Framing Policy for Addressing Opioid Use: Criminal Justice or Public Health
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2020-09-08
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Abstract
In an era of widespread concern about the effects and fatalities of Canada’s opioid crisis, a range of federal and provincial policies have been rolled out and revised in response. Options considered for dealing with the crisis and indeed relied on to date have tended to focus on the use of a criminal justice approach to policy and strategies. While these may be the dominant frames for the issue to date, another frame – one which seeks to utilize the systems and measures of public health – has also begun to emerge. This capstone compares these two approaches, using the province of Alberta’s experiences with the Protection of Children Using Drugs (PChAD) Act and the Calgary Drug Treatment Court (CDTC) as a case study to illustrate their principals in action and make recommendations for evidence-based policy reform. Canada is experiencing an opioid overdose crisis. This crisis carries with it severe individual and collective costs. At the level of individual users and their social networks, overdose deaths have broken families and taken lives. As figure 1 illustrates (PHAC b., 2020) 15,393 (PHAC b, 2020) Canadians died1 from an apparent opioid-related overdose between January 2016 and December 2019. In that same time frame, 19,377 people were hospitalized for an opioid-related poisoning. From January 2016 to March 2020, a total of 2,823 people in Alberta died of opioid-related poisoning (Alberta a, 2020). Between January 2018 and March 2020, eleven youth under the age of 18 in Alberta died from opioid-related poisoning. The peak of opioid overdose deaths occurred over quarter three of 2017 to quarter four of 2018. Since the end of 2018, the numbers have begun to decline, almost returning to levels seen in the first quarter of 2016.
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Hayward, C. A. (2020). Framing Policy for Addressing Opioid Use: Criminal Justice or Public Health (Unpublished master's project). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.