Our Broad Priorities

Deal with the elephant in the room, i.e. why do people end up as victims in the first place:

1. Address housing affordability, it is the starting point of the problem in cities and their suburbs

2. Address the lack of opportunity in rural and small towns

3. Provide better mental health support

Treat current addicts:

1. Rehabilitate the addicts as seen in our Urban Revitalization, Suburban Vitalization and Rural Rescue policies

2. Crackdown on distributors, especially larger ones

3. Crackdown on over prescription of strong opioids

Overview of the Problem

We just need to look around our cities and towns to see the damage drug addiction and homelessness has caused to our loved ones, our cities and our communities. This is not limited to one province or a handful of cities.

The following are only some of the stats that are alarming:

• The number of daily overdoses is rapidly increasing

• Smaller communities are getting devastated

• Western Canada is getting hit hard

We don't believe that drug addiction and alcoholism are a result of many societ wide factors that push people towards escapism:

1. Affordability crisis: Income inequality and the associated homelessness drives many people towards escapism in the form of drugs and alcohol. Mainly affects urban and suburban people

2. Mental Health: Depressed and lonely people are more likely to seek drugs as comfort

3. Lack of opportunity: Unemployed people in low opportunity areas often have nothing to turn to other than alcohol or drugs

This is why most of our effort will be to actually end the problem at its source, and to avoid exclusively focusing on treating the symptoms.

A cure for the disease not its symptoms

Most of the efforts to address the crisis so far by all levels of government have been too focused on treating the visible symptoms of addiction. These approaches are important to deal with the immediate effects of the crisis and must be a cornerstone of any drug policy. However, they don’t address the source of the crisis, i.e. why people get addicted in the first place These approaches are:

• Harm Reduction: Which reduces the deaths resulting from addiction but does nothing to alleviate the issue

• Rehabilitation: Which helps cure people from their addiction but does not address the factors that lead to said addiction or potential relapse

• Tough on Crime: Just hides the problem from the public eye at best and is fortunately less common these days

This is why we don’t want to stop at just harm reduction or rehabilitation for our drug policy. We want to make sure that less people feel the need or want to escape through drugs or alcohol in the first place. To do so we have identified the key reasons that push people down the spiral:

1. Affordability: The average Canadian is  living paycheck-to-paycheck, now try to imagine how the lowest earners make ends meet. The simple yet dark reality is that they are not. The ridiculous rent prices have almost certainly been the main, if not only, driver of the homelessness crisis in urban centers and the associated escapism through substance abuse we witness

2. Mental health: Isolated and lonely people are more likely to develop addictions. This has been demonstrated through  older studies on caged rats vs those in “rat parks”, humans are much more complex and social than any rat, it is then no stretch to say that the measured rise in loneliness is certainly playing a role in increased substance abuse within cities, and suburbs specifically. Add to that the rise in depression and anxiety among youth, and it becomes no surprise that the average addict tends to be younger.

3. Lack of opportunities: Unemployment is strongly linked with drug abuse, which goes a long way in explaining why small towns in rural areas are hit harder by the ongoing opioid epidemic and alcoholism

Therefore our Urban, Suburban, and Rural plans tie in to our fight against drug dependence. Each region has similar struggles but for different reasons. Prevention is the best treatment and preventing drug abuse and alcoholism from claiming more victims is a solid policy with an eye towards the future.