that endangers yourself, others community,

00:05:14.160 no consequences there in the criminal code. But then the second policy is one called safe supply or

00:05:20.080 safer supply. They're euphemisms and they're branding advertising slogans. It's not real policy

00:05:25.760 in the sense of evidence-based, thoughtful, helpful for those struggling. What it is, is a program that

00:05:32.240 says, and the federal government funds approximately 100 million dollars of this a year, where they say,

00:05:37.840 we are going to not only facilitate addiction, but we're going to do it to the point where we're going to

00:05:42.800 provide high powered opioids. So for example, hydromorphone, the drug that the federal government supplies in their

00:05:49.040 safe supply program, it's about five times more powerful than street heroin. So if you thought

00:05:54.720 heroin is powerful, this stuff is pharmaceutical grade opioid, and it's used recreationally, unwitnessed,

00:06:01.200 without any intention of trying to taper people off of it. It's not like opioid agonist therapy,

00:06:06.480 which is evidence-based medicine to help people get healthy and deal with the addiction that

00:06:11.360 physiologically affects them. No, this is different. This is just flooding opioids onto the street,

00:06:18.480 and there are approximately 65 million, eight milligram pills. Each of those pills,

00:06:24.800 five times more powerful than heroin, that the government distributes unwitnessed into the community,

00:06:30.720 that is flooding our streets. Anecdotally, I can tell you, in BC, the price went from a decade ago

00:06:36.080 of hydromorphone, even less than that, five, six years ago, it was approximately 15 to 20 dollars a pill.

00:06:42.080 It's now in the neighborhood of 20, 30, 40 cents a pill. In Alberta, it's been decreased as well,

00:06:47.920 not to the same degree. We saw it was maybe worth 15, 20 dollars a pill previously, and now,

00:06:53.040 anecdotally, I hear, it can be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight dollars a pill.

00:06:57.200 So what you can understand from that, if you know basics of supply and demand,

00:07:00.960 that the federal government has now become effectively the provider of the drugs. They are,

00:07:06.320 in some ways, trying to push out the drug dealers themselves as the purveyor of these high-power

00:07:11.120 opioids. And it no longer becomes about harm reduction when you do that, it becomes harm

00:07:16.240 production. It doesn't matter who gets those, who gives those drugs out, whether it be a drug dealer,

00:07:21.120 Justin Trudeau. The physical consequence of that to an individual's body is the same. And I'll tell you,

00:07:28.480 the number one axiomatic rule of addiction policy is if you increase supply, you increase harms. It's just

00:07:35.360 a correlation. There's no getting around it. The evidence on this and the literature is abundantly

00:07:39.520 clear. So we put in a request, as you mentioned, to say, federal government, if you're going to

00:07:44.640 continue doing this, which we oppose in Alberta, handing out these high-powered opioids on the street

00:07:49.040 with no real policy to try and help people, but just to facilitate addiction, we've made it legal in

00:07:55.120 Alberta, but we're concerned the stuff that you're producing in other provinces is crossing the border.

00:08:00.640 And the anecdotal evidence suggests that that's true. We now hear multiple reports from RCMP saying

00:08:05.680 they believe they have now seized tens of thousands of pills from the Safe Supply Program,

00:08:13.120 and that the RCMP publicly said they believe those pills were purposed for being sold in other

00:08:19.600 provinces. Well, if you're in British Columbia, and you have a whole bunch of high-powered opioids,

00:08:23.600 and it's going to be sold in another province, very tough for that province not to be Alberta,

00:08:27.600 at least part of it. So we're very concerned about what we call diversion, which is these pills not

00:08:32.640 going to the ones they're meant for, but instead going to our high schools and our colleges,

00:08:36.960 and hooking a whole bunch of people in the lifelong battle with addiction.

