The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

New Deal For Drunks BY RON KENYON D. W. F. Coughlin, Ontario probation service director, Psychiatrists probe for causes of this, NOBoDY knew where Joe B, came from, but he rapidly acquired respect in the Western Ontario city where he settled, He got a good a host of friends, But he did his best to hide, On many a weekend, he went out and got drunk, During that time job, joined a service club, and made there was one thing he became a different person, that he had "geen fighting in the streets but nobody believed them == nobody wanted te, Yet, if they had only known it, this man was practically a true Jekyll and Hyde, with alcohol as the chemical that performed the metamorphosis, One day, Joe B, stole a car and disap peared from town, In polidw court, after he'd been picked up, the whole story came out, He'd drunk at the time he the car, but it was not a first offence, During other periods of drunkenness, over the years in other towns, he had committed many othe offences, Rumers got around been been 101 Wk He was given a long prison term, For him, aleohal went hand in hand with erime, and there was little hope that he would eve overcome the dual problem, His case is by no means rare, Actually, there are lots of Joe B's in Ontario, In fact, according to Frank Potts, director of psychology for the Ontario Department of Reform Institu ONTARIO TODAY tions, some 457 of people in the courts are affected in some way by the problem of drink: ing, For some of them, drinking has already hecomie hopelessly entangled with crime, They are the Joe B's, and nobody knows what to do to help them, But for others, who are facing a magistrate for the first with no more serious charge than drunkenness, it is apparent that hope exists if these people don't have to time go to jail, mix with eriminals, and come out branded with a eriminal record, These further handicaps, coupled with a drinking problem, has habitual criminals in the past than almost anything else, This ls why a brand-new amendment has just been passed to the Liquor Control Act of On- tario, to give magistrates the power to commit first offender drunks to an alcoholic rehabilita centre instead to jail, Many influential people look upon this legislation as one of the most impressive signs of enlightenment in the field of correction in Ontario in many decades, made mare tion of sending them T was the brainchild of Attorney-General Kelso Roberts and it provides that magis. trates may, instead of fining a man or sending an institution him te jail, order him to enter for 30 days, where he will be treated as a medical case and not as a criminal, With his SATURDAY, aPriL 1, 1961 own agreement, the man may be sent there for 90 days, Authorities don't expect many alcoholics to agree to enter the institution willingly. A spokesman for the Attorney-General's depart- ment estimated that some 70% of drunks would be against the whole idea, This is just what has delayed successful treatment of first-offender alcoholics for so many years, They just wouldn't go for help and as magistrates could only fine them or send them to jail they received no remedial care at all, The new approach, being nicknamed the "Kelso cure", is the first gun in a major attack on this aspect of crime, It began a year or so ago, when a committee of 50 was set up 1o study the whole problem, The committee is still in existence and expected to remain so, Its first major achieve- ment lay in its contribution toward the amend ment passed by the legislature a month or 50 AgO, But this is likely to be only a beginning. Along with legislation, the government wants to find out more aleoholie, Bo a research program backed by $40,000 has been set up through the Alcoholic Research Founda- tion under Prof, J. P, Giffen, of the Depart- ment of Sociology, of the University of Toronto, Dr, Giffen, a psychologist, is attempting to find out more shout the chronic drunk, OR a good many vears we have assumed alcoholism, And pretty often, Ten Canadian about the that we know all about yet surprises come about or so Medical Journal, the alcoholic couldn't get a bed in a hospital and received little interest hopeless VEArs ago, points out the from doctors, He was considered a Case, Then along came antabuse, a drug which abruptly stops people drinking, If they drink in spite of taking it, they become violently ill at once, But antabuse wasn't the whole answer, and wasn't even a major part of the answer, It didn't take into consideration the fact that the alcoholic drinks for a deep psychologi- cal reason =-=- one that needs to be found by a psychiatrist, if possible, and dealt with, But antabuse offered a means of control while the psychiatrists did their probing, and it was a welcome proof that something could be done for the aleoholie, ; Another important aid proved te be Al- coholies Anonymous, whose members, all of them alcoholics, give strong support to the effort of the individual to overcome his problem, And there have been other victories against alcoholism and aleohol, A great deal more has been learned about the way in which alcohol operates within the body and about the damage it can do to parts of the body, including the liver, In the United States three different research projects have reported that aleehol does more brain damage than has ever pre- viously been imagined, Thus, when an aleoholic promises never to drink again he may not be merely bluffing -- he may be sincere, yet his brain, due to destruction of certain cells, may not have the power ta control his actions, "You can't separate the drunk from the mentally sick," says D, W, F, Coughlin, director of Probation Services of the Attorney General's Department, The idea of the new legislation is, at the to get the drunks away frem the from criminal treatment, The drunks will be treated as sick people outset, criminals and