By Ernie Mendoza

For a young man hoping to get established in the journalism industry, Steve Smysnuik appears to have great enthusiasm for the object of his research. Unfortunately, a highly disturbing and sensitive issue such as the plan of Turning Point Recovery Society for the city of Richmond [April 24-May 1] might be just a little too daunting and complicated a subject to tackle with great amount of impartiality and objectivity at the early stage of any young man’s career.

His account of what took place at the public conference on December 1, 2007 at Howard deBeck Elementary School auditorium and several statements made about the Caring Citizens of Richmond (CCR) and about Turning Point need explanation to discern facts from fiction.

CCR opposes Turning Point’s proposal to insert a mid-scale support centre for drug and substance addicts into the established family community at Ash Street.

Having met no support for her project in spite of several meetings with a Neighborhood Liaison Committee over a nine-month period and TPRS’ own three-day open house at the same auditorium in November 2007, Brenda Plant is quoted as saying, “They are condemning us, but they don’t really know what we do.”

Based on Smysnuik’s portrayal of Caring Citizens as a paranoid, ignorant group of self-righteous bigots, one would have to suppose that the Caring Citizens don’t really know what they, themselves, are doing, either.

The truth is, the Caring Citizens have done their homework and have garnered their support of over 12,000 petitioners the only way they know how: by sharing their research and letting people arrive at their own informed opinions. Google the Twelve-Step Program which Turning Point confidently touts as the “world’s most successful recovery model,” and you will find a plethora of criticism and controversy…debate that should raise fair questions in any taxpayer’s mind. Even inpatient programs run by professional therapists at medical treatment centers had a success rate of 45 percent at best (based on the number of patients remaining abstinent after one year of discharge) according to a 2001 study (Humphrey; Roos). What happens to this already shaky statistic when the twelve-step program is carried out in an informal, non-professional setting? Where does this number stand two years out of the program? Three years? Ten years? Perhaps the Caring Citizens are not entirely unreasonable in asking whether this is a substantial enough measure of success for the average taxpayer to feel assured that this is a good use of massive public funds.

It only takes a Caring Citizen with a computer and an Internet connection to learn from Turning Point’s own website that an applicant must be “drug and alcohol free for a minimum of 72 hours” (incidentally, this number has increased from 48 hours since the start of the controversy) prior to admission, at which point they will receive all the benefits of the facility: housing, meals, a shower, change of clothes, a bed to sleep in, etc. Luckily for anyone wanting a little vacation from the streets, then, that Turning Point welcomes self-referrals. (See www.turningpointrecovery.com/admissions.html.)

The Caring Citizens of Richmond know that Turning Point, along with their sponsors and associates, has exaggerated assessments of the need for supportive housing in Richmond, because they know the real numbers. The GVRD Regional Homelessness Research Data shows no more than fifty-four homeless in Richmond in 2008. Turning Point’s Michael Goehring and Vince Battistelli must have done mathematical cartwheels to arrive at the whopping figure of “over seven hundred homeless in Richmond,, as they announced in an interview with Bill Good of AM radio. Could it be, then, that the project was not actually conceived out of an observed need for supportive housing in the area, but out of the discovery of a sweet deal on available land…and a lucrative opportunity for some individuals to make money? Never mind that the property is right smack dab in the middle of a quiet, long-established residential family community and is not zoned for such use. Bylaws are only there to be bent…or even better, changed, if you’ve got the political connections.

If Turning Point Recovery Society were a privately-owned business whose existence depended upon the success of its daily operations and whose capital investment came from hard-earned private funds, the would-be entrepreneurs of the Ash Street project might now be drinking away their financial woes. Fortunately for Turning Point, this is not the case. The deal with BC Housing, which owns the Ash Street property, provides Turning Point a capitalization equivalent to $6.2 million of public funds according to their submitted information package. This would be in addition to millions of dollars in annual donations of taxpayers’ money from their fund-raising events. At least it looks like someone will be benefiting from the project, if the residents, or supposed beneficiaries, aren’t.

Gerald Brown of the Baldwin Research Institute states in a 2004 article: “95% of the existing treatment centers in the United States adhere to the 12 Step philosophies. Not surprising, the success rate of treatment is no different from the success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous: 3%.”

Yet Turning Point Executive Director Brenda Plant and her associates liberally paint a rosy picture of their “record of success of 25 years” with little documentation in support of their claim.

