Alcohol health promotion: not just harm reduction

Health advocates, when referring publicly to alcohol use, are inclined to emphasize ways in which it elevates risk for harms. No surprise there. Drinking more on any occasion leads to greater intoxication and increased risk of receiving and causing injury. More frequent regular use increases likelihood of eventually contracting sustained illnesses. Drinking that has become a daily routine, or involves difficulty at times in stopping, raises prospects for developing a detrimental dependence on alcohol. Formal research indicates broadly-applicable consumption thresholds for added risk, so health proponents readily advise moderate patterns of use. Canada’s low-risk alcohol drinking guidelines are one such set of recommendations in regard to maximum use on a weekly basis, on normal days, on special occasions and in certain situations.

The Alcohol Reality Check is a self-screening tool that draws on scientific study and those Canadian guidelines in particular. It provides people with an anonymous online opportunity to see, through personalized feedback, how their regular drinking pattern compares or contrasts with various levels of risk to long-term health, for immediate harms and for developing unhealthy habitual use. We believe it’s a little exercise worth doing periodically.

Encouraging people in healthier use is more than a public social marketing approach broadly exhorting adherence to behavioural guidelines. That approach carries some liabilities. One is the authoritarian air social marketing readily assumes in prescriptively telling people what they should do. By contrast, a consistent health promotion approach seeks to help those who use alcohol to better manage their own wellbeing by becoming more intentional in their drinking. A tool like the Alcohol Reality Check accomplishes more, health promotion-wise, not just by acquainting people with the guidelines, but by going beyond that to prompt reflection, affirm agency and self-efficacy, and encourage adoption of a course of action that will align with the person’s own reconsidered aspirations of wellness.

A further shortcoming to typical social marketing has to do with its isolating orientation in representing health as an individual issue and not also a collective, mutual matter: people tend to be addressed as singular entities separate from and uninfluenced by their relational connections. The framing of health as absence of personal injury or illness is also inadequate. It ignores further, positive dimensions long-recognized by the WHO’s definition of health as encompassing holistic wellness in physical, mental, social and economic respects. People, whether as individuals or in groups, drink (and some deliberately get drunk) to receive certain benefits that enhance their sense of wellbeing. Experience of pleasure, fun, is part of this.

Failure to acknowledge and address this in a way that is appreciative, even when constructively critical (e.g., asking whether there might be more advantageous ways of securing social benefits), is often an obstacle to meaningful, productive conversation that invites contemplation of change. In respectfully attending to cultural considerations for use, qualitative research confirms a real disconnect on the part of young adult drinkers with guidelines that come across as indifferent if not oblivious to common motivations for and gains derived from drinking. Compounding this deficiency is the way in which social media serves to reinforce much of this motivation (with the alcohol industry ably exploiting both this incentive and the popular mechanisms of affirming it, while narrow health messaging is often a stranger to both).

Alcohol Reality Check is not a social networking site, but Hello Sunday Morning is. Health promotion efforts like it support personal interaction and collective dialogue around how people can relate to alcohol in ways that capture benefits and not just avoid harms. While potentially necessary and quite beneficial as a vehicle of communication and an aid to discussion, a social networking platform is not sufficient for building community health. What is vital is to utilize a variety of means to engage people in conversation that helps them to collaborate in joint initiatives to manage their shared health in relation to alcohol (as in regard to other areas of opportunity and challenge in their civic life).


Tim Dyck, Research Associate, Centre for Addictions Research of BC

Needles in Prison: Where is Public Health Behind Bars?

“Our government has a zero-tolerance policy for drugs in our institutions.”  This comment comes from Canada’s Public Security Minister Vic Toews, responding the 2012 Federal lawsuit filed by four HIV groups and a former Canadian Correction inmate seeking a supervisory injunction – a court order that would force Ottawa to establish Canadian prison-based syringe access programs (PSAPs).

You may be asking yourself: “Drugs are illegal and prisons are drug-free, so why would we give inmates needles to commit a crime?”

The reality is prisons are not drug-free and needle-free; never have been, never will be.

Contrary to the assumption that prisons are a highly restricted, secure environment, virtually no prison in the world has been able to keep drugs completely out. Needles are easily smuggled in or can be made from various items already in prisons (see example here). These needles are shared, often for a fee, between anywhere from 10 to 20 inmates.

Roughly 80 percent of inmates arrive with substance use problems and incarceration has absolutely no effect on reducing injection drug use.  The Correctional Service of Canada itself admitted that 17 percent of male and 14 percent of female inmates reported injecting drugs while in prison – 60 percent of the time with a used syringe.

The danger here is that our prisons have become hot spots for HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission. To begin with, HIV and HCV prevalence rates in prisons are at least 10 and 30 times higher than the population as a whole. A Vancouver study estimated 21 percent of all HIV infections among people in Vancouver who inject drugs were acquired in prison.

In the face of our government’s “zero tolerance” policies, Canada has acknowledged that drug use does exist in its institutions. Currently, bleach kits, which inmates can use to sterilize syringes, are available upon request. Advocates for PSAPs see bleach kit programs as a step in the right direction. But these programs have also come under scrutiny. Research shows inmates report limited access to such programs, particularly because they come with increased surveillance and stigmatization from correctional officers.

In addition to principles based on prohibition, the reason the Correctional Service of Canada has not moved forward with PSAPs is because of the concern that inmates may turn syringes on officers and use them as weapons. What is the evidence behind this?

In the 60 PSAPs across 12 countries introduced since 1992, there have been no reports of needles from PSAPs being used as weapons. Rather, evidence shows:

  • Reduced needle sharing
  • Reduced needle pricks
  • Decreased HIV and HCV transmission (also safer for officers if they do get pricked)
  • No increase in drug use or injecting
  • Reduced drug overdoses
  • Increased referrals to drug treatment programs
  • Effectiveness in a wide range of institutions

Despite this compelling evidence, PSAPs remain a tough sell in Canada. One possible reason why prison health has not been prioritized by the public may be due to a misconception that people stay in prison forever. But prisoners (including those who have contracted HIV and HCV) do not stay behind bars forever. Over 95 percent of people are eventually released back into the community. They are our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. They are part of our communities – making prison health a vital component of public health.

Ignoring this fact not only harms public health more broadly, but, by definition, also violates human rights. HIV advocacy groups argue many rights are violated by refusing PSAPs, including the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

If not evidence, what will it take to introduce true public health and human right standards for Canadians behind bars?

AG

Author: Alissa Greer, Research Project Coordinator at Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center

*Please note that the material presented here does not necessarily imply endorsement or agreement by individuals at the Centre for Addictions Research of BC