MP With Drug-Addicted Brother Calls for End to ‘Safe Supply’ Drug Policy

A man prepares heroin he bought on the street to be injected at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, B.C., in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck

B.C. Conservative MP Todd Doherty tabled a motion asking the health committee to call for an immediate end to the government’s “safe supply” drug funding, sharing that addiction personally affected his own family.

“I’ve been very public and very vocal and upfront about our family’s own struggles with addictions and how I have a brother that lives on the street, that we have struggled to get him off the street,” said Mr. Doherty at a meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health on Oct. 18.

He said that in B.C. there are businesses buying illicit drugs on the black market and then selling them or giving them away on the street. “How far have we fallen that we can perpetuate somebody’s addiction but we can’t get them into a bed for recovery?” he asked.

According to a Blacklock’s Reporter article on Oct. 20, opposition MPs have estimated that more than $800 million of federal funding has been spent on “safe” drug supply programs since 2017. In May, the House of Commons upheld the policy with a vote of 209 to 113.

According to surveillance data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, there were 38,514 apparent opioid toxicity deaths between January 2016 and March 2023. Among them, 1,904 occurred just in the first three months of 2023, an average of 21 deaths per day.

In May 2022, B.C. received an exemption from Health Canada under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to decriminalize possession of up to 2.5 grams of certain illicit drugs for personal use. The exemption was granted as part of a three-year pilot project beginning Jan. 31, 2023, and ending Jan. 31, 2026.

The original decriminalization policy prohibited possession of the illegal drugs on the premises of schools from kindergarten to Grade 12 as well as licensed child-care facilities. Then in September this year, B.C. received approval from the federal government to add playgrounds, spray pools, wading pools, and skate parks to the list.

MP Doherty said he has been forced to go “into the dens of evil” to pay off his brother’s debts, and once rescued his brother in the middle of the night on a bridge after gang members threatened to throw him over if he didn’t pay the debt.

“Two years ago, he was shot twice in a drug deal gone bad, with a shotgun. And it was just mere days later ... the draw and the pull of these drugs got him back onto the street, with buckshot and the wounds, and the tubes kind of hanging out of him,” the MP said.

“That’s how strong ... the pull of these drugs are,” said Mr. Doherty. “And we’re powerless to stop this. Somebody has to answer to this.”

The MP said that in 2008, his wife’s brother was found dead from an overdose. “He was not an addict. He didn’t use drugs. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and somebody gave him something that was laced with fentanyl.”

‘Harmful to Our Communities’

Mr. Doherty read a large portion of a Sept. 25 letter sent to the federal government by 17 doctors specializing in addiction, calling for an end to the “safe supply” of drugs like hydromorphone and opioids.

“It is harmful to give people addicted to opioids almost unlimited access to free opioids. It is harmful to our communities for inexpensive pharmaceutical grade opioids to be flooding our streets,” the letter said.

They said that free government-funded hydromorphone is based on “methodologically weak research” and “causing devastating harm to our communities,” by “increasing the total amount of opioids on the streets and providing essentially unlimited amounts of opioids to vulnerable people with addiction.”

The doctors said the result is new patients with addictions, “additional unnecessary overdoses and death,” and “creating more children with addiction in our Junior High and High Schools.”

They also said that a large supply of free hydromorphone increases individuals’ addictions and delays them from entering other treatments that have proven to be effective.

The committee adjourned debate on the motion and did not vote on the issue.