Alberta has made a major fiscal commitment to treatments of all sorts. They have expensive opioid agonist therapy. They have residential rehabilitation. They also have, by the way, very strong investments in harm reduction. What they are doing that is different from a lot of other places around the country—my country too—is that, first off, it is a system. All the parts are integrated together. There's a province-wide plan. There are steps of care that people go through so they can go on a pathway to come out at the end much better off then when they went in.
The second thing, as I mentioned, is this optimistic idea of recovery. You know, because addiction is a stigmatized condition, there are a number of people who would believe colloquially and say, in a cold way, “Well, once an addict, always an addict. They will never change. They can't get better.” The Albertan model believes that, no, that is not true, that in fact people can recover. We have millions of people who have recovered, who are productive citizens, who are connected to their families and who are people we prize and cherish in the community.
Setting that as the goal, as the aspiration, is extremely important, rather than saying that we're just going to manage this population, that we don't really expect much out of them and that at most we might be able to help them live until tomorrow, and that's all they can ever achieve. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I admire that fact when I've gone up to Alberta and visited and have seen what they're doing, seen that vision that every single person is capable of having a much better life through recovery than they have right now.