There’s no hope of fixing drug crisis through harm reduction

Editor:

A friend called me today and informed me the federal Minister for Mental Health and addictions stated the “minister believes fear and stigma are driving criticism of the government’s decision to support prescribing pharmaceuticals to drug users to combat the country’s overdose crisis...”

After reading the article I realized there will be no hope of taking control of this drug crisis while the Liberals are in power, or any other government that supports harm reduction.

The feds have allowed B.C. to experiment with Canadian lives in that province, pushing experimental policies on the population which have failed, increasing fatal overdoses, not reducing them. How many more thousands of people must die before you admit your policies are a failure?

In 2003, due to overdoses from heroin, Vancouver introduced the first safe injection site on the continent, but after 20 years the evidence is clear that harm reduction practices only magnify the issues. Instead of admitting failure, they have blamed many other factors for why fatal overdoses, the numbers of addicts, mental health issues, crime and homelessness continue to increase. Instead of dramatically increasing mental health and addiction treatment, they pump billions of taxpayer and donor dollars into programs that encourage and enable addicts, and even their safe consumption sites now fail to offer any assistance for treatment. They have decriminalized small amounts of drugs, and hand out prescribed safe supply illegal drugs now made in B.C., such as cocaine, morphine, MDMA (ecstasy) and heroin, and the interview process for these exempted controlled drugs includes minors.

Minors do not need parental consent and parents will not be informed. This is how insane the federal government has become, allowing B.C. to progress into the abyss with these wild experiments that have taken thousands of lives, with no end in sight as fatal overdoses increase every year.

B.C. has over 32 safe consumption sites (SCS), and with all the radical programs they have been allowed to employ, they still have more fatal overdoses per capita than Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba.

Barry Ewing

Lethbridge