The Decibel - B.C. decriminalizes some drug possession

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

As of this week, possession of 2.5 grams of some drugs in B.C. is decriminalized. The B.C. government says it is trying to reduce the number of people who die from overdoses in the province. Around six people die every day in B.C. from drugs – but many advocates don’t believe this decriminalization program will actually prevent people from dying.Garth Mullins is an organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, and host of the podcast Crackdown. He’ll tell us about B.C.’s plan, about the impact criminalization has had on him and people he knows, and what he thinks would lead to fewer people dying from drugs.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

As of Tuesday this week, it's no longer a criminal offense to carry a small amount of some drugs in British Columbia. The province is running a three-year decriminalization pilot program. The B.C. government says the goal is to help reduce deaths from drug overdoses. 2022 was the second deadliest year for overdoses in the province, with more than 2,000 people dying. The deadliest year was 2021. But many advocates say that this plan alone won't actually prevent that. Today, I'm talking to Garth Mullins. He's the host of Crackdown,

which he describes as a podcast about the drug war covered by drug users. Ask most dope fiends, and we'll tell you something like this. We have this kind of inner torment. It's always with us. And the first time we try it down, it's gone. Just all at once, we feel normal.

For Jeff, that first time came when he was just nine years old. My Kowalski brothers said, here, check this out. Garth is also an organizer with VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. And he was their representative at BC's advisory table for this new pilot program. I'm Aneka Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Garth, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. This is a pretty radical departure from previous drug policy in Canada. Why is BC doing this?

Well, I think it's because the people like me and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users have been arm-twisting for almost 25 years to do this and other things. You know, the first meeting I was involved in about decriminalization of drugs for personal possession was like 1998. So we've been fighting for this a long time. So that's probably why it started in BC. And why is decriminalization necessary here? I mean, I was first arrested for drugs when I was about 19. And after that, you sort of realize, oh, you're illegal, you're a criminal, you're put on the outside. And as the interactions with police build up around drugs, you're like, well, I can't call the cops if someone breaks into my house or I don't have recourse to that justice system. You know,

like I've been an opioid user every day for most of my adult life. And when that's illegal drugs, that means you have to hide a lot of your activity from the police. You have to hide using from the police. So it means people tend to use in a more rushed way. They can't try a little bit. They'll do it all at once. And they tend to do it alone. And that's where people die. So really, it makes you live in the shadows. Over a lifetime, it means that we're spending years in jail. You know, lots of us end up doing a long time and you get out, you get a condition such as you can't do drugs. They fine you with drugs.

You get violated for your condition. You go back. I think also like whole communities are over-policed based on drugs as the pretext. So black and indigenous communities experience lots and lots of over-policing because of this. So let's talk about this pilot program that BC has brought in. This is a pilot program that will be in place for three years, and they're going to see how it works and then go from there. But Garth, what exactly does this program do? This isn't really full

decriminalization. This is kind of a half measure. So the thresholds are pretty low. So a lot of people are still criminalized. You can carry 2.5 grams total of, you know, opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, or MDMA. And lots of people tend to have use patterns that mean a three-day supply would be more than that for them. This is what it's supposed to be based on. So that amount is supposed to be a three-day supply, is that 2.5 grams? That's right, yeah. What happens if someone is stopped by police and they have drugs on them? Now that this is in place, what's supposed to happen if they're under that 2.5 gram threshold?

Well, really, nothing's supposed to happen. You know, they're supposed to just let you go. I think how the police conduct themselves, I really don't know because the training hasn't been mandatory for all the cops in B.C., so I don't know if they all know. And then police sometimes have their own interpretation of the rules. And then some police just are like, well, I've been, you know, policing the drug war for all these years. I'm not going to stop now. So I really don't know what's going to happen. One thing they could do, I guess, is give you an information card of where you can go get treatment or help or something like that. I don't really think that's a good idea because, you know, the police have been the people

on the opposite side of this, chasing us around for the whole drug war going back to 1908. So for them to suddenly be, oh, here, here, I want to help you. If that happened to me, if the cop was giving me a card, I'd be very suspicious of it.

I probably wouldn't take it. And I guess I just want to stick on this for a second here, because it sounds like there is training. The police are going through training for this. But I guess how do they know what 2.5 grams is? Like, are they are they walking around with scales to measure this or how is that part supposed to be enforced? They're supposed to eyeball it. So, you know, 2.5 grams doesn't look like that much. If you had it in the palm of your hand, it might take up the size of a quarter or less. Can you give us a sense of these amounts here? You mentioned that the three-day supply before.

