If former drug addict Dave Barber had the power to solve the homelessness crisis that’s become the most contentious hot-button issue in downtown Prince George, he knows a good place to start: Get more people in abstinence treatment centres that won’t allow them to keep using drugs.
It might not work for everybody, but it worked for Barber, who lived half his 41 years as a drug user who stole cars to pay for his addictions. He discovered there was an alternative waiting for him when he kicked his habit a year and a half ago while serving his third jail sentence at Prince George Correctional Centre.
Being locked up weaned Barber off drugs and made him eligible for help from the Integrity Recovery Society, which provides addicts the support they need to integrate back into society. From his jail cell there was a landing pad waiting for him in Integrity’s residential treatment house in suburban Prince George, which gave him a chance to stick with the cold-turkey approach and turn his life around.
He now has a steady job as a labourer, working full time for DART (Drug Awareness Recovery Team) doing yardwork and snow removal, and for the first time in 20 years he’s mapped out a future that doesn’t revolve around what goes up his nostrils or into his lungs or veins.
Barber is convinced abstinence substance treatment, without any government-supplied harm-reduction or safer supply substances, is the most effective way to cure addictions and get people back on their feet again.
What he sees happening in Prince George, he says, is not the answer.
The city is spending $468,000 to set up a 44-unit provincially operated transitional housing complex off Third Avenue and an ongoing B.C. Housing project is converting the former North Star Inn on Victoria Street into an alternative for people living in tents and under tarps. Residents of both sites will have some rules to follow but in B.C. hard drugs are still legal as the result of a three-year pilot project to decriminalize them. Residents of those transitional homes will be allowed to continue using drugs with no provision that they enter treatment programs and Barber says that will only perpetuate the problem.
“You’re giving them a free place to live, free food, a free cheque and free drugs - you’re giving them zero incentive to stop,” said Barber.
“I love drugs but I can’t do them anymore because of the consequences,” he said. “So if we don’t create consequences we’re never going to solve the problem, ever. You don’t think word of mouth gets to every other junkie this side of the Mississippi that you can come to Prince George and get a free place to live and free dope? You can’t fix the problem that way, it won’t work.”
Barber’s familiarity with the drug culture, the people and lifestyle that goes with it, has given him insight into homeless camps that are becoming more widespread and more obvious in every big city.
“At a systemic level, they’re calling it one thing when it’s another; it’s not a homeless problem, it’s a drug problem,” he said.” Look what they’re doing, they’re building them shoeboxes to kill themselves in. Is that a solution? It clearly isn’t.”
He says if you combine sobriety with mental health counselling, then you’ve at least got a chance of trying to reduce the number of people living in the downtown encampments that have become the ghettos of Prince George.
“Go to Moccasin Flats and what do most people think? Get a job. Stop stealing. They’re putting the carriage before the horse,” said Barber. “We have to deal with why they’re homeless and why they’re jobless. Where do you start? For most of us, because the addiction is so powerful, you’ve got to go to jail.
“There needs to be something to move them from the streets into a place where they can get real recovery.”
Barber disagrees with the province’s safer supply policy to give addicts prescription drugs that mimic the intoxicating effects of opioids to prevent overdose deaths and he says those prescribed drugs, paid for by taxpayers, are being sold on the street.
“A good friend of mine was on that safe supply and he would save it up until he had 10,000 pills and he would go to his dope dealer and trade it,” said Barber. “Where do you think those drugs are going to? These pills are going to the teenagers experimenting with drugs and getting them hooked and then down they go.”
He’s also critical of B.C.’s harm reduction policies that supply drug users with agonist therapies such as methadone or suboxone prescription drugs that take away the cravings for hard drugs so they can function during the day and go about their work. He saw how easy it is in jail to get suboxone prescribed by a doctor, which inmates readily take, even if they aren’t addicted to opiates, because it gets them high or can be used as currency to trade for other commodities behind bars.
Barber’s drug problems started with weed and alcohol when he was 18 and he says his first addiction was getting high on pot. That led to a 20-year cycle of being a slave to hard drugs – barbituates, cocaine, heroin and crystal meth.
“It’s a slow descent, and I’d say for every single one of us it started out as fun,” he said.
“I prided myself on not discriminating, I did manage to avoid fentanyl, but pretty much anything I could get my hands on. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop, and the result was incarceration, misery, all the things that come with addiction. It ruined my life and everyone who cares about me.
