00:00:29.280My name is Liam Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard. And if you've been keeping
00:00:33.920up with news out of BC, you'd know BC may have resorted to an actual logical policy. Well, at
00:00:41.320least they've scrapped one policy that's proved completely illogical. This infamous policy was
00:00:47.760introduced back in 2023, which led to the drug-addled homeless population growing on BC
00:00:53.560these streets. This policy decriminalized drugs to, as the BC government stated, reduce the stigma
00:01:00.540surrounding drugs so they can support people to access important health and social services.
00:01:07.120If you live in any major city in Canada, you've witnessed the epidemic of the opioid crisis.
00:01:13.920This is an issue not just in Canada, but internationally. However, it is exacerbated
00:01:20.140by bad policy which canada seems to specialize in whenever you've walked downtown in your canadian
00:01:27.020city i bet you've seen homeless addicts daily on the streets and although many don't like to admit
00:01:33.900it these people are clearly a danger not only to themselves but to bystanders normal citizens
00:01:40.620walking around the city who at any moment could be attacked by these people let's be clear obviously
00:01:47.500not all of these people are aggressive. Some may even be friendly, if a bit out of it, but that's
00:01:52.800not the point. It's like rolling a dice, and the odds that they're dangerous are much higher than
00:01:57.720if it were, say, a sober person functioning member of society. This is supported by psychology. A
00:02:03.7002019 psychiatry study found that substance-induced psychosis, especially from cannabis,
00:02:09.460amphetamines, and hallucinogens, can lead to schizophrenia. About one in four people with
00:02:15.480substance-induced psychosis later developed schizophrenia, with cannabis posing the highest
00:02:19.920risk. You need not look any further than the celebrity examples, which may not be Canadian,
00:02:25.840but still show the same chronic inability to get those people off the streets. If you're around my
00:02:31.400age, you would know a Nickelodeon child actor named Tyler Chase. Known for a role in the show
00:02:37.540Ned Declassified School Survival Guide, Chase played Martin Qualley, which was more of a side
00:02:43.580character. The point is, if you've ever asked, I wonder where he is now? Most of us would now know
00:02:50.780he resides on California streets, homeless and addicted to drugs. His story lays out the
00:02:58.020overshadowing question of, what do we do with these addicts and how do we actually help them?
00:03:04.700His fellow co-star Daniel Curtis Lee tried to do just that, visiting Tyler during Christmas and
00:03:11.140setting him up in a hotel room, the only problem was, according to TMZ, Tyler trashed the place
00:03:17.580only a few hours later. Motel employees had called Daniel to inform him that the room was
00:03:23.940left wide open, the fridge was flipped over, and the microwave was in the tub. Apparently,
00:03:29.860Tyler's family had warned Daniel that putting him in hotel rooms was a bad idea based on previous
00:03:36.040experience of doing something similar. Another actor, Sean Wise, who starred in Mighty Ducks,
00:03:41.780had a rehab room for him waiting, but Tyler refused. If anything, this story shows what's
00:03:48.080going on on my city streets as well as probably yours. It becomes clear what the homeless population
00:03:54.240is actually going through. Most of them are not alone, but are choosing to isolate themselves
00:04:00.040and live without shelter. Reflecting on the experience, Daniel said something particularly
00:04:05.580important. California's policies are broken. California is a blue democratic state.
00:04:14.000Its policies surrounding addiction parallels some of BCs, like their safe supply. Known as
00:04:23.680the National Harm Reduction Program, which includes syringe service programs and safer smoking kits
00:04:29.560to name a few. BC had their own safe supply and even went further by initially allowing people
00:04:37.680to possess small amounts, up to 2.5 grams, of illegal substances for personal use. So what do
00:04:45.820you do to help recover these people? And what do you do with people who seem to want to isolate
00:04:51.120and give up on themselves? According to more than 20 years of research by Julian Summers,
00:04:56.520a clinical psychologist at simon fraser university specializing in homelessness and addiction what
00:05:03.320the government can do has a lot to do with giving people purpose so welcome julian thank you for
00:05:10.680joining us today for pleasure leo great to be talking with you it really is okay well i just
00:05:17.960wanted to um you've done some really interesting research on addiction um and recovery of addiction
00:05:25.640and how to help people who are dealing with homelessness. So I wanted to just ask you,
00:05:31.080let's get straight into the topic, and why don't you tell audience members what your research was
00:05:35.640about and how long it lasted for? Wow. Well, the research that you're, I think,
00:05:43.160drawing most attention to was kind of the product of a progression that started out in the late
00:05:51.0801980s, early 90s, looking at brief interventions with people and short courses of psychotherapy
00:05:58.520with people, but also really paying attention to the other things like non-therapeutic or
00:06:05.460non-professional things that really seemed to make a difference helping people to overcome
00:06:11.160addictions. And where that work led me and my colleagues over a number of years was to focus
00:06:18.960on the people who seem to have the most complex addictions, the most severe addictions, the
00:06:24.680greatest risks related to their addictions, and find out what were the most effective ways of
00:06:31.000helping them to escape from that type of risk, to escape from the circumstances that they were
00:06:37.380living in and pursue just vastly greater well-being, as well as overcoming their addictions.
