The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Should Ontario Decriminalize Drugs?

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is supposed to light a path to treatment for users and de-stigmatize addiction. But has harm reduction actually been achieved? The pilot decriminalization project in B.C. - in effect since January 2023 - has hit a snag due to concerns over public safety. Meanwhile, Toronto has been waiting two years for approval of its application to decriminalize drugs. Should that bid be adjusted as the city learns lessons from the west coast? We ask: DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition; and Derek Finkle, journalist and columnist for the National Post.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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But has harm reduction actually been achieved? The year-and-a-half-old decriminalization pilot project in British Columbia has hit a snag over concerns about public safety. This week, the federal government approved B.C.'s request to recriminalize drug use in public places. government approved BC's request to recriminalize drug use in public places. Meanwhile, the city of Toronto has been waiting two years for approval of its application to decriminalize drugs. Should that bid be adjusted as the city learns lessons from the West Coast? Let's ask. In Vancouver, British Columbia, DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, and here in our studio, Derek Finkel, journalist and columnist for The National Post. And Derek, it's good to see you in this studio again.

Been an awful long time. It has been. It's good to be back. Yes, indeed. And DJ, good to have you there on the left coast for us as well. Before we get into, I guess, hard examples of what's happening on the ground in Vancouver, let's start with this. It's sort of a more question from 30,000 feet, if you like, DJ. What's the intention of drug decriminalization to begin with?

Drug decriminalization is a policy change that recognizes that substance use is a health issue and a public health issue, not a criminal one. It looks at the data over a century that indicates that incarceration does not really decrease substance use. It doesn't act as a deterrent. It doesn't make drugs less available. But what it does do is cause health and social harms, increases cycles of homelessness, over-incarceration of Indigenous people, Black people and racialized people. And it doesn't really get us to the solutions that we need. So decriminalization is intended to remove some of that stigma and legal sanction to make it easier for people to access services and to be less likely to face short-term incarceration which can cause harm and risk of overdose and can also lead to other social outcomes like losing your job and losing

your housing. Okay Derek any issue with any of that in terms of the goal? Not really, no. You're on the same page there. So far, I think. I mean, all I would say is that we effectively, even though we don't on the books have decriminalization in Toronto, it hasn't been formally acknowledged by the federal government. I live across the street from a supervised injection site here in the city that has been in the news a fair bit over the last year because a woman was shot up front by some drug dealers that came to the area because of the site and, you know, have spent probably 40 to 50 hours in meetings with Toronto Police Service, high-ranking people, Toronto Public Health. And one thing that became very clear is that here in Toronto, we have

de facto criminalization in the sense that the police, our Attorney General will not prosecute cases for small possession. The police do not, you know, try to do much about open use. They can move people along a little bit. We have, they have some control, but I just thought it was important to point out at the outset that we do, you know, we don't formally have decriminalization, but I would say we have a working form of it here. But would you agree that part of the idea behind it is to treat it as a public health problem and a health problem, to decriminalize it as that kind of issue and get people healthier at the end of the day? I agree. I agree with DJ in that I see, you know, this crisis as a health care crisis, not a criminal, not a crisis that the police are going to get us out of.

Okay. DJ, why did the BC, I mean, this got a lot of attention when it happened not too long ago, the BC government asked for changes in its drug decriminalization plan. Why did they do that? They were responding to public concerns and increased focus on seeing people in public. public concerns and increased focus on seeing people in public. So there's been a lot of conversation about whether there has been an increase in public substance use. I'll note that the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control has released a data website just this week, and that there's actually no data to indicate whether there's been an increase or a decrease in public drug consumption. I got that. Actually, DJ, let me jump in there because we got those numbers here and we should share them as long as you brought it up. Sheldon, I am at the bottom of page one, top of page two.

