British Columbia has taken a step back in its drug decriminalization pilot, the latest twist in its decades-long push for more and more permissive approaches to drugs.
The B.C. government’s guiding idea has been that destigmatizing drug use is the key to helping addicts, but it has long faced pushback on this approach due to public safety concerns.
History is repeating itself in a way, with current events mirroring the province’s experience throughout the 1990s and 2000s. But the situation has intensified—it’s not just about needle exchanges or designated injection sites anymore. Now, it’s about rampant drug use in all sorts of public places, hospitals included.
The public backlash is greater, and the number of overdoses have climbed.
NDP Premier David Eby’s government has
defended its decriminalization pilot since it took effect in January 2023. Health Canada granted an exemption to the province at the time, permitting possession of up to 2.5 grams of
certain drugs, including opioids, cocaine, methamphetamines, and MDMA.
But on April 26, Mr. Eby asked Ottawa to urgently amend its exemption. He wants to prohibit all public drug use, empowering police once again to take action when drug use impacts public safety.
In her first public comments following Mr. Eby’s request, Federal Health Minister Ya'ara Saks said it’s too soon to tell whether decriminalization is working, and she spoke in favour of the pilot’s continuation.
“The overdose crisis, as I’ve said before and I say again, is a health crisis issue. It is not a criminal one,” she told reporters on April 29. She said the premier’s request is under review.
B.C. has been on a trajectory of decreasing drug regulation for decades, and the coming months will tell to what degree that will be reversed.
B.C. tends to influence the rest of the nation as well. Its harm-reduction approach, including supervised-injection, spread beyond its borders, and so has decriminalization.
Toronto would decriminalize all drugs, not just those listed in B.C.’s exemption. It would apply to people as young as 12, unlike B.C.’s policy that applies to adults only. It would not set a limit, such as B.C.’s 2.5 grams, but would broadly decriminalize “personal possession.”
Mr. Eby told reporters on April 29 that other jurisdictions can learn from his province’s difficulties.
“There are important lessons to be learned on where we are to date, that don’t need to be repeated,” he said.
B.C.’s current policies are driven by an overdose crisis that began in 2016, when the province declared a public health emergency. It isn’t the first time the province has seen such an emergency, and reacted with controversial measures.
The First Whispers of ‘Decriminalization’
In 1997, Vancouver declared a public health emergency in its Downtown Eastside due to a spike in overdose deaths, mostly from heroin. Deaths province-wide had surged from 39 in 1988 to 357 in 1993, many of them in Vancouver. And they remained high, peaking in 1998.
It was in the ‘90s that Canadians first heard the call for “decriminalization.”
In 1994, then-chief coroner Vincent Cain called on the government to legalize and decriminalize certain drugs, according to a
history compiled by doctors Kathleen Dooling and Michael Rachlis for the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2010.
The province didn’t go that far, but it did create the first supervised injection site in North America in 2003.
Stephen Harper’s Conservatives fought against it after they were elected in 2006, withdrawing federal funding and attempting to shut down the site. “We as a government will not use taxpayers’ money to fund drug use,” Mr. Harper said in 2006.
Vancouver police, as well as property and business owners who are part of the Community Alliance, also spoke out against this harm-reduction approach.
Canada’s
Supreme Court ruled, however, that Ottawa could not shut down the site by withdrawing the Health Canada exemption put in place under the Liberals. That would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the court decision said.
Since then, addicts have flocked to Vancouver, as documented in a
longitudinal study from 2005 to 2015 by Simon Fraser University professor Julian Somers. The people Mr. Somers followed “experienced significant personal decline rather than recovery” over time.
The evidence of benefits or downfalls of Vancouver’s approach were debated all along. Harm-reduction was aimed not only at destigmatizing drug use but also at reducing blood-borne illness transmission through sharing needles.
Overdose deaths declined, but hospitalizations increased from 2002 to 2009 and an increasing trend of overdose events was observed in the province as of 2012,
according to the University of Victoria’s Centre for Addictions Research of BC.
The rise of fentanyl made a bad situation worse.
The Current Crisis
In 2016, the province declared a public health emergency—this time it was province-wide rather than limited to Vancouver’s east end as before, though the majority of deaths were still concentrated in Vancouver. Overdose deaths reached 922 that year and more than 14,000 have died since.This time, the call for decriminalization took hold. The pilot began in January 2023 and is set to expire in 2026. The stated purpose of decriminalization is to reduce stigma so people won’t hide their addiction. Advocates say it will prevent addicts from racking up a criminal record, a barrier to employment. Proponents say it could also decrease addicts’ mistrust of authorities and make them more likely to seek help.