00:06:46.940And one of the things that we found using randomized controlled trials was that when we compared the types of housing people had, whether it was housing with other people, for instance, who had experienced homeless addictions and housing them all together with supports, or usual care in Vancouver, which is a mix of low barrier facilities and fairly intermittent forms of support.
00:07:13.700we contrasted those with providing people with choices of housing in healthy buildings where
00:07:22.380they were where our clients were one of the only people coming from our service into that building
00:07:28.740so basically the composition of the buildings was otherwise just organic and we provided them with
00:07:35.02024 7 supports in in that in those uh apartments we found that compared to the other two conditions
00:07:42.140housing people altogether with supports or usual care, that only the people that got the choices
00:07:48.900of housing in healthy settings improved dramatically. 71% less likely to be criminally
00:07:56.680convicted, 45% less likely to have medical emergencies. This is in the very first year
00:08:02.460after being randomized. And their descriptions of their experiences were very unlike those that we
00:08:11.340heard from the people housed together and the people in usual care they they talked about
00:08:15.700experiencing a just a new lease on life a new sense of identity new opportunities and those
00:08:22.920were layered on top of having new responsibilities they had places now that they cared about that
00:08:29.560mattered to them and they were orienting their attention more and more to building on those
00:08:36.040achievements and protecting the things that they had taken responsibility for so that they didn't
00:08:42.700have to worry about losing them. Wow, that's okay. That's really cool. I wanted to ask as well,
00:08:50.820so do you think the reason why people have such a significant recovery difference
00:08:57.780in that circumstance is because it's just like a big part of it is like the people they're
00:09:04.980surrounded by like they're not surrounded by people who are also addicted to substances and
00:09:09.460stuff so maybe they're more influenced by people who are living more like just normal lives
00:09:14.460yeah that that in fact is is very much what our clients told us so as part of this research we
00:09:22.520were looking at multiple ways of measuring what was happening in their lives one of the
00:09:30.700key sources of measurement was simply talking to them. We also looked at things like administrative
00:09:35.460records, so like hospital records and criminal justice records, with their consent, and lots
00:09:42.700and lots of different questionnaires. And that is exactly what they said, that it was for many
00:09:48.440people, the first time in their life that they felt that they were being treated as a normal
00:09:56.560person without constraints. And that's kind of an important, I guess, finding that emerged from
00:10:10.300our work. There are a lot of people who experience homelessness. There are a lot of people who
00:10:16.120experience addictions and other forms of mental illness. The characteristics of the people who
00:10:22.860kind of get stuck in homelessness with addictions, it's not a random cross-section of society.
00:10:31.500What we see when we look at their pasts is really shockingly high levels of what we call
00:10:39.580adverse childhood experiences, forms of abuse, forms of neglect. We were recruiting the people
00:10:46.620who were regarded by people in the downtown east side of Vancouver as being the hardest to house,
00:10:51.940the least likely to get assistance. And when we identified that group, about 500 people,
00:10:58.480when we identified them, about 25% had been in foster care. A minority of them had grown up
00:11:06.340knowing their biological parents. And on top of that, they had these, as I said earlier,
00:11:12.780these just shockingly high rates of adverse childhood experiences.
00:11:19.520So they were, in a way, kind of psychosocially starved.
00:11:26.760And the fact that they oriented to this experience of being treated with dignity, with respect,
00:11:35.060some of them described initially, like, I feel like I'm faking it as a normal person.