So let's bring this graphic up. And for those listening on podcast, I'll read what the B.C. Coroner Service reports. In the year 2022, there were nearly 2,400 drug deaths occurring. That's 44.5 deaths per 100,000 people. Let's go to the next year, 2023. There were more than 2,500 drug deaths occurring. That's 46.2 deaths per 100,000 people. That's a 6.2% increase. But then so far this year, we're going January to March of this year, 572 drug deaths have occurred, and that's 40.3 deaths per 100,000 people. So that's a big drop. So, OK, pick up the story, DJ, because the numbers go up, the numbers go down. What do you make of it? In terms of the numbers going up and down, there's a number of factors we have to consider.

First of all, decriminalization is meant to help people access health services. That means that those health services have to be there and we know that we're still lacking in terms of access to even supervised consumption, methadone, other forms of treatment including abstinence-based treatment and prescribed alternatives. The numbers, however, will not significantly decrease so long as the drug supply itself remains highly variable. Unlike alcohol or tobacco or all of the food that we eat, it's impossible to know what is in everything within the drug supply or to know how strong it is. So when we see that variability in the drug supply, we know that that means there's an increased danger for people using it

because they may not be able to take the same precautions as I would if I was drinking a glass of wine. So if we see the numbers going down now, that is certainly very good news and could be an indication that people are more able to access those health services and are more visible and able to access emergency health care when they need it. However, we do have to take into consideration that the supply will change over time as it has been for many years. Okay, Derek, do you have a more difficult case to make when you perhaps want to see an end to this program when the numbers are in fact going down

so far this year? You know, I see living across the street from a supervised injection site, we have a small number of them in Toronto, and they were introduced in, you know, the first ones were introduced in 2017. Okay. And I think it's important to look at a supervised injection site like a microcosm of decriminalization, because essentially the site has to get an exemption from federal drug laws in order for people to use illicit drugs inside the facility.

And so I think from my view, I don't live in Vancouver, but from observing from afar, I mean, I think that there are a lot of parallels between what happened in the unfolding of decriminalization that also parallel what happened here with the unfolding of our supervised injection sites. And what I would say is that, and I have a feeling DJ is going to agree with me to some extent, in that they put this pilot, they're both pilot projects. That's one thing they have in common. And, you know, they basically put these things into place, promising certain things that would happen. So, for example, a supervised injection site would lower crime. We'd have less open drug use. You know, people have access to wraparound services. You know, any of those things happening? None of those things happened. Overdoses have tripled in my part of the city. Before that supervised injection site opened,

we had no public use. I mean, it was just shocking to see a needle. Now, once it opened, it basically became a hub of activity. And I guess what my real, of drug activity, drug dealers came where there were no drug dealers before suddenly you have an area that becomes a hub of, you know, because it's a safeguarded area. It's where the customers are. Yeah, it's where the customers are, exactly. And then, you know, and that leads us to drug dealers.

Some drug dealers are armed and that leads us to a woman being killed last summer out tragically outside. But really what I see is the parallels between these supervised ejection sites and decriminalization. If you watch the Parliamentary Health Committee examining this crisis, they had the deputy chief of the Vancouver police come on and say that, with respect to, they were naive about what the consequences would be of the project as it was unfolded.

what the consequences would be of the project as it was unfolded. So, for example, you know, that people were going to be smoking crack in hospitals. People were going to be, you know, there was going to be extended use, you know, in parks where kids are playing or on the beach or all the places that Deputy Chief Fiona Wilson outlined. And, you know, she actually said, we warned the BC government of this before, but nobody really ever got back to us. And I would say in the same way that certain things that were probably foreseeable in retrospect, that, you know, we should have known were going to happen, the same way we should have known that drug dealers were going to come and occupy around the perimeter of a safe injection site, there were noble

intentions going into these things. Let's help people. Let's get people help. Let's get people get supervised as they're using drugs. Now, the other thing I'll end here. Hold on. Let me just end here. The other thing that's happened in my neighborhood is we have a supervised injection site. And the truth is, most of the people use outside. They don't want to use in the supervised injection site. And so this whole destigmatization, which I think is a noble thing to pursue, but it's cagey because we have a safe injection site that's open every day across the street from where I live. Yet we have people using in the alleys and even on the property of like you could I could throw a baseball from the supervised injection site.

