Recovery-based Alberta drug-addiction treatment model limits options: critic [Video]

Paul knows addiction.

He spent the last 23 years fighting his reliance on alcohol, crack cocaine and benzodiazepines.

“To be so consumed by it, you’ll sacrifice anything: your children, your sleep, your food,” said Paul, with whom CTV News Edmonton agreed to withhold his last name for this story.

“Everything.”

He faced an ultimatum from his parents, who forced him into Red Deer’s 75-bed recovery community last year. It’s one of 11 addiction treatment facilities the province has promised to build.

“Basically, they told me, ‘If you don’t go to rehab right now, we’re going to take your kids,” Paul said.

The Red Deer facility, which has been operating at capacity since opening nearly a year ago, is a long-term, abstinence-based in-patient program for substance-use disorders that accommodates stays between six months and one year, says Ben Broger, its clinical director.

The province said Monday that since opening, Alberta’s two recovery communities have treated …