FIRBY – Decriminalization has proven it won’t solve Canada’s drug crisis
(Image: Troy Media)
CANADIAN CITIES must do something to curb the alarming rate of deaths from lethal drugs like heroin, fentanyl, cocaine or methamphetamine. But the solution, if one is even possible, should not be through decriminalization.
As disastrous experiments in British Columbia and Oregon so starkly show, decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs has led to an increase in deaths and turned some city streets into hellish no-go zones for citizens who aren’t there to get a hit. If you’ve been to Portland recently, as I have, you’ll see portions of the downtown transformed into post-apocalyptic encampments of drug-addicted homeless people. Vancouver’s East Hastings, meanwhile, has been branded “Canada’s worst street.”
Yet, despite tales of horror from those two jurisdictions, the City of Toronto is pressing ahead with an application to Health Canada to be allowed to decriminalize possession of hard drugs. The obstinance of public health officials in that city has sent Ontario Premier Doug Ford into apoplectic fits.
Ford argued governments should instead invest in drug treatment centres.
“That’s what we should be doing. Not legalizing hard drugs. Like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like, letting people do cocaine, and crack and heroin? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ford said last week. “I will fight this tooth and nail.”
Toronto health officials are not wrong that addiction should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal matter. But there is an overpowering naïveté in the belief that decriminalization will, in itself, save lives. Portland’s experiment failed because officials didn’t do enough of the other things that must be done at the same time.
Portugal – the poster child of drug death reduction – provides an instructive example. In 1999, Lisbon was known as the “heroin capital of Europe,” and overdose deaths were averaging 360 a year in the country of 10 million citizens. Alarmed officials formed a multi-partisan party coalition that backed sweeping change that redefined the problem of addiction. Through an eight-point program, of which decriminalization was just one part, Portugal effectively altered the environment around drug addicts to change their behaviour.
The detailed strategy included shifting from court-based incarceration to custody in the Commissions for the Dissuasions from Drug Abuse (CDTs); creating mobile teams to deal with addicts on the street; staffing those teams with experts; creating ways to test and administer treatment; decriminalizing (not legalize) possession of small amounts of drugs and encourage addicts to seek treatment or to face penalties; helping addicts find employment; tracking the costs of drug addiction, including the total cost to society; expand public education; and, giving treatment officials, instead of police officers, the power to make decisions about drug users.
The initial results were spectacular. By 2018, the number of heroin addicts in Portugal had dropped from 100,000 to 25,000. The country also achieved the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, one-tenth of Britain and one-fiftieth of the U.S. João Goulão, a former family doctor who designed Portugal’s radical approach, was hailed as a genius.
Then things began to unravel. As the country struggled with budget deficits, Portugal reduced resources allocated to its programs, undercutting efforts to encourage addicts into rehabilitation programs. Drug dealers, meanwhile, continued to use Portugal as an entry point to import hard drugs into European Union countries.
Between 2015 and 2021, drug users in treatment declined from 1,150 to 352. Funding dropped from $82.7 million in 2012 to $17.4 million in 2021. Overdose rates have reached a 12-year high and have doubled in Lisbon since 2019. Crime, often drug-related, rose 14 percent from 2021 to 2022.
“What we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone,” Goulão says.
As Gregory Shea, senior fellow at Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management, writes: “To code the case of Portugal’s illegal drug initiative … as a binary choice – in this case, to decriminalize drugs or not – misrepresents the change effort required and, consequently, how to sustain it. .. . If you decriminalize and do nothing else, things will get worse.”
In short, decriminalizing hard drugs while failing to adequately fund other strategies will not only fail but, worse, will likely create an expectation that lifetime drug use is a right.
In British Columbia, Premier David Eby said he hopes other jurisdictions in Canada will learn from his province’s mistakes. While he maintains addiction should be treated as a health issue and not a criminal one, public consumption of illicit drugs must have hard limits.
Do public health officials in Toronto understand all that is required for a decriminalization effort to succeed? It’s not clear that they do, nor that they have the ability to tap into the substantial resources required to reduce addiction. All levels of government need to be committed to this effort, not for one year or five years, but over the long haul. As in, quite possibly, as far into the future as we can see.
The federal government, which initially supported B.C.’s decriminalization experiment, has become more circumspect. Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks told the House of Commons it’s too early to draw conclusions about drug decriminalization: “We’re still evaluating the data,”
Skip the data and listen to the people across the country who are fed up with witnessing the rampant consumption of hard drugs on the streets. It’s not the way any of us want to live, and it’s not the Canada we want to live in.
Provincial governments, notably Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, are also largely opposed to decriminalization. Other provinces say they have no plans to go there. And Conservative Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, our prime minister-in-waiting, has been outspoken against it.
So, with three levels of government at odds over decriminalization, the prospects of running a co-ordinated strategy that would mirror Portugal’s initially successful project couldn’t appear dimmer.
The real lesson from B.C.’s disaster is that if you’re not ready to go all in on doing it right, you are much better off not doing it all.
Doug Firby is an award-winning editorial writer with over four decades of experience working for newspapers, magazines and online publications in Ontario and western Canada. Previously, he served as Editorial Page Editor at the Calgary Herald.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Who has decrim served? Organized crime. Drug addicts. The “homeless” industrial complex.
On the other hand, decrim has harmed our reputation, our communities, international communities facing the horrors of the drug trade, public safety, our hospitals and health care workers, it has siphoned enormous sums of money that could have been used to improve our collective lives, it has damaged our businesses, our public spaces, our sense of justice, it has brought crime, brazen gangland shootings, and it has immeasurably harmed the addicts themselves.
The collective pushback and the public outing of the facts pushed another majority progressive government to admit defeat in embarassment. Of note, this was achieved even with the evidence hiding, the gaslighting and refusal to accept reality up until the very last minute.