And there are people because they don't want to. So I'm just saying lots of points made there. I got to give DJ a chance to get in here and respond. Pick it up wherever you like, DJ. A lot of points made there. Where do you want to go? Well, I think we're certainly in agreement around the desire to see healthier and safer communities for everyone and a desire to not have instances of tragic violence like my friend here has alluded to. That is tragic and needs to be addressed as the serious issue that it is. When gun violence happens outside of a mall, it gets investigated. Outside of a hospital, it gets investigated. That's really important to do.

It's not, however, a reason to stop life-saving services. We wouldn't shut down hospitals. We wouldn't even shut down malls and say that we have to treat them differently because an incident happens outside of one. When we think about sites like this, we have to take into consideration both that they're often not big enough.

In Ontario, there's no support for inhalation, even though inhalation is a preferred method of drug use because it comes with decreased risks for things like hepatitis C and HIV infection. It doesn't require the use of a needle. So people will use that as a harm reduction measure, but it also means that they can't use inside the site because it's not allowed. So there's a number of limits to those sites that do need to be taken into consideration. As it relates to seeing people, the other thing that we need to remember is in British Columbia, and I know in Toronto as well, the rates of people who are unhoused are going up constantly and tragically. The one certainty in life is that you have to have somewhere to put your body. Taxes aren't actually a certainty for everyone.

The one certainty in life is that you have to put your body somewhere. And for some people, they do not have an indoor space to do that. And the second thing to keep in mind when we're talking about seeing people in public, seeing people for longer periods of time, is that as the drug supply changes, we're seeing the introduction of benzodiazepines and tranquilizers. That means that where someone might have used drugs years ago and sort of gone about their day and you might not even have noticed, the nature of the drug supply now is that people will become very sedated very suddenly, and so you'll see them in that public place for longer, you're more likely to notice it because someone is simply there for longer. So there's all of these factors coming

into play. And to your point as well about the, you know, people being outside of a service, we know there are not enough services. So people will wait in line or they don't have somewhere to be after because there's nowhere to wait and there's nowhere for people to go. People have to be somewhere. And so the question then, if we are frustrated, is do we take it out on those individuals who do not have somewhere else to go? Or do we direct that upset at the government and say, let's provide more services, let's do the things that we said were necessary, like wraparound services, access to inhalation services, more prevention sites, more access to health care, and realistically, more pathways out of the unregulated drug market, because so long as

people are relying on a supply that is changing every day, people are in danger, whether you use once, on weekends, or every single day. Derek, I wonder if DJ has really put a finger on what the key issue here is, which is that for the general population, they don't want to see this. If it's happening out of sight, out of mind, in a building, fine. But if it's happening in public, it's too disturbing and we just don't want to see it. You think that's what's going on here? Well, I think there's a certain amount of people who, I think that, you know, for me, living downtown Toronto, I've lived in downtown Toronto my whole life. I don't think people live

in a place like Leslieville if they are uncomfortable with a certain level of seeing people with mental illness, seeing people who are in poverty. You see that everywhere in the city. Yeah, you see that everywhere. I mean, you don't live downtown if you are uncomfortable or seeing people use drugs. But I think there's a certain element that comes with drug using that the DJ is not really, you know, sort of conceding, which is that it also caused in our neighborhood a massive uptick in theft.

