Drugs

A Canadian study casts further doubt on a key plank of the harm-reduction agenda.

Supervised consumption sites (SCSs), which offer drug users a place to get high under the observation of staff, have become a popular proposed solution to the North American overdose epidemic. But a recently released Canadian study shows that, contrary to the claims of harm reduction activists, these sites do not save lives. American policymakers should take heed and avoid replicating their northern neighbors’ failed experiments.

The Ontario government has confirmed it is cutting provincial funding for seven supervised drug consumption sites, days after harm reduction advocates said they were notified of the decision.

The province says it will initiate a 90-day wind-down period to give those using the sites time to transition to the government’s abstinence-based model — homelessness and addiction recovery treatment, or HART, hubs.

Last week, CTV News published an article with a headline harm reduction activists across the country pounced on: “Drug overdoses in Toronto up nearly 50 per cent since last January, city data shows.”

The party to blame in their view, of course, is the Ontario government because it closed injection sites within 250 metres of schools and daycares a year ago. But if you look at the data the story was based on, the activists’ I-told-you-so’s are wildly off the mark.

QUEBEC — An elite Montreal-based narco network allegedly exported carfentanil and next-generation synthetic opioids 100 times deadlier than fentanyl to American consumers via the dark web, leading to the arrest of four yesterday, after 13 months of joint surveillance by U.S. federal agencies and Quebec police, and a seizure of more than 600,000 tablets of synthetic drugs in December.

If gaslighting were an Olympic sport, harm-reduction activists would be buried in gold medals.

For many years, they claimed that there are no real downsides to “safer supply” — an experimental initiative that gives addicts free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. When media reports emerged that these drugs were regularly being diverted to the black market, harm reductionists stridently dismissed them as right-wing disinformation.

What’s the point of police arresting people in possession of illegal drugs, asks MLA Elenore Sturko, if the Crown isn’t going to proceed with charges?

Over 35 years as a drug user, Vancouver resident Garth Mullins said he’s had “hundreds and hundreds” of interactions with police, and long believed drug decriminalization was smart policy.

“I was first arrested for drug possession when I was 19, and it changes your life,” said Mullins, who is now in his 50s and was an early backer of Canadian province British Columbia’s decriminalization program that ended on Saturday.

“That time served inside can add up for a lot of people. They do a lifetime jolt in a series of three‑month bits,” he told AFP.

A program in British Columbia to decriminalize drug use and allow users access to public health services rather than be charged by the police with narcotics possession is ending after three years of intense political backlash.

The experimental pilot began in January 2023, after British Columbia, the center of Canada’s opioid crisis, received a legal exemption from the federal authorities that enabled drug users to carry minuscule amounts of cocaine, opioids, methamphetamines and MDMA, also known as Ecstasy.