00:08:42.560 Yeah, you know, a couple months back, I actually encouraged my audience to go watch those two

00:08:45.920 really excellent documentaries. I'm sure you've seen them. I'm sure everyone in your office has seen

00:08:49.520 them. Vancouver is dying, and Canada is dying, both by filmmaker in front of the show,

00:08:54.080 Aaron Gunn, and I'd once again just reiterate that call. And in one of those films, we learned

00:08:58.000 that it was actually creating youth as young as 12 years old to be addicted to these really

00:09:02.800 high, powerful, high potent opioids. And I think that wasn't the indication that it was time for

00:09:07.280 BC to change its direction. I don't know what was. Obviously, now we see BC is slightly, you know,

00:09:12.240 changing its direction on the decriminalization. With that policy change in mind, are you guys still

00:09:17.920 asking for the federal government to put that chemical tracer in? Or at this point, is it maybe a

00:09:21.920 situation where you're really looking at BC and thinking they finally might understand the

00:09:25.840 implications of what they've done? Let me be clear, it's the federal government that enables

00:09:30.160 all of these absolutely banana policies, the banana policy of handing drugs out to drug addicts to deal

00:09:36.560 with an addiction crisis. You don't need I mean, you have to be a federal liberal to think that's going

00:09:41.200 to help. It's insane. The policy around decriminalization, it's a federal exemption. I put this squarely

00:09:47.040 in the federal government with their powers, trying to infringe upon healthcare responsibilities in

00:09:52.480 Alberta and other provinces, but also allowing BC to go down these roads. So I think it's a federal

00:09:57.200 government that's responsible. And we are 100% still asking Minister Sachs and Minister Holland,

00:10:02.720 the federal ministers responsible to put a chemical identifier in the safe supply they produce. That

00:10:09.520 technology of the chemical unique chemical identifier is used for for profit pharmaceutical companies in

00:10:15.200 the United States to protect their intellectual property of what they developed. If it's possible

00:10:19.920 to be used for a decade in the United States for profit, then surely we can do it to save lives in

00:10:26.560 Canada. I don't know what could be a better use of my federal tax dollars. I don't think a lot of them

00:10:31.520 are going to good right now. I see the debt piling up and useless spending on item after item. How about

00:10:36.960 something concrete? How about something that's going to save a life and give the federal government the

00:10:41.600 data that they need to show that this is being diverted? We'd be able to see in autopsies if

00:10:46.560 there are overdoses resulting from their safe supply. We'd be able to see in drug seizures the

00:10:51.920 RCP have whether this was definitively from safe supply. I think they're afraid. I think they're afraid of

00:10:57.360 what consequences that would be not just politically but also legally. The liability that they would have,

00:11:03.200 I think, would be incredible if it were hard evidence to show what their safe supply has done to

00:11:08.640 our communities. Let's change directions a little bit and look at what Alberta is actually doing. 0.97

00:11:13.520 You briefly mentioned the recovery-oriented system of care that your office is working on. The UCP

00:11:19.040 government has been working on this since they were elected. Have you felt that you've had the

00:11:24.240 federal government supports in your efforts to really encourage addicts to get into treatment and

00:11:28.640 to get into recovery as opposed to giving them so-called safe supply? Well, they haven't brought it into

00:11:33.920 Alberta. I mean, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did mention at some point in passing that he was

00:11:39.840 having conversations with municipalities in Alberta surrounding that. I hope to goodness that's not true

00:11:46.480 but we have made that illegal here. The federal government came, I even spoke with their health

00:11:52.720 committee today at one of my recovery centres that I operate in central Alberta for them to see the

00:11:58.960 hopeful, optimistic alternative to facilitating addiction. I'm not saying just lock people up.

00:12:04.800 This isn't a criminal justice response. I'm not just saying let them languish. This isn't apathy.

00:12:10.720 This is a conservative movement full of compassion. And my view, deeply informed by my conservative values,

00:12:16.640 is that we have a responsibility to our community to intervene to help these people to give anyone

00:12:21.680 struggling with addiction every resource imaginable. So we've invested close to half a billion dollars in

00:12:27.840 capital to build two so far out of 11 total recovery communities, five of them in direct partnership

00:12:34.800 with Indigenous, four on reserve with First Nations. We know that a strong relationship with Indigenous

00:12:40.640 who are deeply affected by this crisis is really important. So we are spending a huge amount of

00:12:46.160 resources to tell Albertans and all Canadians there's another way and to build a system that has

00:12:53.680 continuous care, all of it leading towards recovery. Because if you're not leading towards recovery

00:12:58.880 and addiction, the only alternative is to lead towards death. And I think that's deeply un-Canadian 1.00

00:13:04.320 to just let that happen, to facilitate it, to give up hope on people and say,

00:13:08.080 you're addicted. I'm going to let that happen. Nothing I can really do about it. Here's a syringe.