We had a 60% rise in assaults within 200 meters of the supervised injection site after it opened. We had a 900% increase in priority one 911 calls, again, within people who live within Detroit. So it's not just open use. I get you, but let me put that point to DJ, because DJ, you did make the point a moment ago that we wouldn't shut down a hospital if there was a shooting outside a hospital. We wouldn't shut down a mall if there was a shooting outside a mall. Why would we shut down a safe injection site? And I guess one possible answer is because there's a direct correlation or connection potentially between that site and the crime that took place in a way that wouldn't necessarily be the case with a hospital or a mall. Fair to say? I don't know that to be the case. So again,

you have to look at the specific incident. And again, we're talking about a tragic incident of gun violence. Whether that is specifically associated to a site, I would have to be interrogated because a site is simply a service. It is simply a service. So what you're asking is for me to extrapolate that because a certain individual was on that location that day, that that fact should then be imputed to being correlated to the site specifically. To the point around things like public disorder or crime statistics that my friend has pointed to, you know, I would have to look at that data specifically to understand how it was collected, what the rigor of the data is. We know that there's a significant

amount of study. Supervised consumption sites are one of the most studied health services in this country at this point in terms of more recent interventions and the the data does indicate that these are health-saving life-saving if they are properly supported they do result in decreased public use and decreased litter and things like that so we know that over the course of time and looking at a number of injection sites and i'll just name that i live up the street from several of them only a few blocks away from canada first safe injection site at Insight in the downtown east side, we see that they do have these positive benefits. When we look at things like theft or petty crime, again, we have to interrogate whether that is about a safe consumption site or a health service,

or is that really about increasing rates of poverty and in fact related to policing interactions every time someone has their drugs seized that means they no longer have the small amount of money they had they are potentially in withdrawal and now they have to go and seek out those substances again or maybe try to make money to purchase basic food things like that let's know what we're talking about really is the intersection of poverty, and there's much better ways of dealing with that than opposing services that could potentially put people in touch with things like income assistance, health care, and housing. Okay, we're an Ontario show,

so we're going to show some tape here of Premier Doug Ford, because he was asked about this. You both know that Toronto's put an application forward, and the Premier was aware of that, while at the same time being aware of the fact that British Columbia has now responded to public pressure by going back on its decriminalization case. So let's hear from Premier Ford. This is May 15th. Sheldon, if you would, let's roll it. Dropped out application has turned Drop that application. It's turned into a nightmare. It's turned into a nightmare. I've talked to the premier out there. It's bad. Reinvest into

rehabilitation. The last budget, I believe, was 396, 300 and something, to reinvest into treatment centers, into health, mental health and addiction. 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. I will fight this tooth and nail.

This is the wrong way to go. It's proven. Even in the U.S., they're rolling it back. I think it's Oregon, isn't it that was rolling back as well? BC tried it. It's not working You need to help these people give them treatment support them. That's what we need not say here's some more drugs to take I Got the date wrong. That was end of April in Ottawa. Mayor Sutcliffe of Ottawa standing beside the Premier. Your view on his comments? Well, I mean, I think it's clear that the Premier views treatment as a solution forward. And I guess, you know, I think organizations like

DJ's, they, you know, she's talking a lot about the toxic drug supply that's killing people. And I think that's a worthy topic. But there are many out there who feel that the root out of this or that the answer is to regulate or legalize, you know, the drug supply. And to, you know, that's the answer. And I think, to be honest, it's kind of a waste of time to talk about it because I feel like there's no political will, especially right now, to do that. It's not...

But you heard Premier Ford say, Toronto, forget the application for the drug decriminalization. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I'm saying that's decriminalization. Legalization is another option that's above that. And I guess for me, what I think, you know, there's no point in decriminalizing in drugs formally in Toronto for the same reason that I don't think there was any point

in decriminalizing drugs in BC, despite the noble intentions. It's already here. Well, no, because there are no services. I had a meeting with the CEO of the supervised injection site or the health center on Monday. And the truth is, we talk about these wraparound services, but they are almost non-existent. They're super ineffectual. It takes weeks to connect anybody with services. There's no psychiatric support.

