Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2005 1:57 am Post subject: Community help with crystal meth
A letter to Ms Hawkins, MLA for Kelowna Mission:
Dear Ms Hawkins
I sympathize with your fight to keep Kelowna's youth detox centre open. It is imperative that this happens quickly because of the rapid increase of crystal methamphetamine use in all of our communities. It is destroying families and youth, causing crime to spike, and medical and service providers have not been prepared for the fall-out.
In Victoria our youth workers have documented a 70% increase in teens requesting help for their addiction to this community-destroying menace.
I do outreach on the streets and cannot get treatment on demand for 13 year olds that used just once and have become seduced by the prospect of a skinny body and more friends, leaving home to live on the streets or couch-surf just to access their drug of choice. At $10 for a 10 hour high it is incredibly addictive. Among surveyed youth it is the new drug of choice. Recent studies at UCLA have scanned the brains of heavy users and were shocked to find that within a relatively short time the brain resembled someone with Alzeimers, losing up to 10% of it's mass! These kids cannot help themselves. Once de-toxed there is a 95% chance of use again, so we also need better supported recovery, up to 6 months and we need government support for these addicted youngsters NOW.
The new Crystal Meth Victoria Society is a grassroots organization that is about to put into place a community wide 90 day task-force not just to study the problem but to fix the problems! It will require non-partisan cooperation from local service providers and a team of committed individuals. It is not impossible. It has worked elsewhere.
The community of Maple Ridge solved the problem of homelessness (400 people) by realizing that they had an addictions problem not a homelessness problem. Forming a similar task-force, Life or Meth, they identified and mentored each individual addict, got them immediate detox and then provided supported housing and follow-up. They now have less than fifty people on the street. They educated the community and formed partnerships in only a 90 day time frame. All of us can do the same thing in our own communities. We have to! The US has warned us that it is only going to get worse here and our neighboring States have already declared that they are in a state of emergency.
Maple Ridge has a DVD available that shows exactly how their community responded to the challenge. We are partnering with them because what worked there will work anywhere with dedicated individuals solving the problems instead of talking about them.
In Victoria we have started the research and the first steps to achieve our goals without any funding or sponsorship so far because somebody had to do something!
We have just launched a provincial website ( crystalmethbc.ca ) that each BC community can use to link it's own resources to and provide information for parents and users alike. Politicians and educators can add their voice on our forum page.
Please use our BC website to help your community campaign for more treatment options for youth. It will be helpful if some of these kids who have been helped at Iridian Centre tell their stories on the website for everyone to see. The first step is education and awareness.
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