The Alberta Roundup with Isaac Lamoureux - Alberta minister slams “harm production” approach to drugs

00:00:00.000 Rachel Emanuel brings the news each day. On Alberta Roundup, she has her say.

00:00:11.380 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Alberta Roundup. I'm your host Rachel Emanuel. Today I am joined

00:00:16.180 for the first time by Alberta's Mental Health and Addictions Minister, Dan Williams. Minister

00:00:20.460 Williams, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks Rachel. Minister Williams and I have

00:00:25.140 actually gotten to know each other a little bit at the Calgary Stampede, so it's great to see you

00:00:28.820 here in maybe a more formal setting. So one of the things that we're going to be taking a look at

00:00:32.240 today is our friends over in BC. We know that BC has a drastically different drug policy from Alberta.

00:00:37.800 They have sought to decriminalize drugs. For the last two years, they had a pilot project that allowed

00:00:43.260 adults to carry two and a half grams of drugs for personal use without facing any criminal charges,

00:00:47.620 and that was made possible through an exemption granted by Health Canada under the Controlled

00:00:52.260 Drugs and Substances Act. Just recently, BC Premier David Eby asked for an adjustment to that exemption

00:00:57.960 to recriminalize the use of those drugs in public spaces such as hospitals and restaurants.

00:01:03.560 So one of the things that Alberta Premier Daniel Smith has been saying is, look, I understand that

00:01:07.060 BC can control its own policies, but there's issues where we are worried that these drugs are going

00:01:11.360 to be flowing into Alberta, and I know she's gotten the RCMP involved in that. So this change,

00:01:16.060 it's just a minor change. Do you think that this is going to improve the situation here in Alberta?

00:01:20.300 Well, I don't think it's minor. Obviously, it's good for the country, and I think that's good

00:01:24.380 for Alberta. A few things I want to highlight about how we got here. So BC decriminalized,

00:01:31.400 which it's not just when they decriminalize, there's no criminal consequences to drug use,

00:01:37.620 to public drug use that could endanger others. What they have are no consequences. No one apprehends

00:01:44.660 the drugs and takes them. There's no administrative penalties. Most of this decriminalization that we

00:01:49.880 see in places like BC and Oregon, both of whom have reversed their policy, come out of a misinformed

00:01:55.440 understanding of what happened in Portugal in the early 2000s, where they decriminalized.

00:02:00.800 But what they did in Portugal was heavily burdened administratively somebody who uses drugs. So you

00:02:08.560 go to a mandatory dissuasion commission, if you're using even marijuana recreationally, nevermind hard

00:02:15.360 drugs like opioids. And if somebody is an addiction in their system in Portugal with the decriminalization,

00:02:20.820 they can take away your social assistance, they can take away your social housing, they can take away

00:02:26.180 your passport. These things are unconstitutional in Canada. I'm not suggesting we do that. But I'm

00:02:30.680 saying they're trying to take a very complex situation that was built and made for another country in

00:02:37.240 another decade with no fentanyl and a completely different legal system and a totally different

00:02:42.200 culture and take a child's understanding of it and pose it onto our societies here in North America,

00:02:49.140 whether it be Oregon or BC. And it's been devastating, which is why BC went not even halfway

00:02:54.160 through the three-month trial pilot for decriminalization. I can tell you all the reasons

00:03:00.380 why in my experience as a minister of mental health addiction in Alberta, why decriminalization is a bad

00:03:05.820 idea. But I think your viewers probably know it already. You don't need to be a minister of mental

00:03:10.680 health addiction, and you don't need a PhD in addiction medicine or social policy to understand

00:03:18.220 that if there are no consequences for devastating, harmful, and life-ending drug use, that the drug

00:03:25.000 use is going to expand and extrapolate. And so this is one of the big problems that we are facing in our

00:03:33.520 society is a tragic addiction crisis. There is a response to it. There is a healthy human and compassionate

00:03:42.520 response. It's not allowing addiction to just proliferate and facilitate everywhere it goes when it

00:03:49.260 interfaces with government. It's governments and families and communities that need to intervene and say,

00:03:54.640 no, there's a way to get healthy. There's a way to deal with this addiction. And we're calling that the Alberta model.

