SOCIAL WORKER, CONSULTANT PURSUE RURAL REHAB FOR ADDICTS

Pair Envision Therapeutic Community to Be Called Summerville

The idea started with Bob Gilson. He was a social worker with a
program that offered training to the unemployed and addicted of the
Downtown Eastside.

It was frustrating work.

"I recognized right off the bat that ... a lot of the folks that we
were working with were going back into the [drug] community."

The problem, Gilson believed, wasn't the program, it was the setting.
His clients were trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps
while knee-deep in the filth of the Downtown Eastside. Most failed.

Gilson wanted a better way.

"I saw the need for a residential program where people could be part
of a broader community in a peer-to-peer system that was supportive
over a longer period of time, where they could ditch their bad habits
and re-establish themselves back into society as responsible adults."

In other words, a haven. He wanted a place where addicts could work
toward a better life away from the temptations of the street.

He had no idea how to go about this until seven years ago, when a
friend told him of a TV show about a place called San Patrignano, in
Italy. It was a self-contained addiction treatment community off by
itself in the countryside, and had a population of approximately 2,000 addicts.

Gilson visited San Patrignano twice. He came away impressed. The
community's "clients" were taught trades that, the theory was, could
translate into jobs once they left -- things like quilting, ironwork,
farming, wine-making, animal husbandry and welding. San Patrignano
claimed a low rate of recidivism. It also boasted of being
self-supporting from the sale of wares the clients made on site, and
from private donations.

San Patrignano had its critics, who maintained that its cure rate was
no better than government-run treatment centres, and that its methods
encouraged a cult-like and overly strict regime. (I covered some of
these complaints in an earlier column.)

But Gilson said he saw none of that. He came back determined to
establish a community like it here.

He took "a dog-and-pony show" about his idea on the road, he said,
knocking on the doors of politicians, health boards and philanthropic
groups. Everybody, he said, told him "Great idea!" then showed him the door.

It was his timing. It could not have been worse. Vancouver was
embracing the Four Pillars. The pendulum had swung away from
institutionalized treatment and toward harm reduction. No government
wanted to invest in a rural community for addicts.

One particularly disastrous meeting epitomized Gilson's problems. He
had brought over the son of the founder of San Patrignano to meet
with then-Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen.

The meeting started, according to Gilson, with Owen going around the
boardroom table and placing copies of the Four Pillars plan in front
of each person. The founder's son, Gilson said, pushed it away
without even reading it, then declared the Four Pillars plan had been
tried elsewhere and failed.

The meeting went downhill from there. (In his account of the meeting,
Owen did not speak kindly of the San Pat scion or of the community's methods.)

Gilson, disheartened, gave up.

Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction with the Four Pillars approach began
to grow. The street scene festered, and the incidence of homelessness
exploded. The public's patience with panhandling, open drug-dealing
and property theft was exhausted.

Meanwhile, the idea of a Canadianized version of a San Patrignano
began to filter through the social welfare and business communities.
Through contacts, Gilson was introduced to Tony Seguss, a management
consultant. Seguss's own son, Tim, was an addict, and Seguss felt
strongly that an alternative like San Patrignano might have been able
to help his son. (Seguss has since lost contact with Tim and does not
know where he is.) Seguss suggested to Gilson that he forget about
getting government help and raise the money in the private sector.

Two years ago, he and Gilson wrote a detailed plan of the therapeutic
community they envisioned. It would be called Summerville, and be
established on a large acreage in a rural setting (not necessarily in
the Fraser Valley, Seguss told me). Clients would be free to leave,
with the understanding they might not be allowed to return if they
did. It would be also free, though, as at San Patrignano, clients
must work for their room and board, and earn income for the community
through the sale of goods they would be trained to produce.

Among others, Gilson showed the plan to Vancouver MLA Lorne
Mayencourt, who ended up visiting San Patrignano earlier this year
and who, last month, spoke about it enthusiastically to the Vancouver
Board of Trade.

Mayencourt's championing of the idea took Gilson and Seguss unawares,
and they phoned me. In the last few months, Seguss said, a core group
of eight social welfare and business people have coalesced around the
Summerville idea, and their plan now is to begin serious fundraising
within a year's time. They want to move toward establishing a
community with a population of 25 to 40 addicts, to grow over time.

Given the mood of the public, the question has to be asked:

Has that time come?