The Decibel - Drug decriminalization is over in B.C. What’s next?

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

British Columbia’s drug decriminalization pilot program will end on January 31st. The controversial program was introduced in 2023, but was criticized by advocates and political opponents alike. Parts of the policy had already been rolled back as public pressure mounted. The pilot’s cancellation was met with disappointment, especially from First Nations leaders, over the lack of consultation. What does the ending of this policy signal about the B.C. government’s approach to the toxic drug crisis? And what does it mean for Canadians living with addictions?Andrea Woo, the Globe’s staff reporter covering health and drug policy, gives us a retrospective on what exactly B.C.’s pilot was trying to fix, whether that worked, and what comes next as decriminalization ends in the province.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

After three years, B.C. is ending its drug decriminalization pilot. The British Columbia government had a three-year pilot project decriminalizing personal possession of illicit substances. That's the globe's Andrea Wu, who covers health and social justice. So this is up to two and a half grams of opioids like fentanyl, cocaine, MDMA, methamphetamine. and it meant that people 18 years and older could carry up to two and half grams total and not be arrested or have their drug seized or face any criminal charges for that amount for personal possession. It was a controversial program and both advocates and critics took issue with how it was

implemented and managed. But it wasn't always like that. 2016 is the year that the provincial health officer here at the time declared an emergency from soaring drug deaths. So 2016 was considered a crisis year. So in those following years, there was a lot of effort to try different things, and there was a lot more openness and willingness to try policies that may not have seemed as important or necessary before. At the time, the opioid crisis had taken a turn for the worse, as Sventil made its way into the drug supply. In 2016, over 3,000 Canadians died from opioid use.

A third of those deaths were in B.C. And there was a very cautious sense of optimism that perhaps this could do something, that it was worth trying, at least. That optimism didn't last long. A year into the trial, the province started rolling it back. By May 24, decriminalized drug use was restricted to private residences. And now, illegal drug use and possession will be completely restricted by the end of this month. Andrea's on the show today, and she's going to walk us through what exactly British Columbia was trying to fix, how the public reacted to the program, and what comes after decriminalization.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Andrea. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So, Andrea, what was the province's stated goal of the decriminalization pilot when it started? So that is a very interesting and important question because the messaging around decriminalization played a really notable role in how it was perceived and received by the public. and it may have ultimately factored into the pilot's demise. Public health figures in BC had called for Decrim for many years, like consecutive public health officers had called for it.

In 2019, Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry had issued a report calling for decrim saying that there are long-lasting harms associated with punitive drug policies. So for example, someone with a... an addiction could get a criminal record that in turn leads to barriers to employment and travel and securing housing and other situations that require a criminal background. And it's also costly. There are substantial costs related to policing and courts and incarceration related to those charges while delivering few rehabilitative or public health benefits.

So there are a lot of very compelling. reasons for decrim. But at the time of developing this pilot and around implementation, there was a lot of language from provincial and federal health officials about reducing stigma and having people come out of the shadows and steering people away from the criminal justice system towards health services such as drug treatment. In my view, there was a sense in those early days that backers of this pilot really had to promise the world to convince people that this was important and worth doing. When in reality, decriminalization is a very limited tool. And so in that sense, there's some belief that it was oversold. The other idea was that it was

to treat drug use as a health matter, right, rather than a criminal justice issue. Yes. And that is language and messaging that continues to this day despite the end of, or the blooming end of the pilot. But yes, it's, you know, addiction is a disability. It's a recognized disability. We should be treating it as a health issue and not as a criminal justice issue because we know that that is not an effective response to it. And to be clear, this was always meant to expire after three years with the possibility of extension. Correct. It was announced as a time-limited pilot project three years with the potential to extend it. So we now know that the BC government is not extending this pilot project.

