Drug Legalization

British Columbia has abruptly reversed course on its landmark experiment decriminalizing the possession of certain illicit drugs, citing mounting public frustration and “disorder” in the Canadian province.

Premier David Eby said on Friday that he had asked the federal government to reintroduce a ban on public drug use, formally ending the country’s first large attempt to gauge the effects of decriminalization.

“Keeping people safe is our highest priority. While we are caring and compassionate for those struggling with addiction, we do not accept street disorder that makes communities feel unsafe,” Eby said.

David McEvoy was a heroin addict for 30 years before he got sober in the early 2010s. He stayed away from Ottawa’s drug scene after that and was largely ignorant of its dynamics until three years ago, when he began working as an addiction outreach worker specializing in overdose prevention and education.

B.C. has banned all illicit drug use – except inside people’s homes, drug-checking sites or supervised consumption sites – rolling back its decriminalization pilot project after significant criticism from mayors, provincial and federal conservative politicians as well as a recent outcry from health care workers put at risk by patients using drugs in hospitals.

Drug abuse isn’t just an individual plague. The consequences of drug use extend far beyond the individual user, though decriminalization advocates often don’t acknowledge this reality. As with no-fault divorce, orienting public policy purely around the desires of adults has disastrous consequences for children.

A Quebec Superior Court judge has authorized a class-action suit that alleges 16 pharmaceutical companies misled people regarding the safety and addictive nature of opioids.

People who have been diagnosed with opioid use disorder in Quebec since 1996 may be covered by the lawsuit.

Some of the respondents are the same companies that produce the opioids purchased by federally and provincially funded safer supply programs

Last week I described how easy it is to get the most lethal drugs on the streets of New York.

And how “safe-use” sites had become magnets for dealers and addicts.

Such sites are fought over. Do they help addicts use safely? Or do they normalize lethal behavior?

I went to the streets of another East Coast city to find out.

RCMP in the northern B.C. city of Prince George spent 10 days last month mounting a surveillance operation on a woman who allegedly stood outside a downtown pharmacy each morning trading illicit drugs for safe supply medication.

According to a search warrant obtained by CBC, police saw the 58-year-old suspect make dozens of “hand-to-hand” transactions in that time — both buying and selling prescribed pills worth up to $20 a tablet on the street.

Didn’t the RCMP say this was a minor problem?

Open drug use, weapons and violence are ubiquitous in B.C. hospitals, jeopardizing the safety of both patients and front-line health workers, nurses say. But the provincial government is playing down the problem, if not outright denying its existence, despite the disturbing stories that have been shared over the past few days.

For three years, Sonja Bingham, a 55-year-old mother of three, started every day the same way: with a broom. At dawn, she would come out to sweep away the damage from the previous night—the syringes, the fentanyl baggies, the cigarette butts, and the half-eaten sandwiches. And sometimes as she swept, she couldn’t help but think that the city of Philadelphia would’ve never let this fly during the crack epidemic.

“They threw our black asses in jail,” says Bingham, who’s speaking to me in her living room where there’s a TV streaming the live feed of four security cameras placed throughout her property.

Residents in Denmark’s famous hippie enclave of Christiania on Saturday joined police, the mayor of Copenhagen and the Danish justice minister to tear up cobblestones on the neighborhood’s Pusher Street to make way for a restoration project.

Long revered as a libertarian, hippie paradise, Christiania has been plagued with drug violence in recent years.

Known as Christianites, residents grew weary of the situation and took the drastic decision to close the street last August, after the enclave registered its fourth murder in three years.

On April 1st, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed a bill into law that ended her state’s more than three-year-long experiment with legalization of so-called hard drugs. The choice of day notwithstanding, her decision to sign the bill that reintroduced criminal penalties for the use of those drugs was no joke. It was a badly needed end to a reckless experiment in childish libertarianism with humans as guinea pigs.

Fox News referred to Governor Kotek’s decision as a “U-turn on a short-lived liberal policy,” which is a fair description insofar as the policy move is concerned. However, the big losers here are the libertarians who wanted legalization in the first place. As far as they are concerned, the Oregon reversal raises an existential question for their very ideology.

The promise of the “safer supply” program in British Columbia was that it would cut down on opioid overdoses, but so far the opposite has happened.

The first major study comparing population-level results of British Columbia’s approach with that of other Canadian provinces has found “a significant increase in opioid-related poisoning hospitalizations.”

Ronnie Chickite, chief of the We Wai Kai Nation, is upset — with good reason. In February, approximately 3,500 diverted safer supply hydromorphone pills were discovered in a drug bust on one his nation’s reserves near Campbell River, B.C. Chickite says although he had previously been aware of safer supply diversion, the discovery of so many pills in his community invoked “shocking disbelief.”