00:11:41.140and and eventually though that that wore off and and they began to feel like actually i am a normal
00:11:48.000person and they could start turning their attention to things that that had really mattered
00:11:52.580to them and that they had kind of avoided thinking about like returning to paid work
00:11:58.380or reconnecting with their own kids about a quarter of our clients had kids under the age of
00:12:05.22018 that they were estranged from. And just, you know, when you're living in shelters or a low
00:12:11.960barrier facility, an encampment, struggling with addiction, it's very common for people to really
00:12:18.640banish all thoughts of those kinds of connections to society, of paid work, of family and things
00:12:26.220like that it's too painful but you know what we learned is that um people uh hang on they're
00:12:35.220they're surviving and part of what they're surviving for they may not even know this but
00:12:40.200what what we learned is part of what they may be surviving for is the chance the the hope
00:12:46.020that one day they may actually have an opportunity to experience that kind of respect and support
00:12:52.600and uh what we found as as i said earlier is the results are transformative wow that's very cool
00:13:00.680um i also quickly i wanted to touch as well on just the i did a story on this a while back but
00:13:08.620originally i think global did it on uh you talked to david eby when he was the housing minister of
00:13:14.300bc back in i think it was 2021 right yeah um okay yeah so and you basically told him all this
00:13:22.580research that you've been discussing here right now with us and he apparently the government
00:13:28.660deleted the data on this so and then they went with obviously the decriminalization stuff but
00:13:33.860they scrapped it now it's officially scrapped so i wanted to ask you what do you think the
00:13:40.420consequences of them implementing the policy they have now scrapped were on the province of bc and
00:13:47.060And do you have any hope that they actually might implement your research in the future?
00:20:04.120I think if you think about, at least with respect to addiction, harmful addictions, the most compelling, overarching way to think about who's at risk or what puts people at risk is to think about this construct of psychosocial integration.
00:20:29.080It means being connected to other people, being connected to things that matter, things that matter so much that, you know, you or I, many of our colleagues are not really thinking about, you know, going to the dark web later today and purchasing drugs or going to a dealer and purchasing drugs.
00:20:51.620I'm not referring to occasional use or that sort of thing, but really harmful addictions.
00:20:59.180And it is when people are, this is consistent over time.
00:21:04.040There's a lot of research on this, the link between psychosocial integration and risk
00:21:10.700There's also a lot of research like our work showing that social reintegration is one of
00:21:16.260the most powerful causes of helping people to overcome their addictions.
00:21:21.620So that's true for other forms of mental illness, too. Very common forms of mental illness include anxiety or mood disorders, depression. And unfortunately, the symptoms that arise when we experience these syndromes operate as negative feedback loops.
00:21:42.820So depression tends to leave us feeling as though we can't get outside when getting outside and doing things is exactly what we need to do. Anxiety disorders tend to keep us removed from things that we associate with anxiety and so never actually testing or reality testing some of our irrational beliefs and keeping us stuck there.
00:22:03.720And addiction the same, the continual distraction, distracting our brains from the world and the painfulness of the world that we live in, means that we're always hampered in our capacity to actually do things that might be necessary to get out of that state.
00:22:26.240So these symptoms themselves tend to be mutually exacerbating. But in the background, and so
00:22:34.480someone might say, well, okay, so in a roundabout way, what you're saying is, yeah, they do cause
00:22:38.380each other. And there is evidence showing that if you have a diagnosis with a non-substance-related
00:22:45.560disorder, you're at much higher risk of developing a substance use disorder, and the other way
00:22:50.860around. The thing I'm trying to emphasize, though, is that in the case of all of these symptom
00:22:56.360clusters, there's another factor that may actually be more important than these interactions. And
00:23:03.260that is, what are the conditions that people are living in? What are the opportunities that they
00:23:08.160have to be engaged in meaningful lives and lives that are sufficiently meaningful that it'll
00:23:14.020motivate them to occasionally challenge some of their symptoms? Like, I don't want to do this
00:23:20.080today, but I know I should, I know I must. And in the case of addiction, there's really nothing
00:23:27.620else that has the power and the capability to help people overcome addictions. There's no
00:23:36.980biological test for an addiction. There's no medication that treats addiction. Addiction,
00:23:44.400I haven't said this yet, but at the core of diagnosing addiction is the experience of a loss
00:23:51.660of control over something that's harmful. Okay, so loss of control. And people describe this
00:23:57.380whenever you talk to them about their addictions. There's no medication that treats loss of control.