So let's just unpack that a little bit. How far would 2.5 grams of whatever, of any of these drugs, how far would that get you if you're a daily user? Well, I mean, people have all kinds of different sizes of habits. And maybe, you know, back in the day, that would have been okay. Back when heroin was the dominant opioid, you could do heroin once or twice a day, you know, a hit would last you for 12 hours. But now it's been all replaced with fentanyl and related drugs. And fentanyl don't have legs, you know just doesn't last and so people are doing a lot more per day and so they're carrying a lot more weight so we we did measure our own membership at the Vancouver area network of drug users and we

found that this threshold excludes the majority of people. Like most people are carrying more than this or would use more than this for a three-day supply. I mean, we lobbied the government and it was my job from the elected board of Vandu to go to all of these committee meetings with the government and police and health authorities and municipalities. There's a whole sort of civil society galaxy there to fight for the highest thresholds and the best deal possible. We were never at the decision-making table. So we never had a chance to really get to a threshold that would make sense. One of the other things is if you live in rural BC in a small town, like where I'm sitting now, there's probably someone dealing drugs, you know, within 200 feet, but like in rural BC, things are different and people have to maybe go once a week and stock up a little bit. You know, it's not, everything is like East Vancouver. So I think for those

populations as well, they're going to wind up carrying a little more weight at these committee meetings. I asked the cops directly when these conversations started, I said, who are you actually trying to arrest? Like, who is it that you want to go get? And, uh, they said, Oh, the dealers, the big, the big time dealers, you know, they were kind of making you think of the TV cop show drug dealer. And I said, well, if you're talking about grams, that is the wrong unit of measure. You know, like it's kilos if you really are thinking about dealers. So for decriminalization to actually be effective from your perspective, what kind of limit would there be on this, the amount that you're allowed to carry? Well, if they want to decriminalize possession, then it should be just about what are you doing with it, not what the amount is.

Like I think that would be one of the most important ways to get at this. We don't have that option, though. You know, we're going to continue pressing for higher thresholds because my worry is that this decriminalization experiment will be written up as a failure. How is this project being measured? What would be success here? is stunning for a long time. In fact, the coroner in British Columbia just said that last year, 2,272 people died from overdose. And I mean, we were involved in reversing overdoses every day, but if you measure the success of decriminalization on, on deaths and on people going to treatment, you're not going to really measure the true nature of decriminalization. You know, I mean, people go to treatment or don't. They do less often in BC because we have such a fragmented, terrible treatment system.

But it's still not a good measure of decriminalization. Our measure of decriminalization is, do we have cops in our lives less? Like, are we finding cops in our lives more like the average civilian who's not in the drug war, you know like um half dozen times for speeding tickets or whatever like that you know not just this constant daily involvement and i think that's measurable you know if the amount of interactions and arrests and drug seizures and all that goes down then um that to me is a measure that decriminalization is working we'll be back in a moment That to me is a measure that decriminalization is working.

We'll be back in a moment. When you're when you're talking about, you know, overdosing and people dying, I mean, this is this is very visceral stuff. Can I ask Garth, like, have you known people who have been in that position and have died recently from overdosing? Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, last Friday, I guess we said goodbye to Flora Monroe, who was one of the leaders of Vandu. I knew her and worked with her for several years. You know, around the same time Flora died over Christmas, our friend Miles died, Ricky right before that. And that's just December.

I was trying to just remember all the people I knew who died in 2022, and it was quite difficult. But going all the way back, people have been dying my whole life. Right around Christmas, my best friend for 30 years overdosed. And luckily, we found him, you know, and, and he's okay, but it was terrifying. You know, he was, he was completely out and there was a few minutes. I just wasn't sure what was going to happen. And he kind of woke up and he said to me, um, very groggily, he said, I'm not leaving you yet, Garth. And, um, that was, uh, it's, it's awful. Cause you just, you lose the people you're haunted by the people You're haunted by, could you have done more?

Could you have fought harder? But then the people that are still in your life, you're worried about them too. I mean, I myself have overdosed and I know I terrified the people around me when that happened. What, I guess, what toll does that take on you over time there, Garth? I mean, I'm not sure. You sort of feel angry at the lack of urgency amongst government people. But you kind of feel haunted. You just feel like I'll walk past a certain store where I used to go with somebody who's gone and that'll make me think of them.

Or my address book in my phone is full of people who that number doesn't go anywhere now because they're dead. And there's these little banal things, you know, that you just, you remember a joke that you would share with this person. They're gone and that joke leads nowhere. No one else would get that now. And it's just like you realize you're cumulatively over years becoming a different person with all those losses, you know? Yeah. Around six people a day in BC are dying from drugs. So I really just like your help understanding what's happening here, Garth. Why are so many people dying from drugs right now? Well, it's the toxic drug supply, right?

We've had 115 years of drugs being illegal in Canada. And every year, it gets a little bit worse. You know, the police started 115 years ago by chasing after opium production, and people were just smoking opium. You know, and then we got to people using morphine and then heroin and then injecting heroin and then by the time i'm on the scene in the 90s it's strong china white heroin that's causing an overdose crisis then eventually fentanyl and now everything that's happened since fentanyl came 10 years ago so this is the problem is that the drugs are an unregulated wild west that could just kill you at any time. And we want to be able to replace those drugs with a pharmaceutical version of the same drug where you know how potent it is, you know what's in it, you can gauge your dose and there's no wild west about it anymore. Unfortunately, nobody has done that yet. So, I mean, no one, largely nobody has

done that yet. In British Columbia, we have some pilot projects and half measures and little things that might address, you know, one or 2% of the whole drug using population. But these need to be rolled out en masse, not just like a one little clinic studying what happens when you give 50 people hydromorphone. So I think what we're getting at here is this issue of safe supply, which BC has rolled out a program during the pandemic to help people get access to pharmaceutical drugs so they wouldn't need to essentially buy from street dealers. How effective has the program been though? Well, I was, I was pretty hopeful about it.

