MLAs on a committee inquiring about addiction recovery got another reminder recently about how addiction can bring anyone down.
It was in the form of an appearance from someone who used to move in legislature circles. Marshall Smith was a ministerial aide who made a name for himself as a smooth operator in the B.C. Liberals’ first term, before his life disintegrated.
His story, which has been told a few times over the past several years, involved a shift from drinking to cocaine to meth. He lost his job, did some jail time and lived on the streets in Victoria and Vancouver for about four years.
He lived out of a shopping cart, slept in an abandoned shipping container and had a few dangerous brushes with the thug life before recovering several years ago.
Recovery is now his life’s work, with the Cedars Society, a non-profit group associated with the treatment centre in Cobble Hill. He’s also a board member with other agencies in the field. So he showed up at a legislature health committee’s hearing with some first-hand experience in what he was talking about.
MLAs from both sides of the house have devoted a round of hearings to one question: “How can we enhance the effectiveness of addiction-recovery programs?”
Asking it implies they aren’t very effective at present, which is widely acknowledged. Smith said for all the talk about mental health and addiction, recovery doesn’t get the attention it deserves. It needs to be celebrated and promoted, and all the disparate elements of the recovery effort in B.C. have to come together.
“Observation No. 1: We have a fractured or non-existent system,” Smith said. “You’ll hear people talk about the fact the system isn’t working. The system isn’t working because we don’t have one.”
He said the established health-care infrastructure of the bureaucracy is a “very closed shop” and a lot of viewpoints from personal health-care practitioners who work in recovery don’t get heard. There’s an adversarial posture between the publicly funded harm-reduction sector and personal health advisers trying to help addicts.
Smith told MLAs there has to be better definition of terms such as mental health and addiction, which are broadly used together.
“Mental-health drugs are being given at alarming rates, causing morbidity and mortality, when they’re not indicated for addiction care.”
Legions of people are being misdiagnosed and prescribed mood drugs when their mental-health symptoms would wash away with a period of abstinence and recovery.
Smith also said large segments of the addicted population aren’t considered. For all the attention paid to the disorder and chaos arising from desperate, homeless addicts, they are “a very, very small percentage of the overall substance use and addiction problems in our communities.
“The majority of the addicted population, in fact, in British Columbia are not marginalized, homeless or have mental-health issues and will never access any type of formal care,” he said. “The system that we have is geared to the super-sick.”
Smith said addiction is a neurobiological brain disorder. It’s not caused by homelessness or marginalization. Those factors are important because they block recovery.
“But let’s not believe for a minute that simply by ameliorating those conditions you are going to solve the addiction issue in the individual. Those require two different types of interventions.”
So Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has addicts who can’t get to recovery because of their desperate straits. But Smith said more fortunate people in the suburbs who become addicted can achieve recovery much more easily.
And recovered addicts are a significant constituency of some consequence, he said. They have been quiet because historically, they come from anonymous programs, but that’s been changing over the years.
His parting thoughts were about marijuana, and how legalization of it is tantamount to commercialization.
“Big marijuana is an emerging corporate giant. They have a corporate agenda, which is to make profit and get their product to market.”
If a generation is raised in a liberalized marijuana environment, Smith questioned what happens when they encounter mental-health issues, such as depression and anxiety.
“Do they begin to reach for pharmaceutical solutions to that? That’s a concern.”