"There is not a large body of research on the effectiveness of 12 steps [programs]," says Timothy P. Condon, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "Setting up a program, making it luxurious, using things that are not rigorously tested, I don't know the benefit of that. If I was going to spend a lot of money, I'd want to see outcomes."

It is no wonder then, that when confronted at their open house, contrary to what is advertised on its Web site, Michael Goehring vehemently denied that Turning Point employs the Twelve Steps as their main program for assisting addicts…only one instance in which Turning Point spokespeople have indeed turned in circles to give themselves and the minutes of their meetings a makeover for the benefit of public ears when taken to task about their procedures and policies.

The disappointing reality about drug treatment and supportive housing is that “despite this explosive growth in spending (of taxpayers’ money), there is actually little evidence that drug treatment, federally subsidized or otherwise, ever can be more than a Band-Aid on America's drug crisis. To the contrary, the evidence shows that treatment programs generally fail to get and keep people off drugs. The evidence available on federally-subsidized treatment programs, moreover, suggests that they are often poorly run, fail to follow standard treatment practices, and function as "revolving doors" for addicts seeking respite from the criminal justice system or other problems” (Eisenach & Cowin, The Case Against More Funds for Drug Treatment).

So why then are the Vancouver Coastal Health and its medical practitioners so very supportive of Turning Point? Well, according to Dr. Diana Chapman Walsh of the Harvard School of Public Health, “After two years it was 10% less expensive to refer people to Alcoholics Anonymous directly without any treatment. The significance of this study is that it did head to head comparison between AA and professional treatment and concluded that the benefits of professional treatment programs are questionable. The average cost of a treatment program in the United States is over $18,000 for a 28 day program. Alcoholics Anonymous, although ineffective, is free.” Of course, it’s easier for the government, medical professionals and the general public alike to live with the belief that their good intentions have achieved good results than to acknowledge and address the inefficacy of their efforts and look for real solutions…especially when jobs are at stake. Forget whether or not supportive housing works. Just live with the status quo. At least it’s a cheap fix. Not to mention that our politicians and Turning Point get to look like the benevolent philanthropists, to boot.

Caring Citizens of Richmond fully supports finding “real solutions” to addiction but questions Turning Point’s proposal regarding the land use on Ash Street as an opportunistic venture with no regard to the needs, nature, culture and family values of the family-oriented neighborhood. As taxpayers and homeowners, perhaps Caring Citizens is analogous to the parents who fork out $20,000 a year of hard-earned money for private education for their child, only to learn that a cartload of substance-abusing youths is to be unloaded in their midst, in the hopes that their well-behaved cohorts and structured environment will be a good influence on the troubled youth. What about that lesson we all learn in life, the one that goes something like: “It goes both ways”? And without proper answers, parents of private-school children everywhere might think twice before signing over next year’s tuition cheque. Surely it is not unreasonable to suggest that something more than a 72-hour break from substances ought to separate hardcore addicts from the impressionable children and teenagers in our homes and neighborhoods. Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned rehab…the kind where client can detox in a serene mountain or country setting without the distractions and stimuli of nearby city life…the kind where clients must prove the success of their recovery over months before they are considered “drug-free”…the kind Beautiful British Columbia must easily be able to establish outside of city core. First give these people a chance to step halfway into their recovery before we discuss such halfway-house-type recovery units…and perhaps then caring citizens province-wide will be much more open to meeting such proposals halfway. In the meantime, maybe we should be making sure that the medical, psychological, social, vocational, legal, and political infrastructure is firmly in place to give recovering addicts the best odds of success beyond treatment.

Goehring is right about the “existence of a discriminatory attitude” but the discrimination is in no way against victims of addiction and affliction; it is against the manipulative and calculated extensive use of public sympathy and compassion in an effort to detract attention away from a serious examination of Turning Points’ mode of operations and records authenticating their success. It is discrimination against the extensive use of public funds without the establishment of accountability for their ultimate use and purpose. It is discrimination against promoting ineffective responses to a real problem. If only Turning Point had focused their aggressive approach to finding real solutions to addiction, surely they would have all the support they would need. The citizens do care. We want to give people a second chance at life. But we don’t want to support a bandage solution to a problem requiring surgery.

Ernie Mendoza is chair for Caring Citizens of Richmond