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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Pioneer in addictions field steps down after 47 years

Posted: 04/1/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

‘Every two or three years there’s another new drug’ — Colleen Allan on the ongoing challenges in the addictions field (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

Colleen Allan began work at the Alcoholism Foundation of Manitoba 47 years ago.

Today is her last formal day on the job.

There's been a sea change in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse since Allan was hired as secretary to the AFM's medical director. The AFM has even changed its name, the first letter now referring to the more general "addictions."

Allan started work before Manitoba introduced legalized gambling and, with it, the sorrows that come with that addiction.

When she steps out the AFM's front door today, she's taking the institutional memory of the place with her.

She's officially a "prevention education consultant." In plain terms, she is one of the few people who have lived and breathed progressive addictions treatment in Manitoba from the start.

She started work on April Fool's Day, 1964. Alcoholics -- those who were diagnosed and treated -- were seen as successful businessmen ruining their lives. Women didn't seek or get treatment. It wasn't until the late 1960s that Helen Malone, wife of a former Free Press publisher, spoke about her addiction and convinced the AFM to open a residential addiction facility in Winnipeg.

It would be the first of its kind in Canada. In fact, before 1972, only two studies had even been done on women and alcohol.

Allan brought personal experience to the AFM table.

"The fact was that both my mother and father had addiction issues," she says, sitting in a book-filled room at the AFM's Portage Avenue building. "Both my parents were violent, and so was my first husband."

She was one of the first women in Canada to seek divorce on the grounds of alcoholism and family violence.

Allan wasn't a secretary for long. In 1968, the medical director encouraged her to get an education. She'd get a diploma in social work from Red River Community College in 1970 and continue her advanced education from there.

In 1972, Allan became a rehabilitation counsellor for the AFM.

"Given it was a male bastion, they were very reluctant to give me alcoholics," she laughs. "It took a long time. It was fair because there was no training, no programs at the time."

The face of treatment has changed as well. Back then, police would just pick up intoxicated persons and throw them in the drunk tank. Slowly, it became clear a continuum of care was needed.

By 1976, Allan served as a trainer to outside groups, working with them to see addiction as an illness, not a character flaw. She became a national trainer.

"I was pretty much the only show in town," she laughs.

The influence of alcohol on women was beginning to be understood by the mid-1970s, Allan says.

"We know women metabolize alcohol differently," she says. "We knew women were a lot sicker when they came in here."

At the same time, experts were just beginning to recognize the effects on a fetus of a mother who drank alcohol during pregnancy.

Alcohol and gambling remain primary concerns in the addictions field, Allan says, despite the trend to focus on the latest street drugs.

"You keep getting designer drugs like OxyContin and ecstasy. Every two or three years there's another new drug. They mobilize around the drug, not the issue."

She says there needs to be a collective will to deal with problems as they arise, citing emerging concern over young women mixing Red Bull with alcohol.

"Because alcohol has been around forever, they don't recognize what they're doing when they're taking alcohol. They drink with marijuana. That controls nausea so you're combatting your body's natural protection, which is to be sick when you consume toxic amounts of alcohol."

Allan cautions that accepted forms of treatment, 21- or 28-day programs, for example, don't work for every addict. Many need longer.

"We're doing people a disservice in our middle-class values because we don't give them time to recover."

Allan's passion and experience will be in high demand after her last day at work. She's going to continue working on a volunteer basis in the addictions field, sitting on committees and engaging in research.

"There's so much work to do."

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 1, 2011 B1

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