00:04:00.180 It's focused on recovery. It's getting people off of the addiction to pathway, which leads addiction,

00:04:08.020 run its course, ends in only one of two ways, Rachel. It can only end in pain, misery, and

00:04:11.860 eventually death. Or it ends in treatment, recovery, and a second lease on life. Now, as a minister of

00:04:19.780 mental health and addiction, I feel like I have a moral obligation to do all I can to get people into that

00:04:24.680 second path, that one of hope, that one of recovery, the one that gets people healthy again, when they're faced with

00:04:30.000 that, that disease of addiction.

00:04:32.760 Sure. So when we take a look specifically at the BC policy here, and now they're kind of walking some of it back.

00:04:38.320 I know that your government has actually asked the federal government to put chemical tracers in some of these drugs

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

00:04:47.820 specifically track which drugs might be flowing into Alberta from BC. But if you had to just sort of

00:04:53.120 speculate, I mean, what do you think the impact of BC's safe supply is on Alberta and the addictions that

00:04:58.080 we're seeing here?

00:04:59.020 Great question. And it's really consequential. So we need to highlight the difference between two different

00:05:03.280 devastating policies. One is the decriminalization. That one says no consequences for public drug use,

00:05:10.980 for your drug use that endangers yourself, others, community. No consequences there in the criminal code.

00:05:15.980 But then the second policy is one called safe supply or safer supply. They're euphemisms and they're

00:05:22.280 branding, advertising slogans. It's not real policy in the sense of evidence-based, thoughtful,

00:05:28.400 helpful for those struggling. What it is, is a program that says, and the federal government funds

00:05:34.340 approximately $100 million of this a year, where they say, we are going to not only facilitate

00:05:40.680 addiction, but we're going to do it to the point where we're going to provide high-powered opioids.

00:05:44.260 So for example, hydromorphone, the drug that the federal government supplies in their safe supply

00:05:49.640 program, it's about five times more powerful than street heroin. So if you thought heroin is powerful,

00:05:56.060 this stuff is pharmaceutical grade opioid, and it's used recreationally, unwitnessed, without any intention

00:06:02.760 of trying to taper people off of it. It's not like opioid agonist therapy, which is evidence-based

00:06:07.520 medicine to help people get healthy and deal with the addiction that physiologically affects them.

00:06:13.060 No, this is different. This is just flooding opioids onto the street. And there are approximately

00:06:19.860 65 million, eight milligram pills. Each of those pills, five times more powerful than heroin,

00:06:26.800 that the government distributes unwitnessed into the community that is flooding our streets.

00:06:32.540 Anecdotally, I can tell you, in BC, the price went from a decade ago of hydromorphone,

00:06:37.000 even less than that, five, six years ago. It was approximately $15 to $20 a pill. It's now in

00:06:42.720 the neighborhood of $20, $30, $40 a pill. And Alberta, it's been decreased as well, not to the

00:06:48.540 same degree. We saw it was maybe worth $15, $20 a pill previously. And now, anecdotally, I hear it can

00:06:54.360 be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 to $8 a pill. So what you can understand from that,

00:06:59.000 if you know basics of supply and demand, that the federal government has now become effectively

00:07:03.560 the provider of the drugs. They are, in some ways, trying to push out the drug dealers themselves as

00:07:09.260 the purveyor of these high-power opioids. And it no longer becomes about harm reduction when you do

00:07:15.300 that. It becomes harm production. It doesn't matter who gives those drugs out, whether it be a drug

00:07:20.880 dealer or Justin Trudeau. The physical consequence of that to an individual's body is the same. And I'll

00:07:28.300 tell you the number one axiomatic rule of addiction policy is if you increase supply,

00:07:33.780 you increase harms. It's just a correlation. There's no getting around it. The evidence on this

00:07:38.360 and the literature is abundantly clear. So we put in a request, as you mentioned, to say,

00:07:43.380 federal government, if you're going to continue doing this, which we oppose in Alberta, handing out

00:07:47.260 these high-powered opioids on the street with no real policy to try and help people, but just to

00:07:53.200 facilitate addiction. We've made it legal in Alberta, but we're concerned the stuff that you're

00:07:57.420 producing in other provinces is crossing the border. And the anecdotal evidence suggests

00:08:02.580 that that's true. We now hear multiple reports from RCMP saying they believe they have now seized

00:08:08.340 tens of thousands of pills from the safe supply program and that the RCMP publicly said they

00:08:15.380 believe those pills were purposed for being sold in other provinces. Well, if you're in British

00:08:20.960 Columbia and you have a whole bunch of high-powered opioids and it's going to be sold in another

