Drugs

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.

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.

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?

Early last year, British Columbia decided to decriminalize personal amounts of illicit drugs under the misguided belief that this would mitigate overdoses and deaths. While the drug crisis in Canada is horrific and drastic action is sorely needed, the decriminalization experiment has been an absolute disaster.

Deaths have only continued to skyrocket and public safety has rapidly deteriorated. Violent crime is rising, and discarded syringes and other drug paraphernalia have become common sights—including on playgrounds and other family-oriented spaces.

The British Columbia Supreme Court has blocked new provincial laws against public consumption of illegal substances.

The Dec. 29 ruling in favour of the Harm Reduction Nurses Association imposes a temporary injunction until March 31, pending a constitutional challenge, with the judge saying “irreparable harm will be caused” if the laws come into force.

A new study shows a statistically significant increase in aggravated felony assaults in vicinities where these establishments operate.

Only two government-sanctioned “safe-injection sites” operate in the U.S., one in East Harlem, the other in Washington Heights. Their impact—on both those who use their facilities to inject hard drugs under medical supervision and on the neighborhoods where they are located—is thus of national significance. Other states, cities, and the federal government are doubtless closely watching these two experiments. That is why a new research paper on the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open site is so important and why it has received so much attention.