Manitoba's Methy Problem

Premier Wab Kinew’s plan to force people high on meth into treatment isn’t compassion — it’s control disguised as care.

SMOKE THIS :: In July 2025 the Manitoba government introduced Bill 48, which would allow authorities to detain people who are high on methamphetamine for up to 72 hours and refer them into involuntary “protective care” treatment facilities.

The legislation has passed but has not yet come into force, awaiting official proclamation before it can be applied.

Premier Wab Kinew (NDP) has declared, “People who are suffering from meth addiction do not have the right to determine how the rest of us are going to live in our society.” On its face this may sound like decisive action in the face of a meth crisis. But dig beneath the rhetoric and you find a policy rooted in demonization, misunderstanding, and poor evidence. The result: a law that threatens rights, mis-allocates resources, and ignores what we actually know about addiction and treatment.

The law rides on a false premise. One of the fundamental truths of addiction treatment is that voluntary engagement is a key ingredient for success. When a person is forced into a treatment regimen—no matter how “compassionate” (which is how Kinew pretends this bill is) the forced form promises to be—the chances of meaningful change plummet. Classic research in addiction science shows that readiness to change, motivation, and self-agency matter. Without those factors, relapse is the more likely outcome. None of this is breaking news.

Bill 48 bypasses that science: by authorizing detention of someone because they are “too caught up in their addiction to take care of themselves” (as Kinew’s government frames it) and forcibly placing them into a facility for up to three days (and potentially more) rather than meeting them where they are. The legal presumption seems to be: because you’re high on meth and disturbing public order, we’ll hold you until you might calm down—and then maybe we’ll offer treatment. But the evidence suggests that simply removing somebody from society, holding them against their will, then releasing them back into the same environment—and expecting different results—is wishful thinking (and what do we say about doing the same thing over and again and expecting different results?) Many people will hit the pipe again - or whatever their preferred method of ingestion may be - because the core driver of their use remains unaddressed, and voluntary engagement in a meaningful way was not secured.

Moreover, the law conflates intoxication/disorderly-behaviour with addiction and the readiness to participate in treatment. Being high on meth is not the same as being in a treatment-ready state. Addiction is as much a behavioural and psychological phenomenon (and lived experience) as it is pharmacological. Trapping someone into a “detox” bed without the person’s buy-in may satisfy political optics, but it bypasses what works.

When Kinew states that “people addicted to meth … do not have the right to determine how the rest of us are going to live in society,” it’s a dangerously broad brush. It paints an ugly portrait of a whole class of human beings — people living with addiction, many of whom face trauma, mental-health issues, poverty, Indigenous discrimination, homelessness — as unworthy of agency or humanity. The statement shifts the conversation from “how do we help people who use meth” to “how do we lock up people who use meth so that the rest of us feel safe.” That’s not helpful, and it is harmful.

Such rhetoric reinforces stigma. It sends the message: you’re subsumed into your addiction; you’re dangerous; you’re a public nuisance; you must be removed. That makes it harder for individuals to seek help (because they are already demonized), harder for health-systems and community supports to work respectfully with people who use drugs, and harder for a humane, evidence-based response to take root.

Premier Kinew — as a leader in a party that purports to advance social justice — should know better. He should know that addiction is a health issue, not a moral failing or a public-order nuisance. He should know that whole-of-community responses, harm-reduction frameworks, culturally safe Indigenous-led interventions, trauma-informed care and voluntary treatment options are research-driven paths. Instead we got carceral-framed language disguised as “compassionate care.”

Bill 48 raises serious questions about individual rights. Detaining someone — potentially on the basis of intoxication alone — for up to 72 hours without the usual criminal justice safeguards smacks of arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Civil-rights groups, frontline workers and legal experts have already flagged concerns. And what constitutes “intoxicated by meth” in a field scenario? How will law enforcement or paramedics accurately distinguish meth-induced psychosis versus a mental-health crisis, versus a co-morbid condition? One MP pointed this out: “how do you determine … whether the person’s behaviour is attributed to meth, a psychotic episode, or a bi-polar disorder?”

Then there are the implementation pitfalls: we are being told the facility is a “20-bed protective care centre.” If thousands of people are cycling through meth use, the numbers don’t remotely match. Focus on putting people into beds for 72-hour holds diverts limited resources away from community-based, ongoing treatment, housing, harm-reduction, overdose prevention, mental-health supports — which are proven to matter. In effect, the law risks making people invisible in the system: they’ll be detained, “treated,” released, then back on the street with no continuity of care, no connection to housing or peer supports, no readiness to change. The law may create a revolving door of confinement rather than a pathway to recovery.

In fairness, the Manitoba government says it is responding to a genuine crisis. Paramedics and first responders report higher levels of injury, aggression, complexity of calls when meth is involved. But responding to a crisis doesn’t mean sacrificing evidence. The literature on involuntary or coerced addiction treatment is mixed at best; many studies show poorer outcomes and higher relapse rates when voluntariness is missing. The message: you can’t force motivation. Yet the bill implicitly does just that.

What the government frames as “taking back our communities” is in fact a form of social control: an extension of the logic of enforcement into the domain of public health. That’s a slippery slope. You end up criminalising intoxication and marginalising the very populations you claim to help: people who use drugs, people experiencing homelessness, Indigenous people (who are disproportionately impacted by meth use and colonial-trauma legacies). If this law is not grounded in culturally safe, trauma-informed, voluntary-care pathways, it will perpetuate harm.

Rather than legislating detention, government should focus on ramping up voluntary treatment capacity, harm-reduction services (safe supply, supervised consumption, peer-led outreach), housing first programs, culturally safe Indigenous-led initiatives, and integration of addiction care with mental health. It should pay attention to structural drivers: poverty, trauma, lack of access to care, intergenerational colonial legacies. It should use the voices of people with lived experience. And it should shift away from demonising rhetoric, because stigma kills—not just metaphorically, but literally.

If Premier Kinew is serious about tackling the meth crisis, he should lead with evidence, not fear; with care, not coercion; with respect, not demonization. Saying “we will no longer allow addicts to determine how the rest of us live” doesn’t make you tough on the crisis—it makes you complicit in repeating decades of failed prohibition-style responses.

Bill 48 may look like action. But it risks becoming a symbolic gesture that ignores the real complexities of addiction, undermines human rights, and wastes precious resources on short-term detention rather than long-term healing. We owe the people who use meth—not demonization, not coercive detentions—but pathways to dignity, agency, and health.

And Premier Kinew, if he truly believes in social justice, should know better, and do better.

Shaun Proulx has reported on the subject of crystal meth since 2005. He hosts The Shaun Proulx Show heard weekends on SiriusXM Canada Talks 167. Subscribers can listen to it on this Substack as well. More: ShaunProulx.com