00:24:05.060There are medications that may reduce some of the harms associated with having an addiction.
00:24:09.040that's not treating an addiction though the only things that treat addictions are things that occur
00:24:14.900in our social world okay well let's see oh okay another good one i wanted to ask you about
00:24:24.680um okay yeah so in on your website you have a few booklets but in one of them you uh stated a bunch
00:24:34.820of facts. For example, between 2010 and 2017, the rate of people having schizophrenia, bipolar
00:24:42.860disorder, and substance abuse doubled, actually, in BC. So why do you think this is?
00:24:54.060So this is actually a phenomenon we see in a number of places around the world in roughly
00:25:00.900the same era and the most compelling explanation i have for why this occurred um when when in
00:25:09.540previous years the trend lines were more stable um is to look to the global financial crisis
00:25:16.660and the impact that had between 2008 and 2010 on among other things uh public services social
00:25:24.820services to support people, and also opportunities in lives. We saw the beginnings of big changes
00:25:32.660in the economy, in infrastructure, and changes that, among other things, gave rise to what we
00:25:43.100refer to as deaths of despair. So this is a combination of suicide, alcohol, deaths from
00:25:50.860alcohol-related causes, and deaths from drugs. And all of these began to surge, especially in
00:25:58.600North America, in that same 2010 onward period. We also saw the OxyContin crisis or OxyCrisis.
00:26:09.820And people who are on the inside in pharma are well aware of the fact that
00:26:17.180But areas that have what we rate as higher scores on deprivation, these are the areas where you're most likely to find customers for drugs like opioids.
00:26:34.880And that's true whether you're selling on behalf of pharma or selling on behalf of cartels or illicit traffickers.
00:26:43.880traffickers. The same knowledge applies. So we have these macro trends occurring. And at the same
00:26:52.360time in BC, where these numbers came from, we had no increase in our capacity to either prevent harm
00:27:01.780or help people to reenter society. Mechanisms that we had in place that had been shown to achieve
00:27:07.680that when people were in crisis include drug treatment court, community court, so their
00:27:13.160specialized justice programs that aim to keep people out of prison by incentivizing them and
00:27:18.600supporting them to re-enter society, maintain jobs, avoid addiction, avoid crime. And it takes
00:27:26.920resources, yes. It takes the same resources that we've used in our voluntary interventions.
00:27:32.880But we did none of that. And so as a consequence, we saw not only rising rates of diagnosis,
00:27:38.740But a higher percentage of people with diagnoses, including addiction diagnoses, winding up being involuntarily admitted to hospital and sentenced for crimes or simply detained in our correctional facilities.
00:27:55.160And that percentage went up at the same time that the average number of prior convictions doubled, nearly doubled from about three and a half to six point something average convictions per person.
00:28:07.500So we had very clear evidence already by 2021, in fact, earlier than that, that we had a very severe social crisis unfolding that definitely involved addiction, but it often involved addiction along with other mental illnesses.
00:28:24.540And there was, unfortunately, no willingness on the part of this government to acknowledge those facts and then do the things that were known at the time to best help people who were in those crises.
00:28:39.860Okay. I also wanted to ask you about, okay, so you said in I think the same book that I was
00:28:50.920referencing before, oh yeah, the BC hospitals increased by 50% in that time period. Okay,
00:29:00.600yes. So I wanted to ask you, if this were to be implemented, all the research you were doing and
00:29:06.800the things you're advocating for, do you think that this would actually decrease hospital wait
00:29:12.700times as well? Because if there's less people, you know, in hospitals, yeah, there would be more
00:29:17.460room, there'd be more resources. Yeah, I go even further. So I've been working in the area.
00:29:26.980One of the themes that my work has addressed over many years now is primary health care reform.
00:29:34.560And this is primarily, so our GPs and family doctors are the people we're most likely to see in our system of care and people who are most likely to prescribe treatments for mental disorders.
00:29:52.680And, but their ability to help people is completely dependent on the resources that they have available to refer to.
00:30:02.260So when those resources are few and when the burden of addiction and other mental illness is going up and up and becoming more complex, there is like almost a breaking point that we reach.
