Rustad says mandatory drug treatment would only be rarely used

Chilliwack podcaster Aaron Pete, a frequent collaborator with the Current, has interviewed the leaders of all four political parties. He has already posted interviews with BC United leader Kevin Falcon and Premier David Eby. An interview with Green leader Sonia Furstenau will be published in the coming weeks and highlighted in the Current.

BC should consider imposing mandatory treatment on some drug users, John Rustad said.

The BC Conservative leader has previously said that authorities should be able to force overdose survivors into treatment, but in a conversation with Chilliwack podcaster Aaron Pete, he said the application of any mandatory treatment program would be “very rare.”

The call for mandatory treatment—an idea that has also been floated and abandoned by Premier David Eby—coupled with the suggestion that it would only rarely be used highlights the challenge of forcing drug users into treatment while not repeating historic injustices.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Pete, a frequent Current collaborator, Rustad talked about promoting housing, reforming health care, and trying to abandon the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People—while keeping it as a “guiding principle” for relations with First Nations.

Mandatory treatment

The death toll and the nature of drug addiction have led Rustad and other politicians to suggest forcing people to undergo treatment may be a hard but effective way to reduce the death toll. But those ideas have been criticized by advocates who say forced treatment risks infringes on the rights of individuals while not actually reducing substance use or overdose rates.

While the province has backed off its consideration of mandatory treatment, Rustad has not.

He told Pete: “If you have somebody who, for example, has OD’d and is brought back to life, clearly they are … from a mental health perspective, not capable of making a decision that's in their best interest. So from that perspective, I think we should be able to put them into treatment and try to give them some sort of quality of life.”

More than 2,500 people died from overdoses last year. An even greater number of drug users have had an overdose and survived through the intervention of friends, family, service providers or strangers. Rustad’s comment would suggest that thousands of people could be considered candidates for mandatory treatment.

But in his interview with Pete, Rustad acknowledged the dangers of over-reach and suggested that mandatory treatment wouldn’t actually be used often.

Pete asked: “How do you make sure this doesn't get away from you and people start to pay the consequence? Because these are incredibly vulnerable individuals who might not be able to argue for themselves.”

Rustad responded that “ if we're going to do mandatory treatment, it is going to be very rare.”

He then pivoted to suggest that such treatment could be used to send youths with addictions to facilities.

“We're not talking about mandatory treatment for everybody,” Rustad said. “Obviously, that doesn't work. But where you have those unique situations, you know, I think we need to be able to have some of that option available. But you're right. We have to safeguard against it. We can't use it as an excuse to basically incarcerate or to institutionalize people who are fighting addiction.”

You can watch the exchange here. Or you can watch the full interview below.