LUXURY REHAB CENTRES FLOURISH IN B.C.

Many Albertans Choose Club-Like Facilities For Privacy

In an idyllic setting on this tiny island, towering trees provide a
postcard-perfect backdrop to the cluster of log structures that look
plucked from a Rocky Mountain luxury retreat, most equipped with
oversized fireplaces and one even boasting a workout room and small
outdoor swimming pool. Looks, though, can be deceiving. It may be only
a short distance from the ferry, where in 15 minutes you can be back
in West Vancouver, but the Orchard seems a world away from city life
and all its pressures, in more ways than one.

The people inhabiting these buildings are doing anything but escaping
reality, and the work underway here every day can hardly be described
as rest and relaxation.

The Orchard (www.orchardrecovery.com) isn't a retreat, but a place to
confront reality head-on. In the five years it has existed, the
privately run addictions treatment centre has helped hundreds of
people overcome their battles with alcohol and other drugs.

Still, Lorinda Strang, the Orchard's director, makes sure that while
the work is tough, everything else about staying at her centre, from
the decor to the food, is pleasant.

"We believe that being in recovery should be fun," says Strang, who
went into the addictions field after her brother died of a drug
overdose. "Treatment isn't punishment -- it should be a gift to yourself."

Such a gift, however, comes with a hefty price tag. A 28-day stay here
is $12,700, or $453 per day, while a 42-day stay costs $17,700.

Despite the price, Strang doesn't have trouble keeping her 25-client
operation running at full capacity most days.

And for that she can partly thank Alberta. On any given day, says
Strang, 30 per cent or more of her clients come from Canada's richest
province. And of those numbers, a good many are increasingly showing
up with an addiction to crack cocaine.

"You didn't see these people using crack only a few short years ago,"
she says. "Now, we have clients with crack addictions who are very
successful, intelligent and what society would call
go-getters."

In British Columbia, there has been a boom in privatized treatment of
addictions. There are five privately run, for-profit, full service
residential treatment centres, with most of them located a short
distance from Vancouver, either along the coast or on Vancouver Island.

In contrast, say those on the front lines, Alberta has not a single
for-profit, privately run residential program on par with these
upscale facilities.

When it comes to addictions treatment, British Columbia is in the
unlikely position of having developed a two-tiered health-care
approach, a combination of private and publicly funded treatment,
while usually entrepreneurial Alberta, has for the most part, remained
under the purview of the provincial government through the Alberta
Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (AADAC).

"You have some government-funded treatment in Alberta that is quite
good," says Neal Berger, executive director of the Cedars at Cobble
Hill, a new for-profit treatment centre on Vancouver Island just south
of the city of Duncan.

"But the situation here in B.C. over the past several years has been
much different," says Berger, who 13 years ago established Edgewood,
the oldest of B.C.'s for-profit treatment centres, with his former
wife, the late Jane Ferguson.

"And that has given rise to the for-profit sector."

The situation of which Berger speaks relates to the B.C. government's
longstanding focus on harm reduction. Safe injection sites, and other
such strategies, have, say many, been promoted at the expense of
abstinence-based treatment programs.

In one recent Vancouver Sun opinion column, Alan Podsadowski, a
veteran in the B.C. addictions field, blasted the government for
focusing on the "5,000 addicts on the east side of Vancouver,
representing less than five per cent of those affected by substance
abuse provincially," an approach that has resulted in the minority
garnering "95 per cent of our attention."