Drug Legalization

Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The number of British Columbians hospitalized due to opioid overdoses increased after B.C. launched its drug decriminalization and “safer supply” policy, a new study shows.

B.C. received Health Canada’s permission to allow possession of small amounts of illicit drugs in a three-year pilot project, which started in January 2023.

“One dad I met with early on,” says B.C. MLA Elenore Sturko, “talked to me about his young teen daughter. She died of a fentanyl overdose, and when they cleaned out her room afterwards, they found a bunch of diverted safe supplies, still in the capsule bottles with other people’s prescriptions, the name of the prescribing doctor, the name of the pharmacy.”

A leaked document produced by British Columbia’s Ministry of Health alleges that “significant” quantities of “safer supply” opioids are being diverted to the black market with the assistance of organized gangs and certain unscrupulous health-care providers. This raises serious questions about the competence and honesty of B.C. New Democrats and federal Liberals, who gaslit Canadians for two years by insisting that reports of mass diversion were disinformation.

Kensington, Philadelphia, has been called many things over the years. The Walmart of Heroin. The Las Vegas of Drugs. “How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Kensington?” one longtime Philadelphia drug user joked. “Because anywhere else, they would have called it the teethbrush.”

The East Coast’s largest open-air drug market (according to the Drug Enforcement Administration), Kensington has long symbolized the dysfunction of a city that once served as America’s capital. Shots of Kensington’s “zombies” make for local news fodder and X outrage. The city’s failure to fix Kensington was central to the successful mayoral campaign of Cherelle Parker, a tough-on-crime Democrat, sworn in as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor in January 2024.

An affidavit filed by private investigators retained by the province to surveil supervised consumption sites says they observed apparent drug transactions, public intoxication, discarded drug paraphernalia, physical altercations and public drug use in their vicinity.

But harm reduction advocates and the people who run the sites say they paint a misleading picture.

“All they have here is more evidence of people trying desperately to survive a drug poisoning crisis,” said Sarah Ovens, an organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society.

U.S. President Donald Trump seems to delight in chaos and disruption. Is the threatened tariff war over border security? Drug smuggling? NATO spending? A precursor to trade negotiations? All, or none, of the above?

Yet, as with virtually every crisis, there is also opportunity. In this case, an opportunity for Canada to examine some of these issues and see if we can do better. Not to please Trump, but to ensure that the government is doing what it should to protect its citizens and the country.