Alternatives needed to handle drug possession charges, police chief says

With the decades-long War on Drugs being “patently unsuccessful,” Moose Jaw’s police chief says he supports a suggestion to decriminalize simple possession charges for small quantities of illegal drugs for personal use.

“Just outright prohibition has not been effective, so there have to be other alternatives to that,” Chief Rick Bourassa remarked.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) recently called on the federal government to make the change and focus more on addressing production and trafficking in light of Canada’s ongoing opioid epidemic. The organization suggested it is time to rethink how police and governments approach the use and abuse of illegal drugs to save lives.

The CACP recognizes substance use and addiction as a public health issue. Being addicted to a controlled substance is not a crime and should not be treated as such,” said CACP president, Chief Const. Adam Palmer. “We recommend that Canada’s enforcement-based approach for possession be replaced with a health-care approach that diverts people from the criminal justice system.” As a member of CACP, Bourassa has been aware of this conversation for years and supports moving specific issues in the criminal justice system — such as addictions and mental health — out of that system to be handled by non-legal methods. One reason is the justice system is not the best place to handle those issues.

It’s CACP’s business to speak to governments and make recommendations about these types of issues, while it’s the responsibility of police chiefs to inform those discussions about how to implement them, he continued. He noted that police chiefs don’t create public policy but simply implement the laws that governments make. “I think we can say there’s been a lot of money expended (on combatting drugs) without likely a lot of value coming out of that,” the police chief said, “so let’s look at some other ways of doing that.”

Other social supports have to be in place for the decriminalization to be effective, though, so it doesn’t jeopardize public safety or health, Bourassa pointed out. If police are to enhance public safety, then police organizations may have to look at a different model for handling issues such as simple possession.

There are situations where people act violently or cause a disturbance while under the influence, which could allow for a non-police, social service-type response, he said. However, that can’t always happen since the situation could change quickly and force officers to react and respond.

If the federal government did decriminalize simple possession, police would still be involved in monitoring illegal drugs by going after production and trafficking. Bourassa noted the police already do that with cannabis after the federal government legalized it in 2018. Police sometimes come across illegal drugs while investigating something else entirely, he added. Occasionally police will discover that people have drugs on them after bringing alleged offenders into custody for another issue. That is the most common way police lay charges with simple possession.

When asked for a comment, the Ministry of Justice said in an email that it was reviewing CACP’s recommendation and had nothing further to say.