I was one of the coauthors of the original policy in 2020, right when the pandemic started, there was this fear. In fact, some doctors called me and said, oh my God, if drug users are COVID positive, they're going to be out scoring dope every day and spreading COVID around. What do we do? And I said, well, I don't know, prescribe people drugs so they can stay at home and self-isolate like everybody else. And so there was a move to do that, you know, that we made this paper that eventually became a policy in British Columbia. And it wasn't the drugs that people were using. So it wasn't the fentanyls and all that. It was Dilaudid, hydromorphone, which is kind of like a cousin of those street drugs. Not as strong, so it's hard to replace, but it was a

pretty good step in the right direction. The idea was always to add more drugs and to roll it out to everybody. But unfortunately, the program is almost inaccessible. It's very difficult to get. There's a couple thousand people on this. And the government of British Columbia itself reckons there's 100,000 people like me who are daily opioid users in the province. And it's probably more that they don't know about. So it's a pretty small proportion. And we keep getting stuck in these half measures and pilot projects, like I was explaining about decriminalization. And until we get the full meal deal, we're not going to get at these deaths. So is it a scale issue then? If this was rolled out more broadly,

would that make a difference? Well, it's a little bit of scale and it's a little bit what's being prescribed. If you're used to drinking a pint glass of vodka and someone gives you a Coors Light, it's not going to be the same thing, right? Let me say this. Safe supply was our word.

The drug user movement came up with this word. And now I hear it from the mouths of, you know, some federal reps and provincial ministers and stuff like this. But they're talking about something different. When we were talking about safe supply, we're like, if you are wired to fentanyl, here's pharmaceutical grade fentanyl. And the only goal would be to separate you from the toxic street drugs would be that you could take something that's not going to kill you in the afternoon.

I mean, until safe supply prescribing is as easy to get as the dealer's drugs, it's not going to happen. Garth, there is, of course, a lot of criticism against safe supply, the main one being that it might actually encourage people to use drugs by providing them, essentially. And conservative leader Pierre Palliev has spoken about this. He said that a safe supply of drugs is actually fueling the crisis that we see that have terrorized these people and our communities, they are the result of a failed experiment. This is a deliberate policy by woke liberal and NDP governments to provide taxpayer-funded drugs, flood our streets with easy access to these. What do you make of those concerns? I mean, the coroner released the overdose death statistics from 2022 yesterday, and she found nobody had died from that prescribed safe supply. So Pierre Polyev is just full of shit, I'm afraid.

Like, it's absolutely not true. But what do you make of the concerns though that it might actually encourage people to use drugs by making it so accessible? But it's not so accessible. You know, I just was talking about how very difficult it is to get on that program. And for encouraging drug use, well, I want to encourage the people who are prescribed

those drugs to use them instead of the drugs that are coming off the street, because you might stand a chance of living through the year if you do that. So really, I mean, that the issue when you're saying, you know, standing a chance of living through the year, that that's a very, this is a real risk of people overdosing and dying. And this is this is what the issue that you're saying you want to see addressed first and foremost. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a really good point. Sometimes we're talking about different problems, right?

Like people on the right, maybe they're concerned about people using drugs. People have always used drugs. You know, I went to high school in Vancouver in the 80s and there were drugs in my high school. It's just drugs have always been around here my whole life. People have always used drugs. It's just that when people die from drugs, die that afternoon, overdose and die in these huge numbers, to me, it's triage. Like before

you want to talk about if someone's use problematic or this or that, you want them to be alive. Just lastly, Garth, you were part of the advisory board for this program in BC, and I know you've been advocating for decriminalization since the 90s. How does it feel to see this move finally come through? Well, you know, people probably think in other parts of the country, why is he moaning and complaining about the things that aren't there? There's these things that are there. 2.5 ain't bad. He's always complaining, you know, and I get it. I get it. But the problem is it's my job is to look for the future, right? As a, as an organizer with VanDue, that's what I'm supposed to do is how do we raise that threshold? How do we get it

to more places in the country? So I'm always going to be sounding like I'm a little ungrateful, but I mean, privately yesterday morning, I went out and walked around and just felt like, what does it feel like to be decriminalized here? And I got to say, there's a smile on my face. I was patting the neighborhood dogs. I felt all right, you know, it's a step in the right direction. And this is how change mostly happens in drug policy is we fight for something that would really make a big change. And we get a kind of a watered down concession from government. But any time a community or a movement of marginalized people fights for something and the government has to give a concession, that means you're on the road.

That means you got momentum and you're getting somewhere. So that did feel good yesterday. Garth, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Oh, thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland,

and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.