After an emotional rally on Wednesday, the minister of health is “looking closely” at the policy on involuntary care
Keith Fitzpatrick’s story of addiction begins like so many others: with a painkiller prescription.
“I wasn’t picking it up around the corner and seeing a dealer,” Fitzpatrick said. “Doctors were the ones who tried to help me. But in the early 2000s, people didn’t really know that these drugs could cause problems.
Fitzpatrick, who is now a father and an advocate for mental health and lives in Labrador City, says it took him years to realize he was physically and mentally dependent on the pills that were supposed to help him deal with trauma.
Before he was ready to detox, he had to wait 20 years and come close to dying several times.
“Stopping wasn’t enough for me. “A couple of times I was legally dead, but I still used,” he said.
“People have to decide for themselves how to stay alive. We can’t make it happen. No one could make me do it. I had to wait until I was ready.”
Fitzpatrick agreed to talk to CBC News about his experience because of a recent public push for forced addiction treatment, which has been tried in the U.S. and is now being looked at by the Alberta government.
On Wednesday, about 100 people gathered in St. John’s for a rally to ask the provincial government to implement “compassionate involuntary care.”
They want the province to make it legal for family members to send loved ones to rehab without their permission.
Nathan Wicks Parsons, a 21-year-old recovering addict who went to the rally, told CBC News that when he was using drugs, his mind was so clouded that he couldn’t make good decisions, and those decisions almost cost him his life.
“When you’re dealing with an illness that makes the people who have it not believe they’re sick, we need to step in and say, ‘Hey, someone else needs to help take care of that person, because they can’t take care of themselves,'” he said.
“If it wasn’t for my mom, I probably would be dead.”
At the rally on Wednesday, Health Minister Tom Osborne said that his department was “looking closely” at that policy to see if it could be used in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Treatment that isn’t wanted could kil
But Fitzpatrick says that making someone go to treatment will fail at best and kill them at worst.
“Most of the time, you’re forced to go to rehab even if you don’t want to. The less you use drugs, the less your body can handle them. Fitzpatrick said, “When you leave, you pick up right where you left off, and then you overdose right away.”
“I would have been in jail. And I can tell you right now that if I had been locked up, I probably wouldn’t be alive today because I didn’t want to be there. That’s what’s scary about being forced to do something. In fact, there is no proof that it works.”
Fitzpatrick talks about the moment, 20 years into his addiction, when he had a moment of clarity and decided he’d had enough. He says that the only way to help addicts is to have a strong health care system that is also affordable.
“There is a problem in this province, and we need to talk about it in an open and honest way. He said, “People are dying.”
“We need places where people who want help can get it and the ability to help them. We need safe materials, safe places to inject, and naloxone kits.”
Evidence limite
In the United States, there are already laws that allow people to be treated against their will. Since the 1970s, “Section 35,” a law in Massachusetts, has forced tens of thousands of people to go to treatment. With this system, family members, doctors, or police officers can ask a judge for a warrant to arrest someone who is using drugs.
The person being held, who may or may not have broken any laws, then goes to court, where a judge decides whether to put them through detox in jail or in rehab.
There isn’t a lot of research on whether these laws help or hurt people with addictions, but a 2016 review of studies on mandatory treatment found that “the majority of studies failed to detect any significant positive effects on drug use.”
Nick Boyce, a senior policy expert with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, says that people who die of an overdose aren’t always people who have a problem with drugs.
“Not everyone’s use of drugs is addiction,” he said.
“Most people actually use [substances] in ways that don’t cause problems. It’s something fun to do sometimes. And those are the people who are most likely to overdose because they can’t handle as much.
Boyce said that forced treatment usually goes against international agreements on human rights, autonomy, and medical ethics, which can cause more people to die.
“It might seem like we’re doing the right thing, but if people aren’t ready for treatment, it can actually increase the chances of people dying because they weren’t ready,” he said.
“Why do we need laws that force people to get treatment when we don’t even have treatment that people can get on their own?”
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