The Decibel - How the politics of decriminalization played out in B.C.

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Last year, British Columbia’s government began an experiment in drug policy by decriminalizing illicit drug use, up to a certain amount. The pilot program was meant to address the worsening opioid crisis that killed thousands of people in B.C. in 2023. But now, the provincial government has made a major reversal on that cornerstone policy, after reports from mayors of urban centres, residents and health care workers of rampant open drug use.Justine Hunter, The Globe’s B.C. politics reporter joins the podcast to talk about the politics of decriminalization and what this means for harm reduction policies across Canada in the future.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

We today have made a formal request to Health Canada to amend the exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. In short, this amendment will make public drug use illegal in British Columbia. On Friday, British Columbia Premier David Eby announced a major change to the province's drug decriminalization program. What happened was Premier David Eby did the most stunning retreat on this policy only 15 months into a three-year pilot project where he's asking Ottawa now to effectively recriminalize public use of hard drugs. That's The Globe's Justine Hunter. This is after 15 months of his government being slammed in all quarters,

from mayors, from people even who supported decriminalization, from the police, and of course from the opposition, over the public safety issues that have come out as an unintended consequence of moving to decriminalization in B.C. The pilot program started in January 2023. It allowed people to carry up to 2.5 grams of certain illicit drugs, including opioids, for personal use. These drugs weren't legal, but people wouldn't be arrested and charged for using them. BC is facing an opioid epidemic. Over 2,500 people died in 2023, an average of seven per day. This program was supposed to help, but it didn't exactly go as planned. And so almost immediately after this policy came into

effect in BC, you had open drug use in parks and beaches, in places that people weren't comfortable with, but also at the same time in places like hospitals where nurses were concerned about being exposed to fentanyl smoke. And they don't even know, in fact, sometimes what they're being exposed to because people were using openly in hospitals, in their patient rooms, in bathrooms and things like that. So it caused a backlash and that backlash has not abated. It's only gotten built over the last 15 months. That backlash has spread outside of BC. It's having an impact on drug policies elsewhere in Canada and has become a talking point in Ottawa. So today, Justine's on the show

to walk us through what the plans were for decriminalization in BC, what happened to the pilot program, and what's next. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Justine, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Justine, to start, I was wondering if we could go back to when British Columbia actually decided to launch this three-year pilot project of decriminalization. So this started at the end of January 2023. What was the goal of this program? The idea is that if people are treated as criminals for being addicted to drugs, they're not going to get the kind of medical treatment they need. And that there was an acknowledgement from police that arresting people over and over again wasn't actually going

to help save lives. We have a massive crisis in British Columbia. I know it's not unique, but we've been losing on average right now seven people every day in British Columbia to the toxic drugs that are on the streets. So by de-stigmatizing the use of hard drugs for personal use, that this would allow people to get connected with the health care system and treatment. So this pilot allowed people to carry 2.5 grams of certain drugs and use them in some public places. But some advocates were really calling for other measures to come into place at the same time as well. What did we not see included in this pilot? The understanding was that this would just be one part of a suite of measures. So it's one thing to say, well, we're not going to charge you.

But the other part of this would be, we're going to make sure you can get the help you need to deal with your addiction. And the government did make some measures. They've opened up hundreds of new beds, for example, for treatment. But it's not enough. So it's one thing to say you can not be arrested, but you're not necessarily going to get the help that you need because there's wait lists for detox beds, for example. The criticism is that we didn't put in the guardrails around public use in some places, but we also didn't provide the supports to help people with addictions. When this was put into place in January 2023, was this politically

popular at the time? I think there is a broad acceptance for harm reduction in British Columbia, and that's really what has eroded over the last 15 months because this project did not go as planned. I think British Columbians understand the depth of the raw numbers of the number of people dying from addictions and that there's some broad support for the notion that we shouldn't be trying to arrest people and treat them as criminals when really they need help. Justine, you said this project didn't go as planned. What do you mean by that? The government, when they asked Health Canada to grant this exemption to allow people to have some, possess and use hard drugs, what they didn't anticipate, and they should have because they were told, that you need to have some limits on where people can use drugs, that there needed to be some, as the police have described, guard

rails around controlling where people can use. So it's one thing to say we're not going to arrest you, but there's another thing to say we need to have some enforcement tools so that if there's problematic behavior associated with drug use in public, that the police still would be able to deal with that. So you had urban mayors right across the province within weeks of this policy saying that they didn't have the ability to deal with the problems that were coming with people using drugs in public. You talked about kind of the initial goal was really to destigmatize drug use. Has this, I guess, has this been effective at actually doing that? Well, that's a good question. And it's one

that I've been asking for the last 15 months. And we know, for example, that there are, and this should be no surprise, there are fewer people being arrested in the last 15 months, which was part of the intent. Has that saved lives? It's really hard to measure because there's so many other factors involved. So I watch every month the BC Center for Disease Control puts out a new dashboard updating the statistics around things like the number of people who have died of overdose, the number of paramedic attended events involving overdoses. And the numbers haven't changed dramatically one way or the other. But we also know that the mix of street drugs that people are overdosing on has become more toxic. And there has been, particularly since the pandemic started,

