Oregon’s drug-legalization law didn’t make things better. Now what?
After a three-year trial period, Oregon’s great experiment with drug decriminalization looks to be wrapping up. A bill to restore misdemeanor penalties for drug possession has now passed both houses of the state legislature with bipartisan support, and Governor Tina Kotek is expected to sign it.
Oregon lawmakers have moved to reintroduce criminal penalties for the possession of hard drugs, in effect ending the state’s groundbreaking three-year decriminalization experiment.
In 2020, nearly 60% of voters moved to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs with the passage of Measure 110, but the new law had grown increasingly controversial as the state grappled with the fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use.
On the Sunday of the Family Day long weekend, three days after a proposed class-action lawsuit against a Toronto supervised consumption site was all over the news, the Toronto Star published a feel-good harm-reduction story.
The Star article had an intriguing headline: “Here’s what happened to overdose deaths in Toronto neighbourhoods with safe consumption sites.” The story was about a study published this month in The Lancet.
Last month, harm reduction researchers published a “landmark” study claiming that Canada’s controversial “safer supply” experiment is saving lives.
But when I analyzed the underlying data with a team of addiction physicians, we discovered that there was actually no evidence that safer supply works and that the researchers had cherry picked their data and inflated positive results.
British Columbia’s rampant drug deaths have more than once thrust public health officials into uncharted territory. It became the first province to decriminalize small quantities of hard drugs for personal use in 2022, about two decades after Vancouver opened the first supervised injection site in North America. But as overdoses increase in some British Columbia towns, there is disagreement in one city about how to address it.
Back in 1990, when I first became involved in pain research, there was considerable optimism that new technologies would improve our understanding of pain mechanisms. Scanning technologies, such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography), delivered spectacular images of the body and brain. It surely wouldn’t be long before new medications could use this new knowledge to deliver better pain relief, many of us thought.
Alberta is expected to break another annual record for toxic drug crisis deaths, with nearly 1,700 recorded in the first 10 months of last year.
The provincial government has been reporting these deaths since 2016. The latest figures it has released are from last October. According to those numbers, there had been 1,692 fatalities in the province from drug poisonings in the first 10 months of 2023, the majority linked to opioids.
Living in downtown London, Ont., right next to a mission for people who are poor and homeless, Stephanie De La Celle’s children often see people using illegal drugs. Playing in the park, riding their bikes or just going to the store for ice cream, they come across men and women openly smoking or injecting. That bothers Ms. De La Celle, 41, who has five-year-old twins, an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old under her roof.
“They shouldn’t be exposed to that at their age,” she says.
The southeastern Ontario city of Belleville has declared a state of emergency after a rash of overdoses over a 24-hour period that prompted warnings from police this week.
Belleville Mayor Neil Ellis says the declaration on behalf of city council was made because of the growing addiction, mental health and homelessness crisis in the city and its impact on emergency services.
Ellis says municipal services are close to a breaking point and he is calling for support from provincial and federal governments.
All of Canada is suffering a death of despair under the Trudeau government.
I’m standing outside the Central Police Precinct in downtown Portland, Oregon. Officer Eli Arnold and I have bicycled over to meet two of his colleagues, returned from a drug bust. We examine the proceeds of the crime on the hood of a squad car. The officers weigh the fentanyl powder on a small scale, record the amounts, and take out a few bags of pills to show me. A pill falls to the ground; one of the officers rushes to return it to the bag.
A little more than three years after Oregon voters made their state the first jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize drug possession, legislators are scrambling to write a new set of laws amid a public revolt against the state’s experiment with rapid drug policy liberalization.
Tim Hortons is one of Canada’s most iconic brands. It’s a place to grab a double-double, a Boston cream donut, and catch up with friends. It’s also increasingly a place to do hard drugs—at least when it comes a Tim Hortons location in the city of Oshawa, just west of Toronto, that has had to close its indoor dining because too many drug users were injecting and being violent throughout the restaurant.
“It’s the darkest part of our country happening on the site of one of the businesses that is the pride of Canada,” wrote Joe Warmington in the Toronto Sun. “The fact that a Tim Hortons has decided it’s better to not let people dine in says all we need to know about the mess we are in.”
As Ontario continues to see a major escalation in issues surrounding mental health and addictions, some say a decision at an Oshawa Tim Hortons to stop dine-in eating further underscores a need for more funding and resources.
Canadian harm reduction activists believe that “safer supply” can reduce overdoses and deaths by providing addicts with easy access to “safe” pharmaceutical opioids—but we already tried this experiment 20 years ago. It was called the OxyContin crisis and it had nightmarish results. So why are we making the same mistakes all over again?
In what constitutes a clear trampling of parental rights, British Columbia recently authorized the provision of “safer supply” fentanyl to youth across the province, regardless if parents are informed of, or agree to, this measure.
