Alberta model
Think like a recovery capitalist: Business basics
If exploitation is the driving force of drug prohibition, privatized 'treatment' is the paved road it rolls on: a look at the business challenges faced by these organizations.
Alberta model
Media Criticism
Are news media finally fed up with UCP drug war propaganda?
The Alberta government is scrambling to glue together its narrative that overdose deaths can be solved through a limited scope of privatized rehab. But a live interview on CBC Calgary pulled the curtain on the strategy's naked truth.
Alberta model
Recovery Capitalists 1: Mobilizing policy through allies
The upcoming Recovery Capital Conference in Calgary serves three main functions: mobilizing Alberta government policy through credible actors, repaying these actors with public funding, and recruiting for the far-right. Part 1 examines the first of these, and what happens when credibility falls short. See also: Part 2 and Part 3.
Alberta model
What's wrong with rehab?
The lack of accountability in the “Alberta Model” for dealing with drug use: teaser from a long-form piece in Alberta Views, online now. Since submitting this story for publication with Alberta Views, Drug Data Decoded has uncovered additional unsettling information about how the Alberta government may be hiding outcome data
Alberta model
City of Recovery
Red Deer city council has made history as the first in Canada voting to close an overdose prevention site. Ignoring decades of research, Mayor Ken Johnston asserted this will set the groundwork for the city to become "free from addiction." People across the country should pay attention.
Alberta model
Sober living homes take “sobriety deposits.” Do clients get them back?
Pairing unjustified deposits with mass evictions of residents, transitional recovery facilities appear to be placing profit before people.
supervised consumption
Red Deer is galloping toward a cliff
Heralding a new phase in the Alberta government's war on harm reduction and hostile takeover of municipalities, closing the city's overdose prevention site could drive 28 preventable deaths a year.
Media Criticism
Is Alberta UCP reinventing residential schools as addiction treatment?
Eleven 'therapeutic communities' are planned, many situated in First Nations, but possibilities of forced abstinence and forced labour evoke a horrific history.
Newsletter
Clearing the Plains 2.0: Alberta Drug Policy is Indigenous Genocide
Framing drug toxicity as a tool of land occupation can guide settlers to reposition their grief from individual tragedies to collateral damage of genocidal policy.
Alberta model
The Alberta Drug Model is a Christian institution: Part 1
At least half of long-term addiction care beds are Christian and almost all are 12-Step abstinence-based. Part 1 of a series on Alberta addiction services.
Alberta model
Marshall Smith's propaganda rampage
CBC Calgary provides lovely background music to unending UCP overtures to abstinence-based treatment. But can violins clash with critical analysis?