Manisha Krishnan is an Emmy award-winning journalist who covers drug policy.
British Columbia’s three-year pilot project to decriminalize personal possession of drugs hadn’t even hit its halfway point when the province delivered a catastrophic blow to its own policy.
In January, 2023, the federal government created an exemption for B.C. to decriminalize drug use, allowing people to cumulatively carry up to 2.5 grams of drugs such as fentanyl, cocaine, and meth without being arrested. But earlier this month, Ottawa approved B.C.’s request to make public consumption a crime again.
One might assume the about-face is the result of mounting evidence linking decriminalization to spikes in overdoses and increases in violent crime. But as is too often the case with drug policy, the actual rationale boils down to bad-faith attacks and political cowardice.
In recent months, B.C. United MLAs have claimed that St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver is grappling with “needles and broken crack pipes all over the floor,” citing reports of hospital staff dealing with exposure to drug use and blaming decriminalization for causing a “free for all.” Those reports were refuted by St. Paul’s addiction medicine physician Dr. Seonaid Nolan, who said the hospital isn’t facing a new rash of people getting high everywhere. Despite that, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix launched a task force to address illicit drug use in hospitals – something that was never made legal.
B.C.’s Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth has also claimed that the decision to recriminalize public drug consumption is about protecting “vulnerable community members.” But people who use drugs are surely among the most vulnerable people in that province, where overdoses are the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 59. And those who are unhoused and subject to the street drug supply are at highest risk. Forcing them to use drugs in private only increases the overdose risk, because there’s less chance someone will be around to revive them.
Meanwhile, proponents of these reversals claim that law enforcement is a compelling tool in forcing people to get off drugs – as if that hasn’t already been the status quo for the past 50 years.
B.C. isn’t alone in experiencing what appears to be a collective amnesia about the policies that got us here in the first place. In April, Oregon lawmakers made possessing small amounts of drugs a misdemeanour three years after decriminalizing it, with the Washington Post framing it as a “disastrous experiment” responsible for a surge in overdoses and an open-air drug market in Portland. And last week, Ontario’s government effectively squashed Toronto’s decriminalization efforts, while calling for an end to safe consumption sites (and a review of existing ones).
But the problems cited by decriminalization’s detractors – the ugliness of public drug use and visible poverty, chief among them – didn’t just materialize after governments instituted these policies. Vancouver and Portland have long had sizable drug-user populations and major issues with income inequality, homelessness (made worse by the pandemic), and an increasingly addictive and toxic drug supply. In its 2024 national threat assessment, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said the shift from plant-based drugs like cocaine and heroin to synthetics like fentanyl produced “the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis the United States has ever faced.” (The report didn’t mention that strict enforcement led traffickers to distribute offerings that are more efficient and concealable – and thus potent – in the first place.)
In fact, two studies published last year by researchers at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine found that decriminalization in Oregon did not lead to increased overdoses or violent crime. On the flip side, police seizures of drugs are strongly linked to increased overdoses because they cut people off from a reliable supply, and being incarcerated increases the risk of an opioid overdose tenfold.
Decriminalization does have an image problem. Part of that lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of what it’s meant to do. It’s not a panacea: it’s meant to be one tool, of many, to address the criminal justice disparities in drug arrests, which are most often levied at Black, brown and Indigenous people. Other measures, such as expanded safe supply and safe injection sites, are also needed to make a bigger dent in drug deaths. Yet decriminalization has become a convenient scapegoat.
These solutions will take time to sort out, and their rollouts will be messy. But that doesn’t mean we should reverse course at the first sign of backlash or public impatience – not when previous approaches saw drug deaths explode into a crisis.
In a recent exchange in Parliament, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre described drug decriminalization as “wacko.” But there’s an even stronger term for applying the same failed solutions to the overdose problem again and again, hoping for a different outcome: insanity.