Are drugs or alcohol causing harm in you or your loved ones life? There are solutions, people can recover, New West Recovery provides a safe and healing environment to recover from addiction while promoting and facilitating a desire for recovery.
It’s hard not to be inspired here. Youth and Adult Addiction Treatment
Last Door Recovery Centre and Westminster House Launch “New West Recovery” outreach campaign.
New West Recovery is a campaign with a goal of improving the lives and outcomes of individuals and families affected by addiction related issues. The campaign focuses on early intervention, prevention, education, harm reduction, recovery capital, and addiction treatment – with an emphasis on connection. Individuals will be connected to high-quality addiction and mental health services in the New Westminster community.
Canadians come from across the country to access addiction recovery services in New Westminster BC, making New West, the recovery capital of Canada. Addiction treatment is unique and diverse, accommodating all ages, return to work solutions, and family addiction recovery programs.
New West Recovery will make 2018 “A Year of Recovery” with outreach booths activated at over 50 community events, conferences, and festivals. A map to wellness guide to New Westminster’s mental health and addiction services has been created to look like a tourist walking guide of the city, easy to read and distribute. A new website www.NewWestRecovery.com has also been created to link to the featured information and resources on the maps. Over 50,000 maps will be distributed this summer throughout Metro Vancouver. These efforts, along with a social media campaign, traditional media campaign, and word-of-mouth, will reach over 2,000,000, and reduce the stigma of recovery during the opioid overdose crisis, and serve as a model to combat the overdose crisis for other municipalities to explore. The message is that Recovery from addiction is possible and happens in British Columbia.
The BC Centre on Substance Use Opiate guidelines on withdrawal management has now been adopted by all of Canada and suggests that a short-term detox is not best practice for recovery, and that, instead, long term treatment treatments and community engagement are the best practices for overcoming addiction. New West Recovery provides both long term treatment and community engagement, for youth and adults and their families. Newly recovering individuals become part of a thriving recovery community and are able to fully regain citizenship.
For over three decades the city of New Westminster has grown into become Canada’s largest and most successful inclusive addiction recovery communities, with thousands of residents living in recovery.
New Westminster is surrounded by cities like Vancouver, Surrey, Mission, Maple Ridge, all with well known “strips” where drugs can be bought freely on the streets. Conversely, the City of New Westminster dealt with its strip decades ago by supporting all four pillars of harm reduction – prevention, enforcement, treatment, and addiction recovery. New Westminster has no “strip” and reports one the lowest per capita overdose rate for any major city in the province.
New Westminster also plays host to the annual Recovery Week BC in September, featuring the Recovery Capital Conference of Canada, and Recovery Day, with a delegation from Portugal and Switzerland attending the conference and over 20,000 people are expected at this year’s Recovery Day.
We hope this initiative will also inspire other communities to audit their local recovery capital and find ways to further develop their services into self-sustaining recovery communities that work together and not in silos.