What did the government say about why they're not doing that? So when health minister Josie Osborne announced in mid-January that the government would be ending the pilot, she said that it hadn't delivered the results we hoped for. From the beginning, this pilot was designed as a time-limited trial with ongoing monitoring built in so we could understand what was working, what wasn't, and where changes were needed. However, the pilot hasn't delivered the results that we hoped for. And so naturally, reporters were very curious about what results we hoped for,

like what specifically was not working. working. And she kind of sidestepped that answer several times. And several reporters asked it in different ways. And she said, this is a quote, ultimately we were not seeing results in the way of a huge increase in self-referral to care, an increase in the use of certain kinds of services in the public awareness and understanding that's necessary, creating all the conditions for success. So it sounds like they had these ideas of what they wanted to see as a success. Was that ever defined? It was not.

I think there was like a sort of ambiguous sense that more people perhaps would be accessing treatment. But we don't really, we didn't have those measurable goals at the beginning. And again, I'm not sure that even supporters of Decrim would say that you could produce those kinds of goals because again, this is something, this is a tool that at best can reduce the harms associated with criminalizing personal drug use. It was never intended to get people into treatment or to ultimately save lives. Let's talk about measurements of this pilot. Do we have any measures of how this pilot went? And let's start with health outcomes.

What do we know about health outcomes? I'm thinking about hospitalizations, overdose rates, people moving into treatment. Do we have any sense of that? So we do have all those numbers. And the Ministry of Health produced quarterly reports that were submitted to Health Canada. And so there were things like health service utilization. So, for example, use of overdose prevention services in British Columbia. And that did actually steadily increase over the course of the pilot.

There were things like use of take-home naloxone kits that was more or less stable. But the province also keeps data on people accessing opioid agonist treatment, so things like methadone or suboxone. that was slightly down, I believe, over the course of the decriminalization pilot. But I don't know if people are trying to tie that to decriminalization. The province says that they will be consolidating all of their data and issuing a final report soon. Okay. Interesting. Right. So it seems like right now there's like a correlation where we can't exactly point those numbers towards the fact that this was because of the pilot.

Correct. What about interactions with law enforcement? Do we have any sense of how that might have changed? Yeah, so this was actually a big piece of it. So as the complaints about public drug use started building up, police who were supportive of the pilot project, there were law enforcement officials on the decriminalization planning table with the province. They were supportive of it in principle. they said that they no longer had the tools to effectively respond to public drug use. Tell me more about that. What does that mean? What does it mean not having the tools? They said they didn't have the grounds to approach people using drugs in public spaces unless they were suspected of other criminal behavior.

But I spoke with a criminal lawyer here in Vancouver. Her name is Kyla Lee. and she called this an example of police spin. So she argued that police continued to have tools such as arresting people under BC's Liquor Control Licensing Act for being intoxicated in public. She said they could potentially use the criminal offenses of mischief or causing a disturbance to move people along or to compel them to leave. There are also all sorts of municipal bylaws related to smoking within surcephemy. certain distances of buildings, for example. So you can't be in a doorway, smoking whatever drugs. There was also a very, there was a video of someone using drugs like smoking crack and a Tim Horton's that was widely circulated and there was a lot of chatter about how, you know, this is what BC is

like under decriminalization. People are smoking crack at a Tim Hortons always prohibited. This was never allowed at any point. But there was just a growing sentiment that decriminalization was the cause of this. So I brought this to Fiona Wilson. She was the deputy chief of police at the Vancouver Police Department at the time of implementation. And she's now the police chief at the Victoria Police Department. I relate to her what Kyla Lee had said, that police still had all sorts of tools. And her response, this is a quote, she said, if they're causing a disturbance, if they're running in and out of traffic, if they're screaming or assaulting people on the street, absolutely. But if they're simply consuming illicit drugs in many public places, we didn't have the

