--- title: "Canada’s worst drug problem is served by the glass" description: "Alcohol kills about nine Canadians in hospital every day, yet science-backed treatments rarely reach patients" author: "Albion Grey" published: 2026-09-28T08:00:00Z modified: 2026-09-29T02:24:52Z url: https://rews.cc/a/canada-s-worst-drug-problem-is-served-by-the-glass-99b408 language: en tags: ["health", "alcohol", "addiction", "medicine", "canada", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Canada’s worst drug problem is served by the glass *Alcohol kills about nine Canadians in hospital every day, yet science-backed treatments rarely reach patients* By Albion Grey · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/canada-s-worst-drug-problem-is-served-by-the-glass-99b408 ## In brief - Alcohol costs Canada around $20bn a year and causes more harm than any other drug, including opioids and tobacco - About nine people die in Canadian hospitals daily from alcohol; there are 280 alcohol hospitalisations a day versus 84 for opioids - CAMH estimates less than 2% of Canadians with alcohol-use disorder receive appropriate medications - The Canadian Medical Association and the College of Family Physicians of Canada both declined to comment on treatment gaps - Doctors question $40,000 residential programmes that return patients to the circumstances that drove their drinking Jordan Kawchuk did not expect to have roommates at 54, let alone more than a dozen. For six months at the start of 2026 the writer and former television producer lived at the Vancouver Island Therapeutic Community (VITC), a treatment centre for men in Nanaimo, British Columbia. With his neat hair and button-down shirt, he says, he is often mistaken for staff. In fact it was his second stay at the facility and the fifth in-patient programme of a decades-long struggle with alcohol-use disorder. The ledger of his losses is long: countless jobs, money, trust and, hardest of all, his marriage and the chance to live full time with his daughters as they grew up. Canada’s ledger is longer still. Research suggests alcohol use costs the country around $20bn a year in health care, lost productivity and criminal justice. A national study by researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), published this year in the *Journal of Psychopharmacology*, found alcohol causes more overall harm than any other drug in the country—far more even than non-prescription opioids or tobacco. Around nine people die in Canadian hospitals each day from harm caused by alcohol, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information; 280 hospitalisations a day are chalked up to drink, against 84 for opioids. Consumption is ticking down slightly overall, according to Statistics Canada, but those who drink are drinking more. Nearly 18% of Canadians aged 15 and over will meet the clinical criteria for an alcohol-use disorder (AUD) in their lifetime--( Research suggests). Yet doctors and advocates say the country withholds from them treatments that are known to work. Evan Ailon runs the only dedicated practice on Vancouver Island for AUD. The patients, he says, are not usually the hard part. “The challenges that I have are with colleagues whose lack of information, lack of knowledge about this really gets in the way of the treatment of these patients.” Family doctors, his patients tell him, ignore their drinking or merely advise cutting down; others are simply packed off to Alcoholics Anonymous, which suits some but should not be the only offer. “Some of the most effective medications that have ever been invented in medicine, full-stop, are for alcohol-use disorder,” Dr Ailon says, “but that is just something that’s not known by most providers and certainly not known by the average person.” Naltrexone, approved by Health Canada in 1997, works on the brain’s opioid reward centre, reducing cravings, consumption and, for those in recovery, the chance of relapse. Acamprosate, approved in 2007, steadies the neurotransmitters thrown off balance by chronic drinking and helps maintain abstinence. Yet CAMH reckons less than 2% of people with AUD receive appropriate medications. Dr Ailon sees the cost in hospital wards, where the deaths are often preventable. Patients arrive with severe liver failure after multiple prior admissions, their charts empty of any treatment for the underlying disorder. “If we as physicians had a patient who came into the hospital with numb feet and a heart attack from very poorly controlled diabetes and we wrote in our charts, ‘this patient continues to eat sugar, despite us telling them they need to stop eating sugar,’ but we’ve never started them on any of the medications that we have for diabetes, that would be unbelievably unacceptable,” he says. “Yet for substance use, it’s completely normalised.” Part of the problem is silence. High-risk drinking “is not being recognized early enough in our health-care system,” says Jürgen Rehm, a CAMH senior scientist who in 2023 co-chaired a committee that drew up new guidelines for treating it, “because neither the treating physician asks, nor the patient mentions alcohol problems.” Part is stigma. Mr Kawchuk has been told in emergency rooms that a bed was needed “for people with more problems than you,” and overheard staff mutter “another bed, another addict, another drunk.” “It’s hard even saying that alcohol-use disorder is a disease,” he says, “because I’ve seen people roll their eyes.” Asked by CBC to comment on the state of alcohol treatment, the Canadian Medical Association and the College of Family Physicians of Canada both declined. Then there is the question of what treatment should look like. Dr Ailon frets about patients “dropping $40,000 on something that is no better than what they can do as an out-patient.” Some are helped by residential programmes, he allows, but three months away mean little if the patient is then returned “into exactly the same circumstances that they came from that were driving the issue.” Chris Kinch, a vice-president at Connective, the non-profit that runs VITC, agrees in-patient care is not for everyone. But treatment there is free, and community itself is the method: structured days, meetings and mutual accountability, plus counselling and the social skills to contribute on release. After almost six months, Mr Kawchuk felt ready to go home in June. His first trip was to visit his daughters in the Okanagan. “I don’t care about the careers or getting back to making television or getting rich or owning a home,” he says. “Now it’s time to get to know them as adults.” He takes his medication, attends AA and is writing a book. “I just have to be diligent. I have to know that it is life and death because the disease is out to kill me.” Canada’s drug-policy energies, and its anguish, have long been fixed on opioids; [wastewater monitoring](https://rews.cc/a/flushed-with-data-what-the-sewers-reveal-about-drug-use-in-e-2b8919) tracks methamphetamine and fentanyl city by city while alcohol scarcely registers as a drug at all. Yet the science here is settled and the pills are decades off patent. What is missing is not pharmacology but habit: doctors who ask, prescribe and follow up, and professional bodies willing to say so. Until alcohol is treated as matter-of-factly as diabetes, the nine daily hospital deaths will remain preventable in theory and routine in practice.