a rise in homelessness. And so there are more people that are at risk because they don't have a safe place to be. And so they're in the public view. So there were multiple factors and it's hard to tease out the facts and say that this was a successful project or not. Now, I would note that Oregon did go through their three-year pilot project all the way to the end and then they decided to cancel it because they didn't feel it was actually doing what was intended. Oregon also had a decriminalization project, essentially. Yes, yeah. I wonder, did the B.C. government do anything originally to anticipate any, I guess, public safety concerns that might arise from public drug use? Because we would have to understand that, yes, of course, a result of this is going to be more public drug use. That's kind of the point. The B.C. government was under the impression that police would have sufficient enforcement tools through public intoxication laws, but police insisted that they didn't have

the tools. They didn't have the legal grounds to go and move people on. And so if somebody complained that there's somebody smoking crack next to the playground or in a park where their kids were on the beach, they didn't have the ability to go in and arrest that person or just get them to move on. But I guess I want to unpack this a little bit, though, because there were some restrictions, right? You could not, for example, smoke crack in a playground, your schools, any of those things. So how is that possible? How did the police, I guess, not have the ability to do those things. So the decriminalization experiment began because Health Canada gave British Columbia at the request an exemption to the criminal code. And they initially brought it in with some restrictions. For example, you couldn't use

hard drugs in an airport. And last July, because of the concerns around public use, BC went back to Ottawa and asked them to change the exemption to add some more exceptions to the rules. So they asked for some additional places like spray parks and things where kids are. And so Ottawa then granted that. That still wasn't enough. And so the BC government drafted its own legislation, which it passed in the fall, which was welcomed by mayors and police and others that said there would be even broader exemptions to the rules around where you could use. So there were more limits on public use. If you drew a map and looked at all the exemptions that have been proposed in the legislation last fall, it would have been a bit challenging for police to

actually enforce because it was so complex by now. You had such a long list of specific things and how many meters away from a doorway. So what they've done now is essentially say, well, we're everywhere in public pretty much is off limits. And then police will be asked to use their judgment and discretion to just deal with things that are problematic. But that legislation, of course, was held up and has been set aside by the courts through an injunction while it awaits a charter challenge, which could take a year or more. OK, so they tried to restrict where people could use drugs in public, but then the B.C. Supreme Court suspended that. What did the ruling say? What the Supreme Court justice said was that

that would put drug users in the way of harm, that they would be put at risk because they would be forced back into the shadows where they wouldn't necessarily get the help they needed if they were overdosing. You know, when you've got this chief justice saying that any restrictions that you bring in are putting people who use drugs at risk, the government had very few options to try and tinker with that law at that point, which was subject to an injunction. It would have put them offside with the courts. So that's why they ended up having to go back to Ottawa. Yeah. So yeah, so that injunction happened in December. That was several months ago, right? So I guess what happened in that time period here, Justine? Why is the Premier

backtracking on the entire pilot now? There's two parts to this. According to the Premier, he got a briefing from his Attorney General, and she had told him that it would probably be a year or more before this court challenge could make its way through. So in the meantime, BC was going to be unable to bring in any new restrictions. And then there's that little thing with the fall and the date with the voters. So I do think that the government was under pressure. They didn't want to wait another year without being able to take any action. The other thing that happened though, and I think this was something that only a few people were aware of up until quite recently, which was some of the issues that

were going on in hospitals. So the nurses union started talking publicly about the issues where nurses have been exposed to open drug use and in hospital rooms, in bathrooms, in the maternity ward of the Vick General Hospital. And that, I think, put the public over the edge. I think that was a real tipping point. When the opposition brought in the House, they introduced some memos that had been leaked where different health authorities were describing how powerless they were to actually deal with people using drugs in hospitals. So I think that the public mood really swung around when they thought that even a hospital room isn't safe because of unfettered drug use. We'll be back after this message. So Justine, where exactly does this pilot program stand now?

Is it completely over? I spoke to the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, the other day. And she maintains this isn't over, that this is not recriminalization in her mind. There are limits for sure on where people can use drugs in public. And we'll see how that will play out, assuming that Ottawa actually approves what BC asked for. But there will still be essentially an agreement that we're not going out of our way to arrest people for possession. So it is a question of stepping up the actual supports that should have been there in the first place and increasing access to, for example, safe consumption sites. And that was Dr. Henry's call was for communities

to increase those. There are currently, I believe, 50 safe consumption sites around the province, and less than half of them allow people to smoke drugs, which is one of the things that people want to do. So she's saying we need communities to open up more of these sites so that people have a safe place to consume their drugs. When it comes to arresting people for consumption, I want to ask you directly about that, because when it comes to how police will enforce the new version of this, yeah, have they given an indication of what they're going to do here? The direction from the premier is that police and Crown prosecutors should use discretion, that this is only to be