Imagine this scenario: You’ve fed your cat and gone to bed. At 3:00 AM you waken to the sound of jack-booted thugs breaking down your door. But these are not thieves looking for your jewelry or cash. They are after something far more valuable: your freedom, your liberty, your sense of reality. They haul you roughly from your bed and forcefully remove you from your home, oblivious to your screams of protest, marching you unceremoniously out the door to their waiting, windowless van. You are whisked away in the night, your cat left to fend for itself, alone.
Against your protests, you are taken to a for-profit “addictions treatment” facility, where you are to be held against your will with the thousands of other citizens who have been similarly deprived of their freedom, without warrant, without charge, without trial, without justice, without appeal, without remedy, without due process, without compassion, and without reason, to be kept until you have served your purpose, and are no longer needed. You are no longer needed when the for-profit facility has achieved its main goal, and been paid thousands of dollars for your “treatment”.
And who pays the bill? The government. Who profits? Those private individuals who set up the “treatment” facilities, and the laws that permitted them, in the first place. Who suffers? You do, either as an involuntary inmate, or as a taxpayer who foots the bill, or both.
And what happens when you are released? You find yourself on the street, homeless, jobless, and cat-less. Your life has been destroyed. You are in a much worse, and much more vulnerable, position now than you were before being forcefully removed from your home and your life. Because of this exquisite torment visited upon you, and because of the dismal success rate of abstinence-based “treatment” programs (even when they are not run for profit), you find yourself seeking solace from the intolerable situation you find yourself in by turning to the momentary relief that dangerous street drugs can bring you. And the cycle begins again, but this time from a much more dangerous place.
These concentration-camp-like “treatment” centers are to be run on the same model as the American for-profit prisons: they need government-backed guarantees that their beds will always be full. Actually helping anyone to overcome their addiction would be counter-productive, and cut into profits. Follow the money, look to see who is advocating for these “treatment” centers, who plans to build, own, and operate them, and who stands to profit.
If this imaginative exercise seems too depraved and unconscionable to be taken seriously, do not be misled by your own sense of decency or goodness. The plan is real, the Conservative Party of Canada (and its leader, Pierre Poilievre) is behind it, and if it seems too dystopian to be anything but a flight of (dark) fantasy, consider for a moment what the Canadian Conservatives’ American cousins, the Magas and Trumpists, are planning for 2025. The movement is as widespread as it is dark, it is palpable and it is real, and is an urgent threat that casts its shadow over all of North America.
But in order to implement their nefarious plan, the Conservatives need to remove certain obstacles. That is why we in Canada have been bombarded by a coordinated effort to discredit and undermine the humane, effective, and moral treatment option that is already available: Safer supply programs.
Safer supply programs are not run for profit; in fact they struggle to get even the minimal funding that is needed to produce their very positive results. They work by providing safe, pharmaceutical-grade, fentanyl-free drugs to those who need it, and the drugs are carefully prescribed by doctors after an intensive assessment, with follow-up care provided.
In Canada, 22 people die every day from the toxic street drug supply. That’s almost one every hour. But in the few places that have safe supply programs, that number is far lower. Thousands of peoples’ lives have already been saved through such programs. But though they are small in scope, they pack an outsized punch, delivering huge benefits in terms of lives saved, increased health and well-being, improved quality of life, and an improved society that cares for those who fall through the cracks.
Far from profiting from their low-paid work, harm-reduction and safer-supply workers face some of the worst working conditions of anyone in our society. They are so close to the pain of those they aid, and see so clearly the results of the harshness our society inflicts upon its most vulnerable souls, that they cannot but absorb some of that pain themselves. They can only dissociate so much before the dam breaks, and their defences are overwhelmed. And then they burn out.
Far from the safety of an administrators’ desk in a for-profit “treatment” center, or in some government office where they are protected by layers of self-serving laws of their own making, these people work on the frontlines, not of the war on drugs, but of the war on people who use drugs. These are the doctors who risk their reputations and put themselves in jeopardy by prescribing safer supply to their patients, and the nurses and front-line staff who not only go unrecognized each day, but worse, are vilified in the right-wing press, in carefully-planned opinion pieces (that are really hit pieces targeting specific doctors), and in the hate-filled invective of intentionally provocative Conservative campaign speeches, penned by those who would eliminate them from society, and would profit from the unremitting suffering that would be inflicted upon the Canadian population with their draconian policies.
As unbelievable as it sounds, this really is the plan proposed by the Conservative Party: to involuntarily commit any citizen they choose to a for-profit treatment center that they will build and run, and which the government will pay for. It is a means of punishing those they dislike (the cruelty is the point, right?), while simultaneously mining the Canadian government for all the (filthy?) lucre they can extract from it.
Is this who you want to run the country? Do not vote Conservative if you value liberty, decency, democracy, or a society worth living in.
For more information about Canada’s safer supply program, which is facing a complete funding cut from the Conservative Party if they win the next election, visit this website.