lawful authority to approach them. And so we always teach our police officers, whatever you do when you engage with somebody, you need to make sure you're on solid legal grounds. We'll be right back. I want to talk about one of the goals, which was about destigmatizing the use of drugs. Did that happen? And so that comes up all the time too. And again, that's one of those very noble goals and also one that is very, very hard to measure. And not only do we not have a good sense that stigma was reduced, I think even some of the most supportive people of the policy say that stigma has probably increased in the last few years just because of how contentious, not only the pilot,

but just other drug policies, the political climate that we have here, the growing frustration over homelessness and drug use and street disorder and crime, I think all of those things put together have probably led to an increase in stigma related to drug use. Tell me about that. Like the perception did change, right? What happened? What happened in BC? What happened during this time that made that perception change?

Well, there was a little pandemic. And like many other big cities here in BC, we saw a big increase in homelessness and poverty, for example. So we have a Metro Vancouver homeless count here. And in 2025, the result said that there was a 9% increase from 2023 and that there was a 30% increase in people living outdoors. So those numbers and counts like that were very much reflected in what we're seeing in our streets. And at the same time, we also had this drug supply that was evolving to include, more benzodiazepines and veterinary tranquilizers. And the effect of that was a lot of people out cold, like unconscious on our streets. And I'm sure you're seeing this in Toronto as well

in other big cities. And it's, it's awful. I mean, there's a lot of despair on our streets, for sure, along with visible homelessness, visible poverty. And I think to try to try to to explain the merits of a policy like this was very challenging in an environment where we had provincial and federal elections and a very heightened and divided political climate where drug use and crime and public safety factored so prominently. It was very easy to message things like, you know, don't give free drugs to addicts or we believe in treatment. Because of course, you know, absolutely, of course. There's no one who doesn't believe that we should have a functioning, robust treatment system for everyone.

But to try to explain why something like decriminalization would work takes a lot of time and explanation and nuance. and I don't think that messaged well to the public. And there was a perception, right, that there was more crime because of decriminalization. I'm curious, is that true? Was it perceived crime or was there more crime? I believe that crime rates had actually been falling over the years, but certainly an increase in homelessness and just this public perception of street disorder. And of course, there was also the story of, in the hospitals, right? There was fentanyl smoke, right? There were nurses complaining about fentanyl smoke as well, right? So there was negative public perception and so the pilot became politically unfavorable and now the decriminalization pilot is ending. What have drug policy experts said about the type of support that is needed to give decriminalization a better chance of success? So I asked almost verbatim that question to Cori DeBeck.

She's a professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University here. And she pushed back on the way that I framed that question because she rejected the idea that decriminalization failed because the objectives of, you know, reduced stigma and getting into treatment. that was not going to happen with decriminalization. She said it's a very limited intervention that would only ever reduce the harms associated with criminalization. So what we were talking about before, that, you know, if your university student is caught using drugs, do you think he or she is better off with a criminal record? Like, is that going to affect that person's ability to find a job or get an apartment? But so by removing that, it removes all sorts of harms related to drug use. And when you look at research studies that are now emerging, it was the pilot project was successful or it was beginning to achieve some of those goals.

So, for example, there are a few studies that found that the policy led to a significant reduction in criminal justice encounters for drug possession, which sounds obvious because it's, decriminalization. But again, the harms that stem from that are notable. And another one that Dr. Debec co-authored found that young street involved drug users in Vancouver reported fewer policing related barriers to accessing harm reduction services around decriminalization. So people that might have been worried to go to an overdose prevention site because they felt that they were hassled by cops or they were worried about this and that. They reported that those barriers had been reduced. First Nations leaders have said they were not meaningfully consulted in the cancellation of this

drug decriminalization pilot. What specific concerns did First Nations leaders raise about this pilot ending? Yeah, so they said they were not consulted at all. They found out through the news conference or through the media after the fact. Wow. Yeah. And the one that was really surprising to me is the First Nations Health Authority, which was a very active partner during the planning process and implementation.