00:13:13.200 Here's some drugs. Here's a place for you to do it. That's safe, apparently. I think that the appropriate

00:13:19.600 response wherever we can is to get people into opportunities where they can see hope and therefore

00:13:26.480 end up in recovery and live full lives again as Canadians and Albertans, as mothers and sisters

00:13:31.280 and brothers, as family members and community members. I actually had the opportunity to visit

00:13:37.120 one of those facilities, the one that recently opened up in Red Deer. How often would you say those

00:13:42.160 facilities are at full capacity? There's just always people in them to the brim. Well, ever since we

00:13:47.840 open them up, it's a staged opening. So we don't put the 75 folks in the Red Deer facility in day one,

00:13:53.040 they go through the cohort and they graduate in time. But we're running at a very high capacity in

00:13:58.720 the high 90s. If there's a bed open, it's really because it's earmarked to someone who's coming out

00:14:03.840 of detox and just making sure they have that space open. We have two out of 11 open. When we have all 11

00:14:09.680 open, we'll have increased our capacity by 2000 spaces per year. And that 2000 spaces is incredible

00:14:16.960 because we're talking about the highest quality treatment up to one year of treatment with social

00:14:22.080 cycle supports, medical supports in that, and work with a continuum of care where we're doing a warm

00:14:28.000 handoff to where they're going to afterwards as well. So the system we're building is universal in

00:14:35.280 how it's trying to grab individuals and bring them into care so that we can get them out the other 0.98

00:14:41.520 side recovered and full of life and opportunity again. I know your government is doing a lot of

00:14:48.000 work on a recover-oriented system of care, but overdoses in the province remain extremely high.

00:14:53.280 They seem to just be going up and up and up. One of the things I'm curious about is during the COVID-19

00:14:57.920 pandemic, we saw so much isolation. People were told, stay in, don't go out, we're going to close

00:15:02.240 your churches, we're going to close your schools, we're going to close your place of work, and we're

00:15:05.360 going to coerce you into being vaccinated. And we saw mental health issues, you know,

00:15:10.320 exponentially rise faster than we've probably ever seen them rise in Canada. And I think a lot of

00:15:14.480 people were turning to substances to sort of alleviate some of the pain that they felt.

00:15:18.560 How much of the overdoses that we're seeing now, how much of the addiction crisis that we're seeing now,

00:15:22.400 would you attribute to COVID-19 policy? Well, it's very hard for me to give any concrete numbers.

00:15:28.240 It's tough to tease these things apart. I'm sure there'll be lots of studying and data that will help

00:15:33.360 inform academics to that end. But I can tell you that isolation, it feeds addiction. Addiction,

00:15:40.640 for example, in particular, when you're talking about mental health challenges, addiction really

00:15:44.800 is a disease of isolation, of withdrawing into oneself and not being able to look oneself in the

00:15:51.520 mirror, not being able to build relationships to others around in a meaningful and importantly

00:15:58.000 healthy way. So often addiction is a consequence of other trauma, other mental health issues,

00:16:05.280 a sense of loneliness and isolation. And so to rebuild that, we need to have these communities.

00:16:11.440 And we saw numbers go up of addiction for multiple reasons. One, for the reasons you said,

00:16:15.840 you put a lot of money in someone's hand who's struggling with addiction and then you lock them

00:16:19.280 away or say you effectively have to spend time independently by yourself. That's not a recipe for

00:16:25.360 for a healthy outcome. But then also we had to limit our capacity and intake when it came to our

00:16:30.880 treatment facilities, which we were just starting to ramp up at the time. So it was something that

00:16:36.240 was difficult for us as a government to try and manage both sides of that balancing act. But I can

00:16:41.840 tell you now, we are seeing a lot of important facilities opening up that give us more capacity

00:16:49.360 and a lot of opportunity for people to get the help they need. I'm looking forward on going full bar

00:16:54.080 and, you know, both barrels all the way as hard as I can to get these facilities open and get the

00:16:59.200 capacity going again. Minister, just my last question here before I let you go. Your government

00:17:04.400 announced a few months back the creation of Recovery Alberta. So mental health and addiction

00:17:08.480 services are going to be moved from Alberta Health Services and to this new Recovery Alberta

