Legalize drugs to halt parade of deaths
Rather, legalization would reduce violence, deaths and illegal trade
Four years after the authorities declared opioid deaths a public health emergency in B.C., the crisis rolls along like a Monty Python plague skit: Bring out your dead!
While there are daily briefings about COVID-19, which has killed fewer than 200 people in B.C., overdoses that have killed more than 700 so far this year receive little more than a monthly mortality update.
The number of drug deaths in each health authority is at or near the highest on record, without a cure, vaccine or solution in sight.
Instead of truly confronting the crisis, governments seem to be continually finding reasons to stall and shy away from discussing what is needed.
There is little evidence our political leaders want to talk about the issue beyond wringing their hands and mouthing anodyne concern.
The B.C. government won’t even provide the costs associated with the more than 30,000 people weaned off illegal drugs and now on Big Pharma substitutes.
“As this matter is before the courts (because users have launched a class-action lawsuit) it is not appropriate for us to share any information that is not publicly available at this time,” said Tracey Robertson, senior public affairs officer. “This includes the costing associated with Methadone, Methadose and Metadol-d treatment. That said, we are able to provide you with the number of patients on Methadone (15,459), Methadose (12,026), and Metadol-d (3,589), as of April 2020.”
Believe it or not, it was 15 years ago that B.C.’S public health officers demanded the government decriminalize drug offences.
In a strident, progressive paper, they said it was time to address the harmful effects of the criminal prohibition against substances such as heroin and (at the time) marijuana.
They emphasized that antidrug laws were based on racism and cultural biases, not evidence of harm, and the prohibition was causing far more damage to health and to society.
Titled A Public Health Approach To Drug Control in Canada, that 38-page paper recommended reform of federal and provincial laws and international agreements that deal with illegal drugs, development of national public health strategies to manage all psychoactive drugs, including alcohol and prescription drugs, improved monitoring, and more education.
Governments ignored it, and the echoes that followed over the years.
By 2019, even before her fame, Dr. Bonnie Henry was still trying to get that 2005 message heard.
In May, federal Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was asked to introduce a nationwide exemption for drug possession so no one would have to fear arrest and jail, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, even the nation’s chiefs of police — who fought drug reform to protect their budgets — have joined the bandwagon, saying we should decriminalize drug possession.
The chiefs say it would improve the health and safety outcomes for drug users while reducing property crime, repeat offences and the demand for drugs in communities.
Really? After all these years of filling our jails with drug users while gangs prospered and proliferated, the cops have finally figured that out?
Heck, even Premier John Horgan, who recently sounded like he didn’t have a clue about addiction, is apparently all for decriminalization.
It’s about time. Banning opiates, cocaine and other substances has proven to be as stupid as trying to ban alcohol.
Our drug laws are an abject failure. Still, decriminalization is not the answer to the opioid crisis any more than it was for marijuana.
It’s a halfway house of pain. Which is why we need a discussion.
Decriminalization allows the user to consume without risk of arrest, but does nothing to address the illegal black market, with its tainted products, violence and indiscriminate sales to kids.
Criminal drug laws protect traffickers from taxation, regulation and quality control. They maintain artificially high prices for drugs that cost pennies, and they produce an underground economy where disputes get settled not in court, but with guns.
There are better ways to control drug use.
It’s time to adopt a new legal regime to regulate drugs — their potency, retail sales, warning labels, age limits and other restrictions such as prescriptions. Decriminalization won’t do that.
Legalization will.
We need an integrated strategy of prevention, research, education and social programs to address poverty and the homelessness that has far too many people sleeping in parks.
We have to start discussing that aid package and dealing with addiction as seriously as we have attacked the coronavirus.
Legalization is not a panacea. It does not end drug use or violence.
But it will stop people with a medical issue being turned into criminals, and help us reduce the overdose deaths, the black market and the violence.
The 2005 anti-drug strategy called for a national dialogue, and Dr. Richard Mathias, of the University of B.C. faculty of medicine, emphasized: “We have to find a different paradigm here. The paradigm we have is killing Canadians.”
It didn’t happen.
Today, more than ever are dying. That 15 years have passed isn’t a joke, it’s an indictment.