FIGHTING ADDICTION

Public Vs. Private Treatment: The Hard Road to Recovery

If ever there's been a clear example of two-tiered health care in
B.C., it's in treating alcoholism and drug addiction.

Someone who can write a cheque or shoehorn $18,000 to $20,000 onto a
credit card can be checked into one of about half a dozen private
treatment facilities, often on the same day.

No muss. No waiting.

They'll be medically detoxed on site and then moved into an intensive
sixor seven-week residential treatment program. That likely will be
followed by six months of outpatient counselling and an aftercare
plan that recommends active participation in a 12-step program.

Someone without that much money is in a different position. There's
no onestop shop; they will need to negotiate services at various
locations -first detox, then stabilization, then supportive housing.

Their journey will be hampered by roadblocks. Since there aren't
enough beds, many addicts will wait days or weeks for appropriate services.

Treatment is available -but getting it is significantly more
difficult than in the high-priced private system.

Joanna Journet, general manager of the Orchard, a private treatment
facility on Bowen Island, said the working poor and middle class
often get caught in a funding crunch.

"There's the people who can go free to a treatment centre if they are
on welfare or on assistance. Then there's people who can afford to
come to private treatment. And then there's the people in the middle
who can't really afford to come to private treatment but they can't
afford not to," she says.

Some point to the disenfranchised who cycle in and out of
social-services doors as evidence that they either don't want
treatment or they don't want to get clean.

But most people aren't aware of the double standard in the care of
addictions, says Jody Paterson, former executive director of PEERS, a
support agency for current and former workers in the sex trade.

"It should work the same way whether you have money or not. Yet it's not.

The kind of care that people get when they buy it is totally
different than the kind of care you get in the public system for
addictions -if you get any care at all and that's a big, big if," she says.

As with all health issues, this one comes down to funding -how much
money can be spent, and where, to help the most people.

The last publicly funded residential treatment program on Vancouver
Island was closed in 2002. Since then, the Vancouver Island Health
Authority has focused on outpatient counselling and support as well
as harm reduction and prevention.

Bob McKechnie, VIHA's manager for addictions, admits the system is
pressed. "That's just the way health care is -there is always more
demand than there is resource."