There was a study done by UBC called the Hotel Study, which was a 10-year analysis of the intersection between mental health disorders and substance use disorders. There were about 400 participants in the study. And this was put in front of the Parliamentary Health Committee recently as well. 95% of those people had a substance use disorder of the 400. These are people from downtown Vancouver. 84% had a mental illness, with 74% having a current mental illness at the same time as their substance use disorder. 45% had a neurological disorder that was confirmed by an MRI. So in other words, brain damage. And the testimony was essentially that mental health issues and substance use disorders are the rule. They're

not the exception. But we here in Ontario do not have any significant, we don't have any significant way of that. We're not treating it as a health crisis in terms of the mental health of these people. We're not treating it as a health crisis in terms of access to treatment for these people. And, you know, the truth is, and I agree with Olivia Chow to some extent on this, like there's no point in talking about decriminalization until we actually come up with a plan. Alberta's come up with a plan.

I know DJ doesn't like that plan, but they've at least come up with a plan. Well, let me go to DJ on this. If you are talking to people in Toronto who are working on the decriminalization efforts, what would your advice be to them at this point? Certainly. And I would say I agree that there is a need for more services and more care. Decriminalization, regardless, is an important step, even as we continue to work on those other pieces. Often they get posited as, you know,

it's either harm reduction or treatment. We would say it's and. We need to have an and conversation. The advice to Toronto would be to continue public education. Decriminalization is largely a conceptual change. It's about trying to remove stigma. And so if we're not doing education to help people understand it, if we're continuing to engage in rhetorical debates that point um anger about a lack of systems care or a lack of policy change towards the people who are most at risk and most impacted how then can we actually decrease that stigma it's like saying don't think of a banana never think of a banana but now i'm going to complain about decriminalization i'm

going to complain about people who use drugs i'm going to complain about people who use drugs, I'm going to complain about overdose calls, but please don't think of a banana. If we continue to engage in a political rhetoric, it becomes very hard for people to understand the ways in which policy change like decriminalization can be effective, and to really actually talk about what we want for our communities. We want our communities to be healthier and safer for everyone, regardless of their relationship to substances. That means we have to move past this idea of blaming individuals who may not have other options and really look at what works. We've been under the current drug laws for over a century. They have not decreased the availability of substances. They have led to an increasingly volatile and dangerous supply and the incarceration of a lot of people. That costs

a lot of money and it can cause people a lot of harm. Okay, let me jump in. We can shift those resources in the way that Derek would, you know, point to in terms of having other access to care and services. All right, DJ, thank you for that. Derek, I'm down to my last 30 seconds here. Do you think it's possible to make safe injection sites, such as the one you live near in Toronto, Do you think it's possible to make safe injection sites, such as the one you live near in Toronto, safer, better, healthier, et cetera? No, I don't. Because, I mean, I'm not against harm reduction. I'm not against supervised injection.

I don't think ours should be within 150 meters of two schools and six daycare facilities and at the heart of our community. And I think ultimately, and even the CEO of the center agrees with this, it's a healthcare facility. They don't have the ability to control the drug dealers that operate around the perimeter or even go inside and deal from inside. And the police, because they're in this realm of decriminalization as well, they don't really have the ability or the desire anymore or the support from the DA or AG to prosecute people. And I don't even think that's a great idea anyway. But the bottom line is they can't,

it's out of their control. This is a situation that a healthcare facility can't control. And I think these are things that we need to really step back and look at before we start signing on the dotted line to formally decriminalize illicit drugs. Let's have a plan.

We don't have a plan. Let's get a plan. Tough subject. have a plan. Let's get a plan. Tough subject. And I want to thank both of you for coming on to TVO tonight and helping us out with this. D.J. Larkin, Executive Director, Canadian Drug Policy Coalition in Vancouver. Derek Finkel, the journalist and columnist

at the National Post here in our studio. Thanks, you two. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you.