Decriminalizing drugs just scratches surface

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/02/2023 (976 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘INCREMENTAL change” is a grating phrase for an activist seeking any sort of revolutionary action. Yet it is typically the only sort of progress we get to celebrate.

So it is with the recent pilot project in British Columbia that decriminalizes a variety of hard drugs, allowing users to possess 2.5 grams of substances including cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin.

On the surface, this does appear to be a step in a positive direction. It prevents non-violent users from criminal charges they don’t deserve. It might lead to drug users having fewer antagonistic interactions with police.

But what of the potential downsides? Even placing the limit at 2.5 grams could conceivably lead to heavier users engaging in more transactions with their dealers.

If their needs require a larger personal supply, but they want to stay within the boundaries of the new law, this might force them into more dangerous interactions with either criminal elements or police.

Couple this with how the police and government are combining their supposed user-friendly policy with a crackdown on dealers. A crackdown on dealers is a crackdown on users. Plenty of users fund their habit by selling to their friends, and so maintain a supply above the 2.5-gram allotment.

We have a cultural tendency to perceive every drug dealer as a gun-toting gangster. But many people who qualify as “dealers” under our current legal framework are indistinguishable from other users, other than in the quantity of drugs they possess to serve as a point of contact for their circles of friends.

Cracking down on dealers also negatively impacts the drug supply, which is at odds with the B.C. government’s aims. Its pilot project attempting to foster a safe supply — in which certain patients are offered pharmaceutical-grade medication as an alternative to potentially toxic illegal drugs — is lacklustre enough as it is.

Authorizing doctors to write heroin users a prescription for hydromorphone or meth users a prescription for Adderall is barely more than a gesture in the right direction, especially as we know most physicians outside the pilot project will be reluctant to do so.

Real safety only comes from a well-regulated and properly sourced supply of the sought-after drugs. Prosecuting dealers and limiting supply will only lead to a product that is cut into an even more unpredictable consistency than it currently is. Conceivably the government’s misguided actions could outpace their noble new policy, and things will get worse instead of better.

Cue the entrance of Pierre Poilievre, stage right. The leader of the federal Conservative party has come out to declare the policy a failure before it’s even begun. He claims to be citing data, but points to the total number of overdose deaths since 2015, despite the safe-supply program being less than a year old and the decriminalization approach being rolled out less than a week before his more recent comments.

Herein lies the greatest danger of the kind of incremental change the B.C. government is implementing. These new policies are so laggardly that their limited demonstrable results offer bad actors such as Poilievre the chance to swoop in and declare them failures. Then he will drag us backwards.

What we need is a strong and sweeping commitment to safe supply, not a pilot project that will at best help a fraction of the user population — and then only if they can find enough doctors and users willing to engage a system that doesn’t even provide the desired type of drugs.

What we need is a commitment to end police involvement in the small-scale, non-violent iteration of the drug trade so we can stop criminalizing the wrong people entirely.

Only when we make such steps will we see a stark contrast between the broken system we have now and the direction we want to be going. Poilievre isn’t interested in data, otherwise he would be looking around the world at how virtually every jurisdiction with more liberal drug policies has a healthier relationship with drugs.

Until we implement such policies here and produce similar irrefutable data, the Conservatives will continue to wage their ideological war from the grey area, and the long suffering of this fruitless drug war will continue.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg-based author.