Ottawa's Inner City Health "wet" program — giving wine to alcoholics — has its critics and skeptics, but the data show it works in improving health and reducing harm. File photo. Photograph by: Matt Cardy, Getty Images

OTTAWA — At 9:30 p.m. hard-core alcoholics, coffee mugs in hand, line up at the Oaks homeless shelter for last call.

For a few, it's the nightcap of a 72-ounce day — the equivalent of about three bottles of wine.

Carl Maciejewski was among the first to move into this avant-garde and controversial shelter in Ottawa when it opened a little more than a year ago, after living a decade on the street where every waking moment was spent scrounging for booze then drinking himself into oblivion.

"Before this, there were times I couldn't even remember what I did the next day," said the 58-year-old as he stood in the shelter's spacious kitchen, preparing lunch of split pea soup and ham sandwiches. "If it wasn't for this program, I wouldn't be alive."

Ottawa's Inner City Health "wet" program — giving wine to alcoholics — has its critics and skeptics, but the data show it works in improving health and reducing harm. It was initiated by Jeff Turnbull, an internist and currently the president of the Canadian Medical Association, who saw the homeless repeatedly coming through emergency room doors.

Tiina Podymow, a kidney doctor at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, has cared for and published research on homeless people with complex health problems, including chronic alcoholics, and would like to see the Ottawa model brought to Montreal.

Podymow is well aware of negative public reaction. When the academic paper citing her findings on the Ottawa pilot project appeared in the Canadian Medical Association's journal in 2006 — the CMA at first refused to publish it — the news went international, with Jay Leno poking fun on his show at Canadians providing booze to rubbies.

"The program takes the worst of the worst alcoholics off the street," she said. From there, their lives calm down and daily police pickups, ambulance rides and emergency room visits are replaced with harm reduction and far better care.

"The alternative was drinking themselves to death."

Podymow's research found that on average participants had been picked up by police 18 times and visited the emergency room 13 times a month before they entered the pilot project. Both figures decreased dramatically after they joined the pilot project.

When chronic alcoholics were given a small amount of wine every hour, beginning at 7:30 a.m. through to 9:30 p.m. health and hygiene improved and some participants even stopped drinking completely.

Wendy Muckle, a nurse and director of Ottawa City Health, said the program — which also exists in Toronto and Hamilton, Ont. — is often misunderstood, conjuring up images of taxpayers paying for homeless people to get drunk.

But the program targets a very small percentage of the population for whom conventional detox programs have repeatedly failed.

According to Muckle, 80 per cent of alcoholics can quit drinking on their own and 20 per cent will require some kind of intervention. The wet program targets four per cent of that 20 per cent group.

"It's very much last resort," Muckle said. "These are people who have been in treatment, like, 20 times and clearly that intervention is not effective for them."