Fate put a copy of the June 23, 2008 Province, containing Joey Thompson’s column on drug court into my hands. Reading that column and the prior June 20 column she wrote on Vancouver police chief Chu’s comments on sentencing says much about why we have such an a abysmal record when it comes to helping addicts into successful recovery behaviour.

From the June 20 column: “…to ensure the crap doesn’t kill them in the short term, even though we all know it still will in the long term.”

I would predict that any program born under or from this kind of attitude will fail to provide effective help in helping addicts into recovery, but will succeed in proving those with this attitude correct by letting their addiction “kill them”.

Let us move forward to the June 23 column.

“After about a year of court appearances and treatment by a specialized recovery team, offenders are expected to have conquered their addiction and found stable housing and a job, or relative training.”

I do not know exactly what the specialized team specialized in, but having known several people who were involved in drug court I can say that whatever it was the team specialized in, it was not recovery. In fact, based on what I saw and learned of the program and feedback from participants in the program, you would be hard pressed to deliberately design a program more guaranteed to ensure the failure and relapse of participants. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to them as victims rather than participants.

Given the program associated with the drug court it is not surprising that few choose to join the program, that so few complete the program and that among those who complete the program so many relapse.

“Send them off to jail, and make sure facilities offer them plenty of treatment and recovery options.”

The important unasked and unaddressed point is what these treatment and recovery options will look like. Should they be designed by the same “experts” who designed the drug court program or the majority of our current crop of treatment programs we will get our usual abysmal failure rates.

No rational, semi-intelligent person with experience with addicts and addiction would ever entertain the idea that “After about a year … offenders are expected to have conquered their addiction”.

If that is the basis of your program you are going to fail those in the program, leaving them in or sending them back to their addiction. And “Program enthusiasts (who) said they were pleased with the results, given the tough demands placed on addicts to clean up, find a job and a place to live” are badly in need of a reality check. Working with a bad or unrealistic program is self defeating since the outcomes are not going to improve in any significant manner.

You might just as well put them on probation requiring participants to go to treatment and complete the treatment program. You will end up with about the same number of positive outcomes and you can invest the funds you do not waste on an ineffective program in developing effective programs and community based support systems.

Current research and knowledge, best practices and successful recovery programs all exist. We can, if we choose to, design community based programs and support systems that achieve high success rates.

But we have to set success as our goal, design the systems to achieve that goal based on knowledge not “that’s how it is done” and to refuse to be pleased with results that do not achieve our goals.

It will not be easy or neat and tidy, but it is achievable.