EDMONTON - A lack of child care, poverty and pregnancy are often barriers to women who need treatment for drug, alcohol or tobacco addictions, a national substance abuse conference heard Sunday.
Nancy Poole, a researcher for the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women in Vancouver, told more than 100 delegates at the conference's opening session that women need specialized harm reduction and treatment programs to meet their unique needs, Poole said.
"A huge obstacle was the lack of recognition for the need for women-specific and women-centred responses and real commitment to action on that," she said.
Poole also called for better integration of drug, tobacco and alcohol treatment programs for women who have also been sexually abused, live in violent relationships or are suffering with mental illness.
"We need to work (on it) so that it's not this fragmented thing (that says) 'Well, you can only get this here and you have to go over there for that,'" she said.
"How can we knit our response together much better?"
Many delegates attending the conference work in substance abuse treatment, prevention or harm reduction programs across Canada.
As many as 80 per cent of women entering treatment programs also have histories of being abused or assaulted, and many use drugs or alcohol to try to cope, delegates were told.
Lorraine Greaves, executive director of the women's health centre in B.C., says new research has shown that women and men should be treated differently for substance abuse.
"We're finding, for example, that women metabolize alcohol and nicotine differently than men," she said.
"We're learning things like women get most of the mood-altering drug prescriptions in this country. That's been true for 30 years and that's not changing," she said.
Services aren't responding quickly enough to change the treatments.
Women who smoke or drink can get more serious diseases and have poorer outcomes than men of the same age, Greaves said.
"That means we actually do have the need for different clinical treatment for women," she said.
Women tend to suffer more early childhood sexual abuse and violence than men and that also has to be integrated into treatment programs, Greaves added.
Women with addictions may not seek help because they're worried about losing custody of their children, she said.
Women who are pregnant and addicted are vilified by society, Greaves said, and that needs to change.
"Even if there are so-called treatment programs available for them, or information, they don't go to them. They don't go to them because they're afraid, ashamed and they feel guilty."
"That's always our base illustration to see how far we've come and we haven't come very far in that regard," she said.
Nancy Bradley, executive director of the Jean Tweed Centre in Toronto, said there have only been substance abuse programs specifically for women in the last 20 years.
The trauma that women suffered through sexual or physical abuse wasn't understood or factored into the way they were treated for addictions, she added.
"We now understand how trauma interplays with the issues of substance use for women," Bradley said.
"We know that these women are often mothers and children are often involved. So we know that we need to help them learn how to parent better and provide specific services for pregnant and parenting young children," she said.
The Jean Tweed Centre, which has 18 residential treatment beds, 52 staff and treats up to 1,800 women each year, has a child-care centre and offers classes that teach women how to be better parents.
It also offers programs for problem gambling - another addiction that women face.
Wendy Reynolds, spokeswoman for Action on Women's Addictions Research and Education, based in Kingston, Ont., talked about a program to help low-income women cut down on smoking.
Women struggling with drug and alcohol addictions are often also addicted to tobacco, the conference heard.
But sometimes cutting down on smoking can be a tough sell to single moms, who wrestle with poverty and high stress levels, she said.
"Smoking is part of the context of their lives," she said.
"Women would say to us things like, 'I know I shouldn't smoke around my kids, but I'm not ready to quit smoking. I'm not interested in quitting smoking, it's my friend, the thing that sees me through the day'," she said.
Instead of emphasizing quitting cold turkey, the program, called Start Thinking About Reducing Second-hand Smoke, urges women to take small steps to cut down, such as having a few cigarettes outside the home each day, so their children aren't exposed to so much second-hand smoke.
