Ottawa must lead on drugs

Toronto is in crisis, according to the city’s chief medical officer of health, with 531 confirmed opioid toxicity deaths since 2020.

Addiction and the consequences of substance abuse have bedevilled humankind from the earliest of times. Seneca wrote about it. Ovid. Pepys. Byron. Dickens. Unto the present day.

In Out of the Wreck I Rise, a literary companion to recovery, the editors say: “Addiction is not a bad choice. It’s an obsession: grinding, dictatorial, relentless.”

The human suffering that flows from that scourge is almost limitless. So too are the economic costs.

Hospitals, courts, jail cells, psychiatric institutions, shelters, auto scrapyards, downtown streets teem with the victims and the caseloads that addiction and substance abuse deliver.

The fabled wars on drugs have failed. The crisis grows. “The status quo approach to the drug poisoning crisis is not working,” Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s chief medical officer of health, writes in her latest report to the city.

De Villa is correct. So are her recommendations for trying a different approach.

She is not the first to call, nor is this the city’s first time calling, for the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of all drugs for personal use.

On Nov. 1, British Columbia made a similar request to the federal government for amendment of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Social-service agencies and law-enforcement organizations also support moving the system from one of criminal penalty to one based on health and social equity.

Toronto is in crisis, de Villa said, with 531 confirmed opioid toxicity deaths since 2020.

Over the last year, Toronto Paramedic Services responded to 5,776 suspected opioid overdose calls, she said, including 351 involving death. That was a 61-per-cent increase in such calls over the previous 12 months and a 53-per-cent increase in the number involving a fatality.

The increase in overdoses is attributable, de Villa’s report said, to “the unpredictable and toxic nature of the unregulated drug supply, as well as pandemic-related service reductions.” She added that “decriminalization alone will not solve the drug poisoning crisis.”

That will require new funding from federal and provincial governments to improve access to safer supply and to support harm reduction and treatment initiatives.

“Significant investments are needed from all levels of government to ensure low-barrier access to health and social services for those most at risk of drug-related harms,” she said, adding that social justice is one element of addressing the “increasingly complex issue of substance abuse.

“Although people from all demographic and socioeconomic groups are affected by substance abuse, the harms of criminal justice-based policies disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous people, people with mental illness, people recently incarcerated and other vulnerable groups, worsening the health and social inequalities among communities.”

De Villa’s report – which is to be considered by Toronto’s board of health on Dec. 6 – is a model of rationality in a realm too often given to hysteria, myth, moralizing and political posturing. What is plainly a national problem requires more than a patchwork response, with responsibility to lead left to the overburdened urban centres most ravaged by drugs. The response to what de Villa correctly calls a crisis should be led — most urgently on the matter of decriminalization — by the federal government.

So far the Liberal government has dragged its heels on this issue. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent appointment of Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett to lead a new ministry of addictions and mental health is a hopeful sign that his government may finally be grasping the urgency of the problem.

The task now is to get on with it.