Submission ID 131815
| Issue/Objective | As Canada's toxic supply and overdose crisis intensifies, involuntary substance use treatment is gaining traction as an urgent policy intervention, despite contested evidence of effectiveness. Political and public efforts to understand the crisis conditions have increasingly centred discourses of public disorder, often conflating the visible increase in suffering with violent crime. Corresponding with these narratives is also a growing discourse of urgency to intervene more meaningfully to alleviate the distress associated with the drug overdose crisis. Within this context, involuntary treatment is often framed as an immediately actionable policy solution. This study examines how moralized discourse operates within Canadian news media reporting on involuntary substance use treatment as a potential intervention, thereby shaping understanding across public health, policy, and social systems. |
|---|---|
| Methodology/Approach | We conducted a critical discourse analysis on 144 news articles published between 2020 and 2025, retrieved from the Canadian Newsstream database, assessing their scope using a standardized data extraction spreadsheet. Then, we undertook a Foucauldian discourse analysis of the media reporting informed by Moscovici's theory of social representation. |
| Results | First, media narratives mobilize a moral logic of compassion and obligation to legitimize a coercive intervention that is poorly supported by research. Involuntary treatment is frequently framed through a duty to urgently save lives, obscuring its likelihood to cause harm. Second, reporting foregrounds hegemonic comfort by privileging discussions of maintaining public order, while backgrounding consideration of treatment effectiveness, ethics, and individual rights. Third, narratives frame the crisis conditions driving involuntary treatment in individualized and de-contextualized terms, overlooking structural and historical determinants. |
| Discussion/Conclusion | Media reporting centred on moral urgency, visible suffering, and individualized perspectives coalesce to legitimize involuntary substance use treatment as a viable intervention within public health, policy, and governance systems. Instead, prioritizing interdisciplinary engagement with upstream determinants such as entrenched poverty, intergenerational trauma, and homelessness is critical to addressing the root causes of the crisis. We argue for media and public discourse to critically consider who is best served by involuntary substance use treatment, and to prioritize health equity and enabling cross-disciplinary structural supports as drug policy goals. |
| Presenters and Affiliations | Sahana Babu School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia Trevor Goodyear School of Nursing, University of British Columbia |
