Are involuntary treatment hospital rooms the solution Alberta needs?

0:00As I was mentioning, I want to talk about, I mean, depends on which side of the coin you're on, involuntary treatment or compassionate care. Of course, when it comes to opioid overdoses and Canada, there are three provinces that have consistently been among the highest per capita in terms of deaths. Alberta, BC, and Ontario, they're leading the way, unfortunately still, and perhaps not surprisingly, because of that, there's been a lot of push in those provinces to move towards, as they say, either involuntary treatment or compassionate care, depending on what your perspective is, when it comes to severe cases. Alberta is leading the charge on this, if you will. They passed the Compassionate Care Act last May, which allows a family member, guardian, health care professional, even a police officer, to apply for an order to have a person who's used, drugged, and apprehended, and have them involuntarily committed to treatment, if it's determined they're going to cause harm to themselves or others. All of this involves building specific facilities in Edmonton and Calgary. Those are expected to be finished by 2029. And in the interim, we got some news today from the province that seven and a half million bucks has been put up to create a hundred secure beds in hospital now. But critics argue that

1:03the beds and the broader plan are fraught with issues. And I want to get some we've had on the show here, get his take on this and try to assess what the government's saying on this. So, welcoming back to the show writer at drug data, as well as the co-founder of each plus every a national business coalition supporting humane and evidence-based drug policy, you and Thompson, on the show with us again. Good afternoon to you. Good afternoon, Courtney. Happy St. Patty's day. Indeed. Obviously, I wish we had a better story to talk about, something a little bit more celebratory, but it's a real conversation that we need to have. And as I mentioned, yeah, this was Brett McKay was the writer on this, who found all this information, went through the numbers. And he found that, yeah, these beds are being put into hospitals, a hundred secure beds, an Edmonton, Pinocca, Clare's Home Lockheed Grand Prairie ahead of these new facilities being built in 2029. I'd love to hear your thoughts as someone who's done a lot of deep diving into this. What your thoughts are about these beds being put into a hospital setting.

2:06Yeah, there are some researchers and physicians out there right now really ringing the alarm about this issue of pulling hospital beds away from people who need them inside of hospitals and and turning them over to this completely unproven approach by the provincial government to expand what amounts to essentially jailing people for using drugs with no evidence at all, for that that it's going to work. In fact, the government's own researchers put out a systematic review of the literature showing that there is no evidence to support the creation of this agantic sweeping system across the province and yet here we are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into it, including pulling beds away from hospitals. Well, with respect to this here, the province says they're going to have the necessary staff, they're going to have the resources for patients and that there's an argument to be made. I think that as you do try something like this out here in Alberta for the first time that perhaps the hospital setting is the best setting because these might be individuals who might encounter very serious medical conditions just

3:10because of their situation, of what they're dealing with. What do you make of those arguments? If that was the argument here, then you'd expect them to be building out a more comprehensive continuum of care. You know, a lot of different options for different people with different needs, but actually what the government is doing is closing down a lot of different services such as the hospital-based supervised consumption site in Edmonton that they closed several months ago and replacing those with unproven and untested strategies like these essentially drug jails inside of hospitals. So, you know, we can pilot stuff, we can try it out. I will also bring up that we've been trying medical incarceration of people who use drugs for a century now, and look where we are with the crisis. This isn't working. Canada already has the highest rate of medical incarceration of people for mental health issues in the Western hemisphere, and you could make the argument that that's a big part of the reason why we're in the crisis

4:12that we're in right now. Well, I guess the flip side of the coin on that would be from, you know, the pro perspective is that, you know, you have seen some needle movement on this, obviously, a lot, you know, the premier likes to point to Portugal. A lot of different pieces involved in the conversation with what's happening over there, including decriminalization. But this would be the first instance of this being done for this specific cause in Canada. And the sense is, according to the leaders of this saying that we are going to learn from mistakes that other people have made with this, and we've evaluated the missteps that have been made, and we figure, you know what, given the fact that we're still struggling with this, that, you know, it's like you throw spaghetti at the wall and you see what sticks. Yeah, and this is a great thing about having data that we've been pulling on all of these different types of strategies for decades now. And the province has been relentlessly closing down all the strategies that actually work that have data supporting them and replacing them with ones that don't. So that's the thing that's

5:15really confusing about this whole strategy. You know, if you want to talk about evaluations, why isn't the province releasing data for independent researchers to work with? Why are they publishing fraudulent studies by people inside the government with undisclosed conflicts of interest who are very likely making money off of these strategies so that they can prove the strategies that the government wants them to prove? I mean, this is an absolute outrage and fraudulent use of science, what they're doing here, to try and shore up their own political maneuvering, people who are essentially just politicians operating within the space of scientific exploration. Yeah, I think just in that statement there, you were acknowledging a study that was put up by the Canadian Center of Recovery Excellence, which as you point out is a government corporation. And their data found that to the closing of the Red Deer overdose prevention site that did not lead to more deaths, more ER visits, more ambulance calls. And in fact, there are data,

6:17which says that, in fact, more people accepted treatment on that route. And from the sounds of it, you're calling bull honky on that. Yeah, that study I actually was pouring through thousands of emails from inside the government while the government was preparing all of the data for this study. And I uncovered some pretty alarming things about it, including the fact that they don't even know who's been going to supervise consumption sites. The entire data set is in question. They're trying to base this on personal health numbers, but they don't even know who's been trading around personal health numbers who's actually showed up at these sites. Their entire data set is garbage based on, it appears based on the fact that the personal health number data is completely in question. So that's a big problem with it. I mean, there were undisclosed conflicts of interest among authors that published this study, 10 of 11 of the study authors are in the government. And two of them are pretty big UCP donors, so the tune of thousands

7:20of dollars. So I don't think that we should be publishing this study and making policy based on studies written by people who have that level of political involvement with the policy direction of our province. And people who, in some cases, stand to actually benefit financially from these decisions. Yeah, well, I mean, at the end of the day, I think we all kind of want the same thing, but it does feel like we're having a difficulty getting on the same page and relying on data, because you think data would not lie, but alas, here we are. You and I appreciate you coming on in Chadden about the lay of the land and where we are with this in early parts of 2026. Of course, Gordon, anytime. Thanks so much. There you go. That's you and Thompson, writer, a drug data decoder and co-founder of each and every. That's a national business coalition supporting humane and evidence-based drug policy.