• Phone Number604-677-5876
  • Emailcandace@lovewithboundaries.com
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Love With BoundariesLove With Boundaries

Family Addictions Counselling & Therapy

  • Home
  • Services
    • If You’re Addicted
    • Individual Counselling
    • Couple Counselling
    • Online Counselling
    • Clinical Supervision
  • About Candace
    • How I Work
    • Success Stories
    • The Team
  • Speaking
  • Media
    • Media Kit
    • TV/Video Interviews
    • Radio/Audio and Print Interviews
    • The Candace Plattor Show
  • Books
    • Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself
    • Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself: The Workbook
    • Self-Respect Sunday for Your Soul . . . If You Love an Addict
    • The Truth About Addiction
    • Voices of the 21st Century: Women Transforming the World
  • Blog
    • Blog Archives
    • Ask Candace
    • Your Questions Answered!
  • Contact

Header

 

Candace Plattor, M.A.Registered Clinical Counsellor
Candace Plattor, M.A.
Registered Clinical Counsellor
If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.

March 21, 2014 by Candace Plattor

The Portland Hotel Society: If It Looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck…

Maybe—just maybe—it’s actually a duck?

I just couldn’t let this story go by without writing about it again. The long and short of it is that the higher (no pun intended) authorities of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) and several of their own Board of Directors are stepping down, as ordered by the BC Government, in order to avoid receivership.

So what does this mean? Well, according to the government, in the 2012-2013 fiscal year, PHS received a cool $21 million in funding. Of that money, we are now being shown that $2.8 million was spent on administration costs and a whopping $15.3 million on employee-related expenses, with an astonishing $358,724 spent on staff travel expenses—such as going on holiday to Disneyland. What??

(For more information, please go directly to the article.)

I simply cannot wrap my head around this!

And all of this was going on while so many of the people they claim to have served in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) lived the miserable life of active addiction, often in cockroach-ridden premises, scrounging for food—and anything else that could feed their addiction—in dumpsters in DTES alleyways.

Sure, that shows how much they really care about their clients.

I heard Mark Townsend, Executive Director of PHS (including the safe injection site, Insite), being interviewed on TV the other night. He seemed quite proud when he stated that PHS hadn’t spent any taxpayer money doing this—as if that somehow made it okay. He appeared to have no shame or remorse at all as he admitted that the money spent on such selfish foolishness came from ‘private donations.’ Even if that’s true, even if none of my money or yours funded those trips to Disneyland and beyond, how must the private donors feel about this—and how soon will they open their coffers again to fund legitimate programs for those who desperately need them?

And from what I currently understand, even though the guilty are resigning, the PHS programs will remain intact—so I’m guessing this means that crack pipes will continue to be sold out of vending machines in the DTES for 25 cents a pop, and that the remaining PHS staff will still be teaching alcoholics how to make their own booze.

And if I’m not mistaken, you and I will continue to be paying for that.

But who’s paying for what isn’t the real issue for me, and I want to take this opportunity to clarify my position. After my recent blog post about the PHS, many readers accused me of not believing in harm reduction. (Crack Pipe Vending Machines: The New Kids on the Block.) That is simply not the case. I do believe in harm reduction. As an Addiction Therapist with over 20 years working in this field, how could I not understand that there is a place for harm reduction on the addiction recovery continuum? Those of us who help people with addictions need to meet them where they are to begin with—but, in my opinion, always with an eye on how we can move addicts into recovery, rather than keeping them stuck in what the PHS considers to be harm reduction.

Is it harm reduction to teach an alcoholic how to make alcohol? Of course I understand the reasoning behind such a program—that it’s better for alcoholics if they don’t drink mouthwash and other harsh toxic products that contain alcohol. I personally and professionally know how sick people can become from addiction and I don’t want anyone to have to suffer like that. I’m into holistic health, from every possible angle—but by not encouraging detox and treatment and instead selling clients crack pipes for a quarter, I do believe we are hurting and not helping in the long run.

Clearly, many of the PHS’s other decisions haven’t been so terrific either, as we are now finding out.

I’m hoping that whoever takes over for Townsend—and for his other cronies who believe in their own sense of righteous importance and entitlement—will look again at these programs with clearer eyes and sharper minds. I truly hope we will soon see some positive changes in this long-running DTES agency that has served a lot of needy people.

I deeply hope they stop the enabling and actually begin to provide the long-term help that their addicted clients so desperately need.

Filed Under: Choice point to stop addiction, Helping vs. Enabling, Recovery from addiction, Staying clean and sober takes work Tagged With: Addiction, Candace Plattor, Downtown Eastside, Harm reduction, Helping vs. Enabling, Portland Hotel Society, programs to help those addicted

Footer

Download afree chapter!

Download a
free chapter!

Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself

7 Tips for Outsmarting Your Addiction

7 Tips for Outsmarting Your Addiction

Sign-up form

Download a free chapter and the free report, and you’ll also receive my Overcoming Addictive Behaviours newsletter.

You can unsubscribe at any time. Review our Privacy Policy for details.

7 Tips for Outsmarting Your Addiction

7 Tips for Outsmarting Your Addiction

7 Tips for Outsmarting Your Addiction

Buy Candace’s Award-Winning Books!

Buy Candace’s Award-Winning Books!

Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself

hard copy | ebook | audiobook
en Français: PDF | mobi | epub

Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself the Workbook

hard copy | ebook

Recent Posts

  • The Courage to Change the Things I Can
  • Boundaries on family trips
  • Am I Care-giving or Am I Care-taking?
  • My brother needs ongoing help for past trauma
  • My adult son wants money for his account in jail

TEDxBearCreekPark talk: How to Love with Boundaries

TEDxBearCreekPark talk:
How to Love with Boundaries

Candace Plattor speaking at TEDx

If nothing ever changed

“If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”

Copyright © 2023·Candace Plattor, M.A., Registered Clinical Counsellor·
Vancouver, BC·website by nrichmedia

  • Instagram
Privacy Policy · Disclaimer · Terms of Use