But at the same time, public drug use has become a problem no longer contained to the Downtown Eastside. It has spilled out into the city at large and into smaller municipalities across the province.
“You can’t crack open a beer at the library, but you can smoke drugs or shoot up,” City Councillor Frank Wray of Smithers, B.C.,
told The Epoch Times last year. In the small city of about 5,400, he said, you can’t help but see these things.
“It seems like there isn’t a consideration for the whole community,” he said. “Children need safe spaces as well.”
In New Westminster, B.C., city councillors also raised the alarm last year.
“As a business owner for almost two decades in the downtown core, I have seen a lot of children with their parents that are in the park or they’re walking some of the streets downtown where there is open use of hard drugs,” Councillor Paul Minhas
said at a Feb. 27, 2023 meeting.
“It is a serious concern that I have. It’s very much out in the open.”
The Union of B.C. Municipalities passed a
resolution at its convention last September to “further regulate the possession and use of illicit drugs in parks, beaches, sports fields and bus stops.” The provincial government passed legislation shortly thereafter to limit drug use in such public places, but it was blocked by the courts.
The British Columbia Supreme Court
ruled on Dec. 29 that such limits would cause “irreparable harm,” accepting the arguments made by the Harm Reduction Nurses Association that limitless public drug use is necessary to destigmatize addiction and prevent overdose. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the decision, and the legislation remains under injunction until June 30.
Mr. Eby has said he hopes his current efforts will get around this by having the regulation come from Health Canada.
This recalls the Harper government’s opposition to supervised injection and the Supreme Court’s decision to block it. Just as the federal Conservatives were opposed to harm-reduction initiatives in the 2000s, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is a staunch critic of decriminalization today.
On April 29, he doubled down on his opposition to the “dangerous experiment,”
asking that the House of Commons hold an emergency debate on the issue.
Outcry Ramps Up
Pushback on decriminalization ramped up significantly in April.
B.C. health-care workers have spoken out about open drug use in hospitals, and the matter was hotly debated during
question period in the provincial legislature on April 4.
“Nurses face a daily reality of drug-fuelled violence, from having drug smoke purposely blown in their faces to being kicked, punched, shoved,” BC United MLA Elenore Sturko said.
“So, if you have someone who is with their family at the beach, and there’s a person next to them smoking crack cocaine, it’s not a police matter,” she said.
“What we’re doing isn’t helping people. It’s also destroying our neighbourhoods, so we have to stop the insanity,” Richmond Councillor Alexa Loo told The Epoch Times on April 23.
“We haven’t seen any improvement on the number of people dying from the drugs, the number of people using the drugs, and the number of encampments in our communities. It’s become worse, not better.”
In addition to decriminalization, B.C. has strongly supported safer supply as a way to combat the overdose crisis.
The idea is that giving addicts opioids will prevent them from taking riskier street drugs. The program has also met with strong backlash, however, which has ramped up in recent months. Notably, the
RCMP said investigations have found large amounts of safer supply opioids being sold by drug dealers, constituting
an “alarming trend.”Some addictions experts have said non-addicts, including teenagers, are being sold these opioids as “safe” and thus starting on the path of opioid addiction.
While Mr. Eby has supported a pull-back on decriminalization to the extent of limiting public drug use, he has not stepped back on safer supply.
“If there is a gap in that process, we want to address it right away,”
he said in March, following RCMP reports on the matter. But he expressed faith in doctors’ ability to limit diversion (sale of the prescription drugs on the black market).
Mr. Eby also supports continued decriminalization by and large, allowing for possession and use in private spaces, until the pilot’s scheduled end in 2026. He
faces an election this fall, however, and the two other main contenders in that race say they will scrap the pilot if elected.
In March, the state of
Oregon re-criminalized the possession of hard drugs. Oregon is the only U.S. state to have tried decriminalization, with legislation approved in 2020.
While decriminalization had 58 percent voter approval in 2020, by August 2023, 64 percent of voters said it should be repealed,
according to an Emerson College Poll.
The state saw fentanyl overdoses
more than double in those three years, according to the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division.
Chandra Philip, Chris Tomlinson, Scottie Barnes, and The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