No one there had been consulted before the decision was made to end this. First Nations groups, including the First Nations Health Authority and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, said that they were disappointed to have not been consulted about the. the pilot ending and argued that it should have continued with appropriate evaluation, noting that indigenous people are disproportionately impacted by the policy, or more specifically, the lack thereof. So coincidentally, on the same day that BC announced that the pilot would be ending, Statistics Canada released a report saying that indigenous adults were incarcerated at a rate

10 times higher than non-Indigenous adults. And in BC, the First Nations Health Authority's most recent data show that indigenous people are dying at five to six times the rate of non-indigenous people in BC. And so this was a very, this was a policy that could have gone a long way and meant a lot to indigenous people, particularly given their over-representation. in these statistics. And the fact that they were not even consulted about it was something that they found very disappointing.

And I believe it was Grand Chief Stuart Philip at the UBCIC who said that, you know, the province has long said substance use and addiction is a health issue. And so what does ending this policy, which means a return to criminalization, what does that do? Like how is that supposed to be beneficial? So Dr. Judith Sayers from BC First Nations Justice Council,

who is a key person in the pilot project rollout, said she wanted to see the policy permanent with evaluations and amendments as necessary. Why wasn't that considered? Like, why not keep decriminalization and make changes to it? So that's a really good question. And that is a point and a question that's been raised by others as well. And one that really the only, that only the Ministry of Health can answer, but in my view,

it has become a lightning rod. I mean, we are in a political climate where there is not a lot of room for nuance and for patients as we trial some of these. significant policies and I think given how heightened certain tensions are right now that it is just not politically palatable to keep it and proceed with it. Again, I think it was Grand Chief Stuart Philip who pointed out that we introduced this policy. There was some pushback, made a couple amendments, more pushback. And, and more pushback. And essentially, the pilot, the most recent iteration of it is hardly what it was intended to be at all. That it was never really given a chance to do what it is supposed to do or what it could have done.

And so in that regard, there is a sense that it was sort of set up to fail. So what changes in BC now? Does drug use or drug possession, does that become a crime issue again? So it means that police can once again use the provisions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to respond to public drug use. So again, if they see someone on the street using drugs, you now have more of an ability to approach them. You can seize their drugs if you feel that is necessary. You could arrest them. However, it is worth noting that before this pilot project came into effect in 2020,

the public prosecution service of Canada had issued an order to prosecutors in Canada to not recommend charges for simple possession in the abysmal. of another bigger crime, if possible. So while we are ending the pilot project here in British Columbia, there is still that general rule from the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to look for other methods of diversion when possible to avoid criminal charges for simple possession. So just lastly, Andrea, are there paths away from the criminal justice system now that due criminalization is over? So that's one of the big questions now. Pilot ends what next. I spoke to Corey Wilson. She's the chair of the BC First Nations Justice Council about

what other methods of diversion look like, other alternatives to criminal penalties. And she said this presents a real opportunity to look at other better. more meaningful responses to drug use than arrests in the criminal justice system. So one example that she pointed out is that the BC First Nations Justice Council is piloting something called an Indigenous Diversion Center in Prince George. So it's kind of like a drug court, but for all sorts of minor non-violent offenses. So that includes drug possession, but it could be theft or mischief or, you know, fraud or something that is minor and nonviolent. So under their pilot project at the Indigenous Diversion Center, if you are accused of something like that like theft or shoplifting, voluntary.

participants can complete a 90-day program that is focused on addressing the root causes of their offending. So there would be, you know, culturally appropriate supports, like ceremonies. There's clinical counseling with social workers and there's like art classes and programs that are meant to be rehabilitative as opposed to punitive. and if you take this program upon completion, there are no charges laid. And so Ms. Wilson said this is an opportunity to try something like that in the lower mainland, for example. Andrea, really appreciate you making the time. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

That was Andrea Wu, the Globe's staff reporter covering health and social justice. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Tiff Lamb produced this episode. episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chong is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.