DON'T TELL ME MANDATORY DETOX IS A BAD IDEA

SHOULD parents have the right to force their drug-addicted children into detox?

Is the Pope Catholic?

The province is moving forward with plans to allow devastated moms
and dads to send their junkie kids into a five-day detox program.
After five days, the program becomes voluntary. It's a tough-love
approach that may be the only hope for some of our kids.

The short-term lockup would give youth a chance to get straight
enough to see if they are ready to make a move to kick their habits.

"At that point, the child would no longer be high on drugs," says
Yvonne Block, director of Mental Health and Addictions for Manitoba
Health. "It provides an opportunity for them to make a competent
choice." If your liberal heart is bleeding for youths who will be
denied their basic rights to wander free and inject or smoke their
drug of choice, you probably aren't a parent and you sure don't know
anything about the scourge of crystal meth.

Carole Johnson does. She buried her meth-addicted daughter in July
2004. Johnson and her husband, Dennis, did everything they could to
get 17-year-old Colleen treatment. There was no mandatory detox available.

They had to watch their lively, engaged child be destroyed by her habit.

"What rights do they have when they're 17?" Johnson asked yesterday.
"They're not mature. They're not capable of making these sorts of decisions.

"I gave birth to this child. She was mine. All I wanted to do was
keep her alive."

Instead, they buried her on their 20th anniversary, a tragic
postscript to a battle they didn't have a chance of winning.

"If we had some place to take Colleen, she might still be alive,"
says her mother.

The five-day detox plan is still in the planning stages. The
government isn't sure where the centre will be located or exactly how
it will be administered. There will be a whole lot of consultation
done before the doors swing open. Block estimates it will take six
months to a year to get this thing up and running.

There are already long-term treatment facilities available to youth
addicts in Manitoba. Most often, kids detox while they're already in
residential care. It's not an ideal situation. The new program would
allow the young addicts to have a hand in their own treatment plan,
something that will hopefully convince them to stick to it.

It will also serve as a centralized point of entry where kids can be assessed.

You can't treat a young addict the same as an adult, long-term user.
The standard period for a program is 28 days, but that goes out the
window with kids. They tend to detox faster, primarily because they
haven't been addicted as long, although Block says it tends to take
longer to get over the physical effects of crystal meth.

Carole Johnson welcomes the new involuntary detox proposal. She
wishes she'd had the chance to force Colleen into treatment. But she
worries about short-term solutions to a problem that is consuming so
many of our kids.

"Detox takes more than the 28-day dry-out period," she says. "It's a
lifelong journey. It's good to get clean, to get it out of your
system. What we really need is long-term treatment."

Still, she says, it's a start.

"I'm not sure that people understand what this is all about. It was
horrible. Every drug is bad, but meth is the worst. It just destroys
them." Johnson wishes she'd had the chance to have her daughter
locked up. There was nothing else that could keep her safe, no way to
stop the devastation that followed her slide into addiction.

Don't talk me about the rights of children, unless you're talking
about their right to live lives free of addiction and abuse.