B.C. announced this week that it is ending the province’s three-year experiment with drug decriminalization.
“The intention was clear: to make it easier for people struggling with addiction to reach out for help without fear of being criminalized,” B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said in a statement.
“Despite the hard work and good intentions behind the pilot, it has not delivered the results we hoped for.”
Quelle surprise.
If you look at what decriminalization can and should look like, it is easy to understand why B.C.’s experiment failed. Portugal, a country that today loses fewer than 100 individuals a year to overdoses, shows what is possible with a holistic approach to decriminalization.
B.C. drew from Portugal’s experience in designing its own decriminalization pilot, which allowed residents to possess opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA for personal use beginning in January 2023.
But B.C. only borrowed Portugal’s language of decriminalization, without creating the whole infrastructure needed to make it effective.
Our must-read series on Portugal’s decriminalization system, launched this week, provides a full picture of the differences between their system and ours.
At the top of the list is Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, administrative bodies that assess a person’s risk of problematic drug use, offer counselling and connect users to treatment.
In Portugal, police are required to send individuals found in possession of drugs — from cannabis to heroin — to these commissions.
The commissions take a holistic approach to drug use, assessing individuals for common underlying drivers of addiction, including lack of housing and unemployment. Individuals are then connected to resources tailored to their specific needs.
High-risk drug users are encouraged to enter treatment, which is voluntary, long term, and publicly funded for those who need it. If there is a wait to access treatment, Portugal ensures individuals are supported during that wait.
Could the Canadian experience be any more different?
In B.C., decriminalization neutered police. After the province’s pilot began, B.C. police had no lawful authority to prohibit public drug possession unless someone was engaged in other unlawful activities, Chief Constable Fiona Wilson of the Victoria Police Service recently told Canadian Affairs.
Meanwhile, the province did not substantially increase access to addiction treatment or resources that would help individuals address key drivers of addiction, such as mental health challenges, lack of housing or unemployment.
And to state the obvious, B.C. — and Canada at large — has not created anything like Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions. The reason for this, we’d argue, goes far beyond bureaucratic constraints or budget limitations.
Fundamentally, Portugal has taken a paternalistic stance on drug use. The country seeks to discourage a behaviour that it rightly recognizes as problematic.
Canada, meanwhile, has gone the other direction. We have normalized and destigmatized drug use while allowing programs such as safer supply and safe consumption to be our primary response to a crisis that requires a systemic overhaul.
There are legitimate origins to Canada’s turn toward normalization. Our country was one of many that recognized problematic drug use is a health issue, and that criminal law can be a poor tool for countering it. We also acknowledged that the law can be discriminatorily applied, resulting in the unfair targeting of certain racial or socioeconomic groups.
Decriminalization rightly sought to end these harms.
But we didn’t stop there. Our cultural norms shifted. In Canada, we have become uncomfortable with saying there are behaviours we do not condone; that drug use is bad for individuals, their families and society at large, even if that is what the evidence tells us.
If Canada wants to reduce our overdose rate from 6,000 a year to fewer than 100, it will require radical changes of the kind few politicians have floated. It will entail changing not merely our laws, social investments and bureaucratic architecture, but also our culture.
We will need authorities and the public to discourage drug use. Encouragingly, Portugal has shown it is possible to be paternalistic without returning to the old days of criminalization and stigmatization.
The question is: do Canadians want that? And if not now, how many lives will need to be lost before we do?
If something is harmful to individuals and to society why should we tolerate it? Morality is a basic human feature for a reason. We want to avoid certain behaviours because they cause imminent harm. An important and essential part of morality is shunning and stigmatizing people who violate moral rules. We stigmatize murderers, drug dealers, and wife-beaters because they are knowingly causing harm. Street drugs destroy people’s lives, families, and neighbourhoods, so we would be amiss for not seeing doing these drugs as morally wrong. To take away the stigma, and to make it easier to take these drugs is insane. Portugal’s Paternalistic approach is a much better way to go. In Canada and the U.S. in contrast, it got to the point where people were putting up billboards that supported addicts doing their drugs together so as to minimize deaths from overdoses. We should never be encouraging people to do these drugs. Apparently we’ve given up on drug prevention, because it’s too complex and difficult. The resulting urban blight is not tolerable. I can see a societal over-reaction to this problem coming in the form of increasing support for the far right – another cure worse than the disease.
There will always be a segment of society that is drug addicted. If they want to kill themselves, I have no problem with them doing so!
This is the part that stuck out to me, “The commissions take a holistic approach to drug use, assessing individuals for common underlying drivers of addiction, including LACK OF HOUSING AND UNEMPLOYMENT. ” (Emphasis mine)
Based on this article, it doesn’t seem like BC did that. So they decriminalized drug use without addressing the social issues that drive people to addiction. Yeah, I don’t think being afraid to call addiction “bad” was the reason for the failure here.