The War on Addiction Just Got a New Weapon: Compassion
Alberta's Bill 53 rebrands incarceration as kindness — and calls it public health.
Let's say you're addicted to opioids. You're unhoused. You're traumatized. You’ve already been turned away from detox twice this month because there are no beds, and your caseworker hasn’t returned your calls in six weeks. You're not a criminal. You're not a danger to anyone. You're just surviving—barely, with no one seemingly understanding your struggles.
And then one morning, a cop shows up with a court order and says, “We’re doing this because we care.”
Before you know it, you're in a locked facility. Not because you committed a crime. Not because you’re having a psychiatric breakdown. But because someone — maybe a social worker, maybe your estranged cousin, perhaps a well-meaning family member — thinks your addiction looks dangerous. You're suddenly confined, your freedom taken away.
Welcome to compassion, Alberta-style.
Bill 53: The Euphemism Act, a title that disguises its true nature and intentions.
The Alberta government’s new legislation, Bill 53: The Compassionate Intervention Act, allows for involuntary addiction treatment, with no criminal charge, no medical diagnosis, and no consent required. Just a judge’s signature and a good enough argument that you’re a threat to yourself or others.
This isn’t mental health law. It’s not about psychosis or suicide. Those things are already covered under the Mental Health Act, which requires a professional medical assessment and poses an immediate danger. No — this is something else.
This is a new legal pathway explicitly designed for addiction. That means if you use drugs and someone decides you're “at risk,” they can detain you for up to three months in a secure facility. For youth, it’s even longer. And they’re calling this compassion.
Nothing says “we love you” like a locked door or a mandatory treatment plan.
Compassion Without Consent? That’s Not Care — It’s Control. Let’s be blunt: this bill isn’t about saving lives. It’s about removing people from public view. You can’t call it healthcare if the first step is a legal order and the second step is a facility you can’t leave. That’s not medicine. That’s containment. And you know what’s wild? It doesn’t even work.
A 2022 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people who go through involuntary addiction treatment are up to 50 times more likely to die of an overdose after they’re released. Why? Because forced abstinence lowers tolerance. Because trauma isn’t healed in captivity. Because recovery without consent is a setup for relapse.
But facts don’t matter when you’re in the business of “looking tough.” The government that cut funding for harm reduction, that gutted supervised consumption sites, and that refused to invest in housing-first programs, now wants to pretend it cares. No, you don’t get to shut the door on what works and then offer a locked alternative.
Who Will This Law Target? The answer is clear: those who are already marginalized and vulnerable. Let’s not pretend this law will be applied evenly. We know how these things work. The suburban accountant addicted to Ativan? The downtown lawyer who does cocaine at galas? They’ll get support groups and paid leave. But the unhoused man outside the 7-Eleven? The Indigenous woman on the waiting list for detox? The teenager whose trauma is tattooed across their behavior?
They’ll get the court order.
This bill creates a two-tiered response to addiction: care for the comfortable, and custody for the rest. A stark injustice should stir our collective sense of fairness and equality. And here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: Canada has done this before.
We’ve locked people up for their “own good” before. We called it residential schools. We said it was compassionate.
We institutionalized people with disabilities for decades. We said it was for their protection.
We detained women for “moral weakness” and Indigenous people for being “unfit.” We called it an intervention.
And now we’re back here again, rebranding detention as kindness, and calling it progress.
This is carceral logic in a white coat. This is control dressed as care.
The False Binary: Lock Them Up or Let Them Die
Supporters of the bill love to frame the debate as a false choice. Either we detain them, or we let them die. But that’s a lie, a manipulation of the truth that should make us all feel a sense of being misled. There is a third option, one backed by science, public health, and every expert in the field: voluntary, trauma-informed, culturally competent treatment. There’s a third option — one backed by science, public health, and every expert in the field: Voluntary trauma-informed, culturally competent treatment.
There’s a third option — one backed by science, public health, and every expert in the field: Voluntary trauma-informed, culturally competent treatment. You know what reduces overdose deaths?
Safe supply
Housing-first models
Peer-led crisis response
Supervised consumption sites
On-demand detox and recovery programs
Indigenous-led healing and community care
But that would require political will. It would cost money. It would mean confronting the systems that keep people addicted, traumatized, and abandoned. It’s much cheaper — and much more politically convenient — to hide the problem behind locked doors and call it a “solution.”
If compassion requires a judge, a lock, and a facility with armed security, it’s not compassion. It’s coercion with a nicer font. And if the first time the system engages with someone’s suffering is to detain them, not house them, not support them, not fund them, then the cruelty isn’t the exception. It’s the policy.
So let’s call it what it is. Bill 53 doesn’t solve addiction. It criminalizes the addicted without the paperwork. It doesn’t prevent death. It increases the risk by forcing people into treatment they didn’t choose. It doesn’t care for families. It gives them control without giving them the support they’ve been begging for. And no, it isn’t compassionate.
It’s incarceration in a lab coat.