Vancouver Drug User Advocates Denounce Government Plans for Involuntary Treatment

200 protesters rallied at Victory Square in Vancouver following an announcement by the Eby administration to force drug users into involuntary treatment at carceral facilities, a move that enrages civil rights advocates.

The event was endorsed by no less than seventeen organisations, including the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), the Pivot Legal Society, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War (CPDDW), and Moms Stop The Harm. In contrast, the only conspicuously absent entity was the Vancouver Police Department.

Guest speakers had no nice words for the Premier’s initiative. All of them have, one way or another, accused him of waging a war on poverty. As usual, advocates’ recriminations revolve around a system that sees drug users as patients with diagnoses as opposed to clients with needs, rationalised by ideology instead of science. One in particular who went through the whole process of being apprehended under the Mental Health Act described it as “infantilising” and lamented that none of its actors would acknowledge she used drugs for legitimate purposes.

Of course this is only the latest step in escalating interaction between drug users and law enforcement, which sports horrible kill streaks when answering mental health calls. And as usual the impact shall prove particularly blunt on vulnerable minorities such as the indigenous community. Investing more into the criminalisation of poverty as opposed to social services is certain to increase the tally of a war on drugs that keeps being decried as racist, if not outright genocidal. Vince Tao of VANDU was quoted by one speaker saying governments don’t just kill with their bullets, but also with their budgets.

The project has already been decried as virtually indistinguishable from the criminalisation of drug use treatment. The first facility to receive involuntary treatment patients shall be the notorious Surrey Pretrial Services Centre, an actual prison which also used to harbour immigration detainees, a practice which is being discontinued amid backlash from civil liberties advocates; in both instances, detractors invoked provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in their calls to strike down these egregious practices. Ironically, immigration detention at the Surrey facility has also been shown to be deleterious to inmates’ mental health—and yet the provincial government is to send mentally ill people there for them to recover.

I have already made my own stance clear in an account I published earlier this year, recounting how I witnessed my neighbour being involuntarily detained under the Mental Health Act after a drug overdose, only to be released in a matter of hours after refusing treatment. If nothing else, I agree with fellow advocates that treatment doesn’t work against patients’ will, as this typical example illustrates. It also turns out, without going into details, that the issues plaguing him weren’t primarily due to drug use, so treatment would have completely missed the mark. But psychiatrists would never have figured it all out, because hey, who among them has time to listen to the ramblings of their patients. Advocates, in contrast, do—but David Eby doesn’t listen to them either.