“I have kids, and you don’t think I wanted to stop for them? Of course I did. They were not enough. The drugs become more important than anything else.”
Going cold turkey was the only way to quit drugs for Integrity executive director Rick Edwards. After 25 years of addiction he found the support he needed to get substance-free at VisionQuest Recovery Centre in Chilliwack. He lived there as client and stuck to the 12-step recovery program that gave him control of his own life again and four years later was overseeing a staff of 27 employees as VisionQuest’s executive director.
He moved to Prince George to open Integrity in 2018 after seeing how many of his clients from northern B.C. had to travel to the Lower Mainland for abstinence treatment.
“In reality, myself and one other place on the coast are the only complete abstinence programs left,” said Edwards “I’m a firm believer that it works, because it worked for me and I’ve seen it work for others.
“When I entered a program it was a complete abstinence program, I wanted methadone, I wanted to be able to smoke weed and all the other meds just to ease the sickness. Thank God they didn’t give it to me, because I might not be here today because I was looking for the easiest way out.”
Integrity houses eight men aged 19 and older making the transition from jail. Six clients live at Integrity House downtown on Fourth Avenue and two are living at Clarity House in College Heights. They each pay $1,000 a month for their room and board and are required to stay with the program for six months, with a maximum stay of two years. They have chores and responsibilities to keep the place clean, take turns cooking, and are required to make their beds every day to show they’ve accomplished at least one task every day.
Aside from doctor-prescribed suboxone, a drug combination prescribed to prison inmates that lessens opioid withdrawal symptoms, Integrity allows no other drugs. Alcohol is strictly forbidden.
“When you come to recovery you don’t come because you’re tired of using dope, you’re tired of the consequences that come with using dope,” said Edwards. “As we start sobering up we start gaining things back in our life that we take for granted before.”
All Integrity clients go through the 12-step recovery program and they are held accountable to a sponsor, a senior member of the Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous program who has been in recovery at least a year. The idea is to have a friend in the group who will be there to talk them out of it if and when they are tempted to revert to their old habits.
Edwards said if he was granted a meeting with Premier David Eby, he’d tell him the province needs to be less rigid in its funding criteria and be willing to endorse abstinence-based recovery programs. As it is now, B.C.’s recovery centres are expected to accept clients using harm reduction medications and when they do not Edwards says that excludes them from some funding sources.
“We need more places like this; we need to still continue to support harm reduction but we also need to have another avenue for individuals where harm reduction doesn’t work, which is a complete abstinence program,” said Edwards.
He’s convinced a more stringent approach to tackling drug problems would get more people to turn them away from property theft and dealing drugs to feed their own habits.
“Recovery is crime prevention from rehabilitation,” said Edwards. “Take the dope out of the system and they no longer need to do crime.”
Edwards says the 50-unit BC Housing complex at 160 Ontario St., now being run by Connective Support Society, allows clients to continue to use drugs in their residences and is considered “no-barrier.” If it was up to him, he would run that complex with a different set of rules.
“I would love to have an opportunity for a place like that,” said Edwards. “I’d fill it up and every single one of those guys would be working. Every one of those guys would be going to school, doing something. That’s just another band-aid.”
When Barber was growing up in Parksville, his father was also a drug addict, in and out of jail constantly, and when he was 15 his dad was murdered. Barber's mother and sister had their lives in order and still do, so it wasn’t a case of a bad upbringing that steered him to a life of substance abuse and car theft to pay for those addictions. He promised to himself again and again he would quit using but he could not do it on his own.
While serving a four-month jail sentence in Prince George, Barber was made aware of Integrity and what the society has to offer with its abstinence-based recovery program. He said without having a place to live where he has the support of like-minded people, all of whom have conquered drug and/or alcohol addiction, he would not have been able to stay sober long enough to get himself well again.
“There is a way out, and despite all the treatment centre programs it was never the solution for me,” said Barber. “Rick has been through all that himself and he gives us a safe place to get our lives back together. There’s stability, there’s accountability and from that I was able to go through the fellowships and go through the 12 steps.”
For Barber, being totally drug-free is the only way to stay off drugs or alcohol.
“It’s like an allergy, an abnormal reaction to an external substance,” he said. “People can have one beer and go home, that baffles me. I don’t know how you do it, I’m different. When I have one, I don’t know when I’m stopping, I don’t control it. You set off this allergy and now the drugs become more important than anything else. Harm reduction makes no sense. It doesn’t work. Look at it, are people getting better? No. People are still dying."
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