For months, columnists at outlets like The Globe and Mail and The National Post have been normalizing government policies that strip people of their autonomy and force them into treatment—all under the guise of compassion.
Some of these opinion pieces come from individuals with ties to private clinics—which stand to profit from forced abstinence policies—who fail to disclose their obvious conflicts of interest.
Despite decades of evidence showing that involuntary treatment increases harm and fails to support long-term abstinence, several provincial legislatures are proposing to forcibly “treat” people for drug use.
Research has shown that people in long-term treatment do best when they enter voluntarily and that there is no sound evidence to support coercion.
So why is the public hearing a chorus of calls to expand this failed approach?
With the increasing visibility of poverty across Canada and a toxic drug crisis that shows no signs of ending, several provincial legislatures are resorting to policies like forced treatment to deflect attention away from their own failures that created these crises in the first place.
It’s pretty simple to me: the public likes that drug users are being coercively pushed into rehab because it gets them off the streets where they don’t have to see them and know there’s an issue.
I live in Ottawa: there’s at least one person begging for change or hanging out at every intersection, you can’t ignore it. Some people are just relieved to have them go away, they don’t care where or if it’s a good place.
It’s also much easier to round people up and force them to go somewhere else than it is for them to be in the position to seek help for themselves.
I think it’s simpler than that. The public likes to see drug users get punished. They like to think of them as bad people and like to see bad things happen to them.