00:30:16.980This is not only true in the primary care setting, it's true in the hospital setting, as you're referring to.
00:30:22.880One of our publications from two years ago looked at about 5,000 people who had been admitted to St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver for an addiction or other mental illness.
00:30:35.140They stayed in the hospital for, on average, several weeks, and one in five of them were discharged to no fixed address, essentially homelessness.
00:30:44.720No surprise, those people were very likely to be readmitted to the hospital. And you can only imagine the sense of futility among clinical staff and just how crazy making it would be to spend weeks and weeks of clinical time and expertise helping someone to establish a level of stability and well-being.
00:31:08.020And to be doing that on behalf of taxpayers, this is something that we're all paying for this, knowing that it's very likely that when the person is best ready to leave, you're going to be putting them back out into a situation that's very rapidly going to undo all of the good work that you've done, and you're going to be seeing them again.
00:31:27.860So this is literally a crazy-making environment. Now I'm referring to the hospital context here, but of course, you can think across many, many, many groups in society, first responders, who literally can develop relationships on a first-name basis with the people that they're resuscitating because they're doing it so regularly.
00:31:53.500And no one is coming in to fundamentally rescue those individuals so that they don't need to be resuscitated another time.
00:32:02.480Business operators, family members, community members who are suddenly expected to become tolerant of stepping over people or walking around people, walking around human excrement on our sidewalks, that this is something we're supposed to tolerate all of a sudden.
00:32:21.660And all of this is really, I describe this as essentially the elements that make up mass addiction. When addiction reaches a certain prevalence point in society, these kinds of additional effects are almost ubiquitous in our communities.
00:32:43.480And the effects I'm describing are not people who are also experiencing addictions. They're people who are experiencing very, very serious harms that are a result of having so many people who experience addictions.
00:32:59.320So all of this, unfortunately, means that we will inevitably, in places like BC, other places that experience mass addiction, we will, in a matter of time, experience a breaking point.
00:33:15.220And we can redirect our policies prior to that, recognizing that that's where we're heading.
00:33:24.020And I hope that's actually what we're going to do next in BC. Because if we don't do that, then the crisis just continues to escalate. And it sets the stage for other forms of turnaround that are not so democratic, not so gradual and well thought out, more abrupt. And we've seen that, unfortunately, historically as well.
00:33:48.000hmm okay well i got one more question for you julian um do you think not only would your
00:33:56.440research maybe be implemented in bc but do you think other provinces might be interested in
00:34:00.920doing something similar yeah so i i i became uh absolutely persona non grata in bc around the end
00:34:10.160of 2021. And my research career was essentially terminated in BC at that time, but only in
00:34:22.380BC. So other provinces, other states, other countries have been very interested in our
00:34:30.320work and in the work of other teams that's very closely related. So I've had the real
00:34:38.240pleasure of being able to advise other governments. And in those cases, the changes are not, you know,
00:34:46.240it's not straightforward, of course, changing government policies, especially when, you know,
00:34:51.160people sometimes have a real affection for them. But, you know, you can look across the country
00:34:58.960in Canada, and currently, there are a number of places, Alberta, Ontario are probably leading
00:35:05.920examples of provincial governments that are going in sort of an opposite direction toward
00:35:11.700what we refer to as a recovery-oriented system. No one is, and this is true internationally,
00:35:19.500maybe the lone exception I can think of is Scotland, where there's a potential jurisdiction
00:35:27.100still thinking of emulating what BC tried, this decriminalization, pharma-first
00:35:35.320type of an approach. But I don't think, I mean, there are powerful, powerful advocates for
00:35:44.600recovery in Scotland. Favor UK is one in England and Scotland. And I think that the more they
00:35:53.800are able to show that places like BC are admitting defeat on that suite of policies,
00:36:02.280that it becomes very unlikely that any place in the world is going to want to emulate what bc
00:36:09.000tried to do right it's like an example for everyone wow okay well thank you again jolene
00:36:17.160i really appreciate you joining us today it's my pleasure okay and if you guys enjoyed this
00:36:23.800video you should definitely check out the rest of our videos where we have more
00:36:28.520great information and news also check out our actual site for news it's westernstandard.news
00:36:36.280and yeah thanks everyone for joining and see you next time