Thank you.
I want to move to substance abuse. Statistics seem to be pretty consistent that four out of five people who enter a federal correctional facility have a substance abuse problem. I've heard figures around 70% to 80%. I really liked the phrase that Mr. Sampson used about having a penitentiary within a hospital. I might amend that to suggest that it should be a penitentiary within a treatment centre. If 80% of the people entering the system have serious substance abuse issues, it would seem to me that one thing we'd have to do is make our federal penitentiaries, or large parts of them, actual drug and alcohol treatment centres.
I was also somewhat surprised to see that on the $120 million dedicated to the drug file in prisons--and Mr. Holland pointed this out--all of that money was directed at drug interdiction. Not one penny was dedicated to treatment or harm reduction. I'm just wondering about that. It seems to me that we're completely missing the boat if we're putting money into drug interdiction instead of putting a lot of resources into drug treatment.
Anybody who's familiar with drug and alcohol treatment knows that availability of drugs and alcohol is not an issue, okay. There are many people walking the streets of Canada who are recovering alcoholics and drug addicts and they're two minutes away from getting drugs and alcohol if they want it. It's not an availability issue; it's a treatment issue. I'd like your comment on whether you think it's misdirected to put a tenth of a billion dollars into drug interdiction and not put money into drug treatment in prisons when we have such a high need.