The Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community represents a design of treatment which is directed primarily toward recovery from substance abuse through personal growth, which requires abstinence from mind-altering substances, including prescription drugs used illegally.
Abstinence is the goal for individuals in the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community program; hence, our interaction with other health and social service networks is based on treatment concepts leading to abstinence. Consequently, involvement with concepts of addiction as something that can be managed is irreconcilable to us.
We view needle exchange projects, providing addictive drugs or prescribing substitute drugs without significant personal contacts directed toward improving the life of clients through abstinence, as inhumane and should be avoided.
The Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community treats people, not drugs. Drug addiction is a symptom of other problems that can be dealt with after the drug abuse and other acting-out behaviour has stopped.
Treatment of addiction, which takes place at the Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community, is harm reduction since it eliminates the devastating harm that drug use has on individuals, families and communities. However, harm reduction, as the term is commonly used, is not treatment.
We believe that introducing harm reduction ideology to treatment centres or presenting harm reduction as a viable method of addiction treatment significantly reduces the addicts' ability to deal with the underlying issues that give rise to the addictive behaviour. It is only when these issues are negotiated that real long-term recovery may begin.
We should never confuse harm reduction programs, designed to control the spread of disease, with programs dedicated to treating addiction. They are simply very different things.
The Baldy Hughes Therapeutic Community aspires to be part of an integrated treatment system including residential and outpatient programs, day centers, detoxification clinics, prison alternatives and hospital alternatives.
We are proud of our abstinence-based program and we are proud to be reducing the harm that drugs have on our community.
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