Alberta in particular continues to ride the “War on Drugs” policy train from the 1980s. In fact, in many ways the current UCP government has doubled down on it with an approach that basically says “recovery is the only option for addicts” - to the point of actually talking openly about using government coercive power to force people into treatment involuntarily.
Their argument is largely based on a number of misguided notions about addiction, and how best to address it. They largely view addiction as a personal moral failing - literally the addict is at fault for “putting the stuff in their body” in the first place, and should be grateful that we provide places for them to “get clean”.
That is, to be charitable, a horribly naive way of looking at the issue. I’m not going to spend a ton of time here reviewing the academic literature on addiction - if you want to get a taste of it, wander over to Google Scholar, and type in addiction and I think you’ll get a sense of the scope of the issues.
However, since the 1980s, the illicit drugs world has changed a lot. Back then the most dangerous substances were things like heroin, or possibly freebasing cocaine. Overdoses certainly happened, but compared to now they were rare. Today’s drug supply on the street is many orders of magnitude more dangerous, and compounds are being mixed together in ways that most of us can’t even begin to imagine.
I do agree that addiction is a major problem for policy makers to address. Where I disagree with policy makers across the board is in the simplistic, one (or maybe two) dimensional approaches to government policy being implemented. We cannot treat this as a singular monolith issue any longer.
We need to implement a package of policies to deal with the issues - and it will take significant resources on multiple fronts to do it right.
A Proposal