00:17:13.280 Ministry that will fall under your department, of course. Wondering what the benefits are of moving

00:17:17.120 this outside of AHS and whether it's still scheduled, these changes are still scheduled to go into effect

00:17:22.480 beginning in July. Yeah, we're hoping to be able to stand up on July 1st. We just passed one bill

00:17:29.520 yesterday that's necessary for standing up part of this around CORE, Canadian Center Recovery Excellence,

00:17:35.200 and we introduced a new bill as well yesterday. So hopefully we'll have that figured out and

00:17:40.640 hopefully the legislation passes. Now, the value of this is that we're focusing on mental health and

00:17:46.080 addiction in a serious way. AHS is a big organization. It's literally the biggest employer in the country

00:17:52.320 126,000 staff plus. That doesn't include part-time or, pardon me, casual. You see over 18-19 billion

00:18:01.440 dollar organization. Any one of the files that Minister of the Grange works on are massive and

00:18:06.560 consequential. You talk about emergency wait times, EMS response, talk about surgeries, all of this

00:18:14.160 adding up into what is a really important and complicated file. By taking mental health and addiction

00:18:19.760 out, me as a minister, as a full minister now, by taking the part of AHS that dealt with mental health

00:18:26.480 and addiction and giving it its own dedicated ministry and organization, that's organizations

00:18:31.760 now is going to be called Recovery Alberta, focusing on mental health and addiction recovery for health.

00:18:36.960 It allows us to focus on it in a really serious way and to dig my shoulder into the grindstone and make

00:18:42.160 sure that we're getting the policy outcomes we need. Canadians and Albertans are more aware of

00:18:46.320 addiction and mental health in their families' communities than ever before. It deserves its own

00:18:51.360 committed funds, its own budget line, its own organization. I can also change the culture.

00:18:58.080 And AHS is an acute organization. Its culture is very different from addressing a challenge and a crisis

00:19:04.480 like addiction or mental health. Mental health and addiction crises are often in the community.

00:19:09.840 They're with family members. They're not in hospitals. If they've gotten to the point you're in an

00:19:14.160 emergency hospital, I mean, we're way at the far end of this. We need to address this way before.

00:19:19.040 And the culture of it can't just be acute, medicalized, pharmaceutical intervention exclusively.

00:19:24.000 I'm talking about building community. And you'll notice Recovery Alberta, the language itself is about

00:19:29.040 recovery and health. It's not just about responding in some medical way, but a healthy individual and

00:19:34.880 the wellness that they need. Even look at our logos. You see the semicircle of chairs around the word

00:19:40.160 recovery. It's talking about conversation and community coming together. We need to take a

00:19:45.680 very serious look at how we think about mental health and addiction in the West. And if we over

00:19:50.080 pharmaceuticalize and intervene exclusively in this highly acute medical way, we're going to be

00:19:54.960 missing a lot of the important work that needs to happen before that's even started. And that's what

00:19:59.040 Recovery Alberta allows us to do. Minister, I know a lot of what you had to say and what your

00:20:03.360 government's doing on addictions will really resonate with my viewers. Thank you so much for coming on today.

00:20:07.120 Thanks for inviting me, Rachel. I hope I can be invited back. I really appreciate the chance and

00:20:11.200 the work you guys are doing. Yes, absolutely. We'll definitely have you back. For the rest of you,

00:20:16.160 I'll be back on Saturday with my regular programming and just a little tease for you. I have a big story,

00:20:20.320 but the United Conservative Party and some action they're taking against COVID-19 vaccines,

00:20:24.640 especially those for children. So you guys won't want to miss that. I'll see you all on Saturday.

00:20:28.800 Have a great week and God bless.

00:20:37.120 I'll see you all on Saturday.

00:20:38.480 Bye.

00:20:39.120 Bye.

00:20:41.120 Bye.

00:20:43.120 Bye.

00:20:45.120 Bye.

00:20:47.120 Bye.

00:20:49.120 Bye.

00:20:51.120 Bye.

00:20:53.120 Bye.

00:20:55.120 Bye.

00:20:59.120 Bye.

00:21:01.120 Bye.

00:21:03.120 Bye.

Juno News - May 16, 2024

Alberta minister slams ＂harm production＂ approach to drugs

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