At least a third of the publicly funded addiction treatment beds the province claims are available for drug users across B.C. do not actually offer treatment, the IJF has learned.

“B.C. now has 3,645 publicly funded substance-use treatment beds, including 659 beds opened since 2017 with more to come,” the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions announced in an Aug. 27 press release.

But a breakdown of the available types of adult and youth treatment options provided by the ministry shows that its tally includes 1,232 low-barrier housing beds, accounting for about 34 per cent of the total.

Addiction treatment is not directly provided in low-barrier housing in B.C., but is part of “a full continuum of support services,” the ministry said in an email to the IJF. This type of facility simply makes shelter available to people who use drugs, without requiring them to abstain or be in treatment.

The news comes as both the B.C. Conservatives and the NDP government are touting involuntary addiction care as a solution to the province’s ongoing toxic drug crisis.

That political focus is deeply frustrating for Correne Antrobus of Moms Stop the Harm, an advocacy group led by families affected by tainted illegal drugs.

“How can you even mention involuntary care when we don't have voluntary care?” she said.

Antrobus leads support groups for loved ones of drug users in Victoria. She asked the IJF to take a closer look at the province’s treatment bed numbers because they didn’t line up with what she was hearing from families.

She wasn’t surprised to learn the numbers had been inflated.

“I was furious. I knew all along something was incorrect, but when I saw that I thought, ‘Here's a blatant lie,’” she said.

“To skew the numbers like that for recovery beds is really disappointing to me.”

The IJF asked the ministry to respond to concerns about including low-barrier housing in the total number of treatment beds. 

“Substance-use low barrier housing provides people with opportunities to connect with health, social and other community services,” the ministry said in an unattributed statement.

“It is often a first step for people to get acquainted with health and social services and stabilize their lives so that they can be ready to move towards treatment and recovery.”

The ministry added that low-barrier housing units, along with all other categories of beds, have been included in the total number of treatment spaces since before the current NDP government came into power in 2017.

Also included in the province’s tally are detox spaces, sobering and assessment beds, bed-based treatment options, more intensive tertiary care beds and transitional care. There are supportive and supported housing beds as well, which the ministry said provides connections with “substance use treatment supports,” including pharmaceuticals and support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous.

At least 125,000 people in B.C. have opioid use disorders, according to a provincial tally. That’s 34 times the number of publicly funded treatment beds B.C. claims to provide.

‘We need everything to stop this crisis’

More than 15,000 people in B.C. have been killed by toxic drugs since a provincial public health emergency was declared in 2016. Last year, about seven people a day died from tainted drugs.

The province has struggled to address the problem from multiple angles, including addiction treatment, supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites, a modest decriminalization experiment and a program offering a prescribed safer supply of alternative drugs.

On each front, the available options pale in comparison to the scale of the problem, advocates say. 

“We need all avenues to this. We need everything to stop this crisis and nothing has been done fully,” Antrobus said.

Her daughter is an active drug user. The last time she reached out to ask for help, Antrobus said, there were no publicly funded beds available. The family was forced to pay out of pocket for expensive private treatment.

But that isn’t possible for everyone. Antrobus argues that it’s essential to have treatment available in the public system as soon as someone is ready.

“Anyone within active substance use, if they ask for help, you have to jump on it as soon as they ask, because it's a very short window,” she said.

Access to safer supply also falling

Of course, not everyone who dies from toxic drugs has an addiction. In fact, former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe has told reporters that people with severe drug dependencies do not constitute the majority of deaths.

A November 2023 report from a coroners’ death review panel suggests that as many as 225,000 people in B.C. are at risk of death or serious injury because of the tainted illicit drug supply, including casual users.

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has recommended a significant expansion of B.C.’s safer supply program in an attempt to protect those people, including removing the need for a prescription. Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Jennifer Whiteside immediately rejected that recommendation.  

Instead of expanding, the program is actually contracting. Just 4,029 people received safe prescribed alternatives to street drugs in July, according to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control . That’s down 22 per cent since a peak of 5,189 in March 2023.

The latest reports from the B.C. Coroners’ Service also demonstrate how the provision of supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites is falling short. 

About 68 per cent of the people who have died from toxic drugs so far this year smoked their fatal dose. But supervised consumption sites are still largely geared toward injection drug use. Two of B.C.’s five regional health authorities — Northern Health and Interior Health — have no sites that allow smoking, according to a 2024 report from the province’s auditor general.

Meanwhile, B.C.’s three-year decriminalization pilot project has been drastically rolled back in response to concerns about public safety, and police have again been granted the authority to seize drugs from anyone carrying them in public spaces.

With an election coming soon and anti-drug user rhetoric heating up, Antrobus is doubtful there will be meaningful change soon.

“Everything's being pulled back because of political reasons,” she said. “We see them choosing votes over human lives.”