Types of Outpatient Drug Treatment in Nova Scotia

The Nova Scotia government cannot afford to ignore their drug problem. When a government turns a blind eye to drug addictions, the amount of people who are using increases. When an area's drug addiction increases, so does the unemployment rate and the amount of crime that they experience.

The best way to make sure that they are keeping their drug problem in check is to make sure that they have strict laws dealing with both the use and sale of drugs. The better the local law enforcement is about identifying the signs that a person is using drugs, the sooner they can get the person off of the street and into the system.

Getting Nova Scotia's drug addicts off the street is just putting a band aid on the drug problem. While strict drug laws might be enough to convince some people to not even experiment with drugs, it is really putting a band aid on the problem. In order to truly make sure that they are actually fixing the drug problem in Nova Scotia, the government needs to make sure that all of the people who are convicted of a drug crime are able to get into counseling.

The best drug rehabilitation programs use a combination of detoxification, residential treatment programs, and outpatient therapy programs. As of right now there are 23 different drug rehabilitation programs in Nova Scotia. Out of these twenty-three programs fourteen of them are outpatient treatment programs.

Although each of Nova Scotia's outpatient drug rehabilitation programs is slightly different, they are all set up so that the addict is able to get the counseling that they need, while they are also able to go to work and take care of their family. The amount of counseling the addict gets while they are in an outpatient program completely depends on the way the program is set up.

One of the changes that is slowly starting to happen to some of the outpatient drug programs in Nova Scotia is the addiction of holistic means of helping addicts overcome their addiction. There are some pretty big differences between the holistic treatment programs, which are called Biophysical treatment programs. The biggest difference is how the program approaches the nature of the addiction. Traditional treatment programs feel that addiction is not something that can be cured, that it is something that the addict needs to learn how to overcome. The bio physical treatment programs feel that the addiction can be cured, that the addict simply needs to have the right tools.

Some addicts respond very well to biophysical drug treatment programs while other ones are most successful when they are involved in a more traditional program.

^{Sources:
http://www.biophysical-drugrehabs.org/non12step-drug-treatment.html}

^{http://www.canadarehab.ca/drug_rehab_novascotia.html}