By Alan Boisvert
In 1978 the B.C. Social Credit party started a Compulsory Heroin Treatment program in conjunction with the British Columbia Alcohol and Drug Commission. This program was started to force heroin addicts into compulsory recovery treatment. The criteria for this compulsory treatment was that any person who had "fresh needle marks", affiliation with users, or had been arrested for drug possession was considered as fair game.
The treatment centre, Brandon Lake, was near Nanaimo B.C.. Incarceration for treatment was for a minimum of six months. Addicts not on a drug treatment program or a Methadone Maintenance program were being directed there by police and judges. The civil rights of users were absolutely negated. Oppression was the order of the day.
To clear things up perhaps I should tell of my own experience with the Compulsory Heroin Treatment Program. I was standing at a bus stop on Granville St. waiting for a bus to take me home to Kitsilano when a marked police car stopped in front of me. The police officers approached me and started looking me up and down. One of the officers asked what I was doing, I told them I was waiting for the bus to go home. They wanted to know where I had been and what I was doing downtown, if I had any drugs on my person and what I was going to be doing in Kitsilano when I got there.
After answering all their questions and after being searched by them, I was asked to roll up my sleeves. When they saw some fairly fresh needle marks on my arms, they informed me that under the new Compulsory Treatment Act, I was being placed on the Compulsory Treatment Program.
I was given a document informing me to report by a specified date to be processed by an alcohol and drug counselor and a judge under the auspices of the B.C. Government. I would be taken into custody and transported to Brandon Lake to start my incarceration. Brandon Lake was nothing more than a jail for drug users who couldn't be arrested and put in a provincial or federal prison. Essentially a jail for the innocent. I had a few days before having to report to Big Brother.
During these next few tension filled days, I talked with some people who were quite familiar with the
Compulsory Heroin Treatment Act. I was informed that my only chance of avoiding this absurd circus was to get on a drug treatment program. I've had my run-ins with detoxes and their idea of total abstinence. This approach does not work for me. Forced detox would only make me feel more bitter towards society.
Two days before I was to report, a very good friend of mine managed to get me an appointment with a physician who was an addiction specialist. He was horrified with what was happening to me, and he was disgusted with what the Alcohol and Drug Commission and the B.C. Government were doing to addicts.
He told me had been working in the field of addiction for almost thirty years and that forced addiction therapy never worked, that it never had and it never would. He assessed me, and because of my many previous attempts and failures with detoxes he asked me if I thought I might manage on a Methadone Maintenance Program, if I thought I could reduce and stop my heroin use. I didn't know at first, but being in the situation I was in I thought that if I didn't go with this I would be incarcerated in only two days.
A month later I met some people who had just gotten out of Brandon Lake, and as I had feared they related their experiences to me. All of them were happy to be out. Not one person liked the way they had been treated there, they claimed the staff was indifferent to the addicts and that almost all the so-called clients felt they were just doing jail time despite all of Brandon lake's forced counselling.
Out of this group of people just released from Compulsory Heroin Treatment and considered "cured" by the government, all were still using heroin. Three of the people, who had not been drinkers before, were now alcoholics as well.
About a year later Brandon Lake's Compulsory Heroin Treatment
Act ended when it was challenged in court by an addict and a physician.
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