Progressive governments have done their cause immeasurable harm over the last few years. Profligate spending. Decrim. Identity politics that have ventured into absurdity. As a reformed progressive, I lament the loss of rationale thought and discourse on the left. The good ideas have long been spent. Little else but dogma and the demand for blind allegiance remains.
Public sympathy has evaporated. The concern now is the cleanup and return of our communities. The rest is secondary. As it should be. Governments will fall on this issue. The NDP recognized that, and better hope they can put this genie back in the bottle before winter.
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Dead penalty for trafficking would…would over-prescribing be a gray area?
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So, ya … ok.
No one argues that just decriminalization is the ultimate panacea of addiction services, and thankfully this writer doesn’t suggest such, but lets talk about what is.
The real world objectives of saving lives and ending street drug addiction, means nearly unaffordable decisions … yet we also know that no Canadian or provincial govt is going to endlessly fund this, in a 4 year election cycle, hogtied by an annual budgetary process, in a world where voters will say “dont spend my tax dollars on that”.
The Portugal example can not ever translate to Canada, as even when it was successful, Portugal’s health system and the justice system are both entirely fully federal jurisdictions. Canadas provincial health systems, and our mixed federal and provincial justice systems means that type of program is a non starter, in a word … unmanageable. We can talk about Portugal, but it cant work here, so it’s pointless to bring it up.
The only way to end the problem; massive, massive tens of billion$ infrastructure community based rehab system constructions across the country, including more to create ongoing retraining infrastructure to teach people how to live off the street and become society members post initial treatment, backed up by a judicial system that is able to over ride the Charter and force people to enter the system, in a world where many provincial governments will not play ball with the feds for political optics reasons over any issue, much less a large one like this.
What gets me is commenters that only look at the decrim aspect and tear it apart because it doesn’t work to fix the problem, without adding information like I did above here in 2 paragraphs, that actually advocate for how to fix the problem. This and other commentors sound like re-spews of political opposition soundbites, from leaders and parties also unwilling to actually invest to fix the problem, because if they did … they wouldnt survive a future election. Noise fodder that does nothing.
So ya, decrim solves nothing on its own, but its doesn’t serve to complain about it, without also talking about in length how it can work as an addendum to larger recovery services. But like politics … its all about the clicks.
In other words, talk about and advocate for actual fixes, or just stop whining.
You’re not helping.
My opinion.
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Spending billions in adult babysitting services is certainly not a solution either…just saying.
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Doug Firby does not need to agree with me that decriminalization is the first step to treatment. Its not enough for Doug Firby to say “Canadian cities must do something” he must take a side and defend that side with honest and verifiable evidence that can be defended. What exactly is this “something” that needs to be done Doug? If you don’t tell your readers what you would propose you cause more harm than a common thief who steals to eat. Give us your ideas Doug and ask the editors and journalists if the political parties in Canada serve national interest on this issue?
OK Doug you have taken a side as you write the “solution, if one is even possible, should not be through decriminalization.” Doug where is your evidence that it was decriminalization in BC and Oregon that “possession of hard drugs has led to an increase in deaths.” Alberta and Ontario did not decriminalize and their numbers went up dramatically and then you provide silly example saying that decriminalization caused “apocalyptic encampments of drug-addicted homeless people” on Oregon and Vancouver streets like East Hastings. There are thousands of streets and cities in North America where drugs have not been decriminalized with encampments and drug users. How many drug users in Vancouver came from outside of BC only to become a number as a BC statistic because we do not have a national policy on this issue?
In this paragraph “Toronto health officials are not wrong that addiction should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal matter. But there is an overpowering naïveté in the belief that decriminalization will, in itself, save lives. Portland’s experiment failed because officials didn’t do enough of the other things that must be done at the same time.” you totally destroy your opinion as it is an opinion since you don’t provide evidence that is verifiable.
Then Doug in the next part of his article trots out Portugal as a failure much of it found here which explains the success and failure in Portugal. Link: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/ This is a great article to read and see how selectively Doug chose to spin his position.
What Doug does not do is tell the reader why things started to unravel in Portugal. Portugal became entry point for illicit drugs into Europe and a magnet for European drug users. This is similar to what happened in Oregon and BC. Doug then states that problems in Portugal resulted from doing “nothing else, things will get worse.” What exactly is the else that Doug ignores? Police were given “power to make decisions about drug users.” Rather than the “treatment officials” read page 4 in how police treat drug offenders in BC Link http://www.bccdc.ca/resource-gallery/Documents/Statistics%20and%20Research/Statistics%20and%20Reports/Overdose/Decrim_pre-implementation_qualitative_report_PWUD.pdf
Here again Doug destroys his evidence that decriminalization is a bad policy by saying “In short, decriminalizing hard drugs while failing to adequately fund other strategies will not only fail but, worse, will likely create an expectation that lifetime drug use is a right.
The other issues that destroy Doug’s position on decriminalization include lack of UNDERSTANDING in the bureaucracy health, education and social services as well as lack of resources to implement treatment.
Doug writes that “All levels of government need to be committed to this effort, not for one year or five years, but over the long haul. Doug then does a 360 degree turn by saying decriminalization will work if street drugs are treated as criminal offences, if we have a national policy, remint officials rather than police make decisions with clients, if we provide with decriminalization health and housing support like Finland Link: https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/kul/wir/woh/21338482.html we may have a better chance with this societal issue that is generational.
In the end Doug does another 360 and that tells you where he stands “Provincial governments, notably Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, are also largely opposed to decriminalization. Other provinces say they have no plans to go there. And Conservative Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, our prime minister-in-waiting, has been outspoken against it”
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