Canada’s Culture of Death: A thirteen-year-old drug addict is refused treatment and dies in a homeless encampment

Caring just enough to keep drug addicts alive, but not caring enough help them to quit drugs.

Image by the Canadian Constitution Foundation

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By

Barbara

The reaction to the Ontario government’s planned closure of ten safe consumption sites was wholly as expected. The usual chorus sang out of its accustomed hymnbook. The opposition New Democratic Party started an online petition to save overdose prevention sites and released a statement about the “dangerous” shift in policy. “To take away these services in the midst of a crisis is going to cost lives."  The fringe-lunatic Green Party chimed in: “These cuts will claim lives. They will lead to more disease spread, more public substance use, and more drug poisonings showing up in our ERs.” Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 79 called on the government to reverse the closures. Front-line employees, no doubt aghast that their paycheques are coming to an end, held a press conference. “This decision will lead to thousands of preventable deaths, force drug use into public spaces, and increase strain on our healthcare system. We see what this government is doing, and we will not be silent.”

Meanwhile, the National Post reports the death by overdose of a thirteen-year-old child.¹  Young Brianna was living in a homeless encampment in British Columbia after a treatment facility discharged her against her parents’ wishes. It appears that she was in possession of needles and crack pipes supplied by Fraser Health, B.C.’s largest regional health authority. Brianna started using marijuana when she was 10. By twelve, she had progressed to ecstasy and was hospitalized for a suspected overdose but discharged against her family’s wishes. Her parents begged for treatment; however, they were told she had the right to decide for herself. Brianna had already made over 20 documented suicide attempts.

This is where we are in Canada. It is astonishing that the so-called harm reduction advocates, desperate as they say they are to save lives, are not organising press conferences and releasing statements about the death of 13-year-old Brianna, who, had she been placed in a treatment facility, might still be alive today. Theirs is a strange sort of caring, caring just enough to keep drug addicts alive, but not caring enough help them to quit drugs.

Let’s look at a few of the contradictions. A 13-year-old child, too young to drive, open a bank account or vote, is able to countermand the decisions of her parents and legal guardians. If she were in school, as she ought to have been, the school would be obligated to notify her parents every time she was 10 minutes late for class and would require a signed consent form to go for a field trip or sports day. Even then, she would be accompanied by a mandated ratio of adult supervisors. Her school bus driver would only be allowed to let her off at her designated stop. Canadian schools are so safety paranoid that children are forbidden from throwing snowballs, lest someone be injured. Yet in a medical setting, the same child is able to decide if she will consent to treatment. A hospital can discharge a very obviously ill and disturbed child. The whims and caprices of a mentally ill drug-addicted minor trump her need for treatment and the wishes of her parents.

Then, there is the role of child protection services. There is no indication that child protection was involved to advocate for treatment when Brianna was being forcibly discharged. Later, when she was sleeping rough in the squalor of a tent encampment, surrounded by drugs and supplied with drug paraphernalia by a provincially funded health agency, child protection failed to take her into care.

Although it is unlikely to happen, a coroner’s inquest if not a provincial commission of inquiry is needed to shed light on the many failures that killed this unfortunate girl.

The provincial election in B.C. is a month away. It is hoped that, when he wins, front-runner John Rustad and his Conservative party will immediately close all safe-consumption sites in the province. If saving lives really is a priority, the government has a number of options, the most important being investment in new treatment facilities.

In the short term, the new government should invest in a public health campaign to re-stigmatise drug use, including marijuana, similar to the highly effective anti-tobacco and drunk driving campaigns. The province’s health curriculum should urgently be overhauled so that children are taught that all drug use is harmful, life-destroying and illegal. Teachers who refuse to teach the curriculum should be fired for cause.

Drug laws exist and it is time to start enforcing them, and strictly. Arrests and stiff penalties for possession will deter some. There should be zero tolerance and even stiffer penalties for drug trafficking. Anyone dealing drugs who is not a Canadian can and should be deported. Drunk driving kills. It is treated like a serious crime by police and the courts. Drugs kill and should be treated just as harshly.

Mandatory treatment, opposed by the pushers of ‘safe’ drugs and ‘safe’ consumption sites and their unions, eager to protect their CAD $70,000 jobs, is the only way to help addicts not merely extend existence but quit drugs and have a chance at a full and meaningful life. When in the throes of addiction, when overdosing repeatedly, addicts are manifestly unable to make rational decisions. For their own good, they need to be confined under the mental health act, so they can receive rehab and treatment. Children, especially, need and deserve protection, not just from injury by errant snowballs, but the far graver injuries inflicted by mind-altering lethal substances, not to mention death by overdose.

If the so-called harm reduction advocates really cared, they would care enough to stop enabling addiction, to stop addicts from endangering their own lives and often also ruining the lives of family members. They would care enough to promote recovery and offer the chance of a fulfilling life by insisting, when necessary, on mandatory treatment . Real compassion would be to stop enabling addiction.

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Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read I am a NIMBY. For more from Barbara checkout her great Substack: Notions: Thoughts that may grow up to become Ideas

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