Premier announces major funding boost for recovery treatment but critics and advocates say the approach will not help most vulnerable.
EDMONTON—It was a signature Jason Kenney moment — standing on top of a building in Edmonton’s Ice District, the outgoing premier announced $124 million to help get more people into addiction treatment.But it didn’t take long for combative Kenney to emerge.
“I believe that the alternative approach, which we see creating a catastrophic outcome in B.C., of destigmatizing dangerous drug use, and in fact facilitating it, in fact legalizing it, I think that is consigning people trapped in addiction to basically slow-motion palliative care.” All of this was undertaken while Alberta consistently recorded Canada’s second-highest number of drug poisoning deaths per capita, after B.C. In 2021, 1,823 people in Alberta of drug poisoning, the highest number on record. The vast majority of those were due to contaminated opioids.
“In Alberta, it’s like this rhetorical war. It’s the land of free-market capitalism, the land of pull yourself up by the bootstraps, the Protestant work ethic — these are the foundational cowboy-hat myths of Alberta,” Mullins said. “And they just collide with harm reduction.” “What Jason Kenney is really saying is that he doesn’t approve of places where people will be saved if they inject poison into their bodies and overdose,” MacPherson said. “No one wants people injecting poison into their bodies. But they are, in big- and small-town Alberta every day and every night. So the whole point is to provide better safety for those people.”
One of the Kenney government’s legacies will be moving away from services aimed at vulnerable people, such as supervised consumption sites, and introducing supports for more affluent citizens, such as an app that alerts emergency services if someone is overdosing when using alone, said Rebecca Haines-Saah, an associate professor of community health sciences at the University of Calgary.
The government said this week its new regulations would expand access to medication for people with severe opioid addiction and “protect the public” from high-risk opioids. But MacPherson said it does the opposite. But some of Day’s colleagues argue the ultimate effect of the new regulations is restricting access to high-potency opioids to “very specific settings and very specific circumstances” dictated by the government, said Elaine Hyshka, an associate professor in the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health.
She said she requires a shot every day at 3 a.m. and it takes about two hours to get to her nearest clinic. “The vast majority of overdoses are linked to illegal street drugs. And so restricting access to these pharmaceutical grade alternatives that people are potentially being stabilized on is really solving a problem we don’t have,” she said.