Addict calls for help in jails

Photo: The Canadian Press

Memories of vomiting, diarrhea and unrelenting stomach pain as he withdrew from opioids in prison had Rob MacDonald repeatedly asking for addiction treatment before he left a maximum-security facility – but despite dozens of formal complaints, he says he didn't get any help.

"I was thinking, 'Wow, I can't believe I'm going out onto the street with this addiction,'" MacDonald said a week after being released on supervision from the Atlantic Institution in Renous, N.B., his fourth facility in over a decade behind bars.

MacDonald, 41, said he feared his 15-year opioid addiction would cause him to return to crime while using illicit drugs on the outside so he tried desperately to get treatment from the federal prison service.

"I put 150 requests in, probably 70 complaints, for a 15-month period, trying to tell them, 'Put me on it. I need it before I get out. I want to get help, I don't want to go back into the community in a high-risk situation, I don't want to reoffend,'" he said from Halifax, where he lives in a halfway house.

He said he complained to the warden and then appealed to the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada. One of his complaints to the commissioner was upheld but he said he was placed on a wait list because there was a limit on the number of inmates receiving treatment.

When he was incarcerated at B.C.'s Kent Institution between 2017 and 2019 for drug-related offences and robbery, MacDonald said debilitating withdrawal symptoms had him seeking potentially deadly fentanyl-laced drugs that were smuggled into the prison.

"At least eight guys died in the 17, 18 months I was at Kent," he said.

The Correctional Service linked MacDonald to a clinic in Halifax upon his release nearly two weeks ago and he is now prescribed the opioid substitute Suboxone. But he said he should have received the medication in prison as part of the agency's treatment program, which also includes methadone, so he could focus on finding a construction job to get his life back on track.

Ivan Zinger, Canada's ombudsman for offenders, said the Correctional Service has failed to provide adequate addiction treatment, programs and staff at a time when more drugs are contaminated with fentanyl.

"I think when you're dealing with a large inmate population that has such a long history of substance abuse you should be providing an awful lot more treatment and programming in addition to opioid substitution therapy," said Zinger, who called for the reallocation of funding to provide those services.

"It's unclear to me why the budget has remained the same and decreased in the past when clearly the number of incidents is increasing," he said of overdoses that caused 41 deaths between 2010 and 2018.