00:08:24.960 province, very tough for that province not to be Alberta, at least part of it. So we're very

00:08:29.220 concerned about what we call diversion, which is these pills not going to the ones they're meant

00:08:33.960 for, but instead going to our high schools and our colleges and hooking a whole bunch of people in

00:08:38.500 the lifelong battle with addiction. Yeah, you know, a couple months back, I actually encouraged my

00:08:44.860 audience to go watch those two really excellent documentaries. I'm sure you've seen them. I'm sure

00:08:48.720 everyone in your office has seen them. Vancouver is dying and Canada is dying, both by a filmmaker in front

00:08:53.800 of the show, Aaron Gunn. And I'd once again, just reiterate that call. And in one of those films,

00:08:57.740 we learned that it was actually creating youth as young as 12 years old to be addicted to these

00:09:02.380 really high, powerful, high potent opioids. And I think that wasn't the indication that it was time

00:09:07.300 for BC to change its direction. I don't know what was. Obviously now we see BC is slightly, you know,

00:09:12.300 changing its direction on the decriminalization. With that policy change in mind, are you guys still

00:09:17.960 asking for the federal government to put that chemical tracer in? Or at this point, is it maybe a

00:09:22.120 situation where you're really looking at BC and thinking they finally might understand the

00:09:25.960 implications of what they've done? Let me be clear. It's the federal government that enables

00:09:30.080 all of these absolutely banana policies. The banana policy of handing drugs out to drug addicts to deal

00:09:36.720 with an addiction crisis. You don't need, I mean, you have to be a federal liberal to think that's

00:09:41.180 going to help. It's insane. The policy around decriminalization, it's a federal exemption. I put this

00:09:46.780 squarely in the federal government with their powers, trying to infringe upon healthcare

00:09:51.140 responsibilities in Alberta and other provinces, but also allowing BC to go down these roads.

00:09:55.880 So I think it's a federal government that's responsible. And we are 100% still asking Minister

00:10:01.440 Sachs and Minister Holland, the federal ministers responsible, to put a chemical identifier in the

00:10:07.940 safe supply they produce. That technology of the chemical, unique chemical identifier is used for

00:10:13.360 for-profit pharmaceutical companies in the United States to protect their intellectual property of

00:10:18.060 what they developed. If it's possible to be used for a decade in the United States for profit,

00:10:23.900 then surely we can do it to save lives in Canada. I don't know what could be a better use of my federal

00:10:29.960 tax dollars. I don't think a lot of them are going to good right now. I see the debt piling up and useless

00:10:34.900 spending on item after item. How about something concrete? How about something that's going to save a

00:10:39.300 life and give the federal government the data that they need to show that this is being diverted?

00:10:44.500 We'd be able to see in autopsies, if there are overdoses resulting from their safe supply. We'd be able to see in

00:10:51.200 drug seizures the RCP have, whether this is definitively from safe supply. I think they're afraid. I think they're afraid of what

00:10:57.640 consequences that would be, not just politically, but also legally. The liability that they would have, I think, would be

00:11:03.860 incredible if it were hard evidence to show what their safe supply has done to our communities.

00:11:10.700 Let's change directions a little bit and look at what Alberta is actually doing. You briefly mentioned the

00:11:14.740 recovery-oriented system of care that your office is working on. The UCP government has been working on this

00:11:20.220 since they were elected. So have you felt that you've had the federal government supports in your efforts

00:11:26.020 to really encourage addicts to get into treatment and to get into recovery, as opposed to giving them

00:11:30.860 the so-called safe supply? Well, they haven't brought it into Alberta. I mean, Prime Minister

00:11:35.700 Justin Trudeau did mention at some point in passing that he was having conversations with municipalities in Alberta

00:11:42.860 surrounding that. I hope to goodness that's not true. But we have made that illegal here. The federal government

00:11:49.420 came, I even spoke with their health committee today at one of my recovery centres that I operate in central Alberta

00:11:57.220 for them to see the hopeful, optimistic alternative to facilitating addiction.

00:12:03.060 I'm not saying just lock people up. This isn't a criminal justice response. I'm not just saying let them languish.

00:12:09.440 This isn't apathy. This is a conservative movement full of compassion. And my view, deeply informed by my conservative

00:12:16.060 values, is that we have a responsibility to our community to intervene, to help these people, to give anyone struggling

00:12:22.180 with addiction every resource imaginable. So we've invested close to half a billion dollars in capital

00:12:28.500 to build two so far out of 11 total recovery communities. Five of them are in direct partnership

00:12:34.820 with Indigenous, four on reserve with First Nations. We know that a strong relationship with Indigenous who

00:12:40.820 are deeply affected by this crisis is really important. So we are spending a huge amount of resources to tell that,

00:12:48.020 to tell Albertans and all Canadians there's another way, and to build a system that has continuous care,

00:12:54.340 all of it leading towards recovery. Because if you're not leading towards recovery and addiction,

00:12:59.700 the only alternative is to lead towards death. And I think that's deeply un-Canadian to just let that

00:13:05.060 happen, to facilitate it, to give up hope on people and say, you're addicted. I'm going to let that happen.

00:13:10.420 Nothing I can really do about it. Here's a syringe. Here's some drugs. Here's a place for you to do it. That's safe,

00:13:16.420 apparently. I think that the appropriate response, wherever we can, is to get people into opportunities where

00:13:24.180 they can see hope and therefore end up in recovery and live full lives again as Canadians and Albertans,

00:13:30.180 as mothers and sisters and brothers, as family members and community members.

00:13:35.620 I actually had the opportunity to visit one of those facilities, the one that recently opened up in Red Deer.

00:13:40.900 How often would you say those facilities are at full capacity? There's just always people in them to

00:13:45.620 the brim. Well, ever since we opened them up, it's a staged opening. So we don't put the 75 folks in

00:13:51.540 the Red Deer facility in day one. They go through the cohort and they graduate in time. But we're running

00:13:57.380 at a very high capacity in the high 90s. If there's a bed open, it's really because it's earmarked to

00:14:03.060 someone who's coming out of detox and I'm just making sure they have that space open. We have two out of

00:14:07.860 11 open. When we have all 11 open, we'll have increased our capacity by 2,000 spaces per year.

00:14:14.740 And that 2,000 spaces is incredible because we're talking about the highest quality treatment,

00:14:19.380 up to one year of treatment, with social cycle supports, medical supports in that,

00:14:24.820 and work with a continuum of care where we're doing a warm handoff to where they're going to afterwards

00:14:30.500 as well. So the system we're building is universal in how it's trying to grab individuals and bring

00:14:38.900 them into care so that we can get them out the other side recovered and full of life and opportunity

00:14:44.820 again. I know your government is doing a lot of work on a recover-oriented system of care, but

00:14:50.740 overdoses in the province remain extremely high. They seem to just be going up and up and up.

00:14:55.380 One of the things I'm curious about is during the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw so much isolation. People

00:15:00.100 were told, stay in, don't go out, we're going to close your churches, we're going to close your

00:15:03.380 schools, we're going to close your place of work, and we're going to coerce you into being vaccinated. 0.96

00:15:07.700 And we saw mental health issues, you know, exponentially rise faster than we've probably

00:15:12.020 ever seen them rise in Canada. And I think a lot of people were turning to substances to sort of

00:15:16.740 alleviate some of the pain that they felt. How much of the overdoses that we're seeing now,

00:15:20.420 how much of the addiction crisis that we're seeing now would you attribute to COVID-19 policy?

00:15:25.300 Well, it's very hard for me to give any concrete numbers. It's tough to tease these things apart.

00:15:30.020 I'm sure there'll be lots of studying and data that will help inform academics to that end.

00:15:35.140 But I can tell you that isolation feeds addiction. Addiction, for example, in particular,

00:15:42.180 when you're talking about mental health challenges, addiction really is a disease of isolation,

00:15:46.740 of withdrawing into oneself, and not being able to look oneself in the mirror, not being able to

00:15:52.500 build relationships to others around in a meaningful and importantly healthy way. So often

00:16:01.140 addiction is a consequence of other trauma, other mental health issues, a sense of loneliness and

00:16:06.820 isolation. And so to rebuild that, we need to have these communities. And we saw numbers go up of

00:16:12.740 addiction for multiple reasons. One, for the reasons you said, you put a lot of money in someone's hand

00:16:17.300 who's struggling with addiction, and then you lock them away or say you effectively have to spend time

00:16:21.700 independently by yourself. That's not a recipe for a healthy outcome. But then also, we had to limit

00:16:28.660 our capacity and intake when it came to our treatment facilities, which we were just starting to ramp up

00:16:33.300 at the time. So it was something that was difficult for us as a government to try and manage both sides

00:16:40.100 of that balancing act. But I can tell you now, we are seeing a lot of important, important

00:16:46.580 facilities opening up that give us more capacity, and a lot of opportunity for people to get the

00:16:51.060 help they need. I'm looking forward on going full bar, and you know, both barrels all the way as hard

00:16:56.980 as I can to get these facilities open and get the capacity going again.

00:17:01.780 Minister, just my last question here before I let you go, your government announced a few months back

00:17:05.380 the creation of Recovery Alberta. So mental health and addiction services are going to be moved

00:17:10.100 from Alberta Health Services and to this new Recovery Alberta Ministry that will fall under

00:17:14.260 your department, of course. Wondering what the benefits are of moving this outside of AHS,

00:17:18.740 and whether it's still scheduled, these changes are still scheduled to go into effect beginning in July.

00:17:23.860 Yeah, we're hoping to be able to stand up on July 1st. We just passed one bill yesterday that's

00:17:30.260 necessary for standing up part of this around CORE, Canadian Centre Recovery Excellence, and we

00:17:35.460 introduced a new bill as well yesterday, so hopefully we'll have that figured out, and hopefully the

00:17:41.140 legislation passes. Now, the value of this is that we're focusing on mental health and addiction in

00:17:46.580 a serious way. AHS is a big organization. It's literally the biggest employer in the country,

00:17:52.340 126,000 staff plus. That doesn't include part-time, or pardon me, casual. You see over 18, 19 billion

00:18:01.460 dollar organization. Any one of the files that Minister of the Grange works on are massive and

00:18:06.580 consequential. You talk about emergency wait times, EMS response, talk about surgeries, all of this

00:18:14.180 adding up into what is a really important and complicated file. By taking mental health and

00:18:19.300 addiction out, me as a minister, as a full minister now, by taking the part of AHS that dealt with

00:18:26.100 mental health and addiction and giving it its own dedicated ministry and organization, that's

00:18:31.060 organizations now is going to be called Recovery Alberta, focusing on mental health and addiction

00:18:35.460 recovery for health. It allows us to focus on it in a really serious way, and to dig my shoulder

00:18:41.300 into the grindstone and make sure that we're getting the policy outcomes we need. Canadians

00:18:44.980 and Albertans are more aware of addiction and mental health in their families' communities

00:18:49.060 than ever before. It deserves its own committed funds, its own budget line, its own organization.

00:18:55.620 I can also change the culture, and AHS is an acute organization. Its culture is very different from

00:19:02.740 addressing a challenge and a crisis like addiction or mental health. Mental health and addiction crises are often

00:19:08.820 in the community. They're with family members. They're not in hospitals. If they've gotten to

00:19:13.540 the point you're in an emergency hospital, I mean, we're way at the far end of this. We need to address

00:19:18.020 this way before. And the culture of it can't just be acute, medicalized, pharmaceutical intervention

00:19:23.220 exclusively. I'm talking about building community. And you'll notice Recovery Alberta, the language itself

00:19:28.340 is about recovery and health. It's not just about responding in some medical way, but a healthy

00:19:34.180 individual and the wellness that they need. Even look at our logos. You see the semicircle of chairs

00:19:39.540 around the word recovery. It's talking about conversation and community coming together.

00:19:44.980 We need to take a very serious look at how we think about mental health and addiction in the West.

00:19:48.900 And if we over-pharmaceuticalize and intervene exclusively in this highly acute medical way,

00:19:54.500 we're going to be missing a lot of the important work that needs to happen before that's even started.

00:19:58.580 And that's what Recovery Alberta allows us to do. Minister, I know a lot of what you had to say and

00:20:03.220 what your government's doing on addictions will really resonate with my viewers. Thank you so much

00:20:06.340 for coming on today. Thanks for inviting me, Rachel. I hope I can be invited back. I really appreciate

00:20:10.580 the chance and the work you guys are doing. Yes, absolutely. We'll definitely have you back.

00:20:15.540 For the rest of you, I'll be back on Saturday with my regular programming and just a little tease for

00:20:19.220 you. I have a big story, but the United Conservative Party and some action they're taking against

00:20:23.380 COVID-19 vaccines, especially those for children. So you guys won't want to miss that. I'll see you all on

00:20:28.260 Saturday. Have a great week and God bless.

The Alberta Roundup with Isaac Lamoureux - May 16, 2024

Alberta minister slams “harm production” approach to drugs

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