"I was thinking, 'Wow, I can't believe I'm going out onto the street with this addiction,"' MacDonald said recently a week after being released on supervision from the Atlantic Institution in Renous, N.B., his fourth facility in over a decade behind bars.
He said he complained to the warden and then appealed to the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada. One of his complaints to the commissioner was upheld but he said he was placed on a wait list because there was a limit on the number of inmates receiving treatment. "I think when you're dealing with a large inmate population that has such a long history of substance abuse you should be providing an awful lot more treatment and programming in addition to opioid substitution therapy," said Zinger, who called for the reallocation of funding to provide those services.
"That's a problem when you have a highly addicted inmate population that has a lot of time on their hands and are in sometimes difficult conditions of confinement. They will find ways to bring in drugs." Kent Elson, a lawyer for an offender at Joyceville Institution in Kingston, Ont., said the Correctional Service did not accommodate his client's disability of addiction so he filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission last November.
While Correctional Service guidelines state a doctor is required to interview offenders before they are involuntarily tapered or cut off from methadone or Suboxone, Elson said his client was not seen by a physician."The impact on him was terrible but everybody wins if prisoners get the right treatment. Suffering from PTSD is not going to make them easier to integrate back into society."
Why we send people to jail for addiction is beyond me.
GO to a psychiatric hospital... they have detox programmes. Threaten self-harm OR 'risk of self-harm' by addiction... USE a 12 step programme in community. Connect with a MeetUp and a Church; volunteer, EAT WELL, exercise, and get an education then a career. You can do this.
Needs to help himself - no help is successful without the will power. Help isn’t forever either. Have to make it work on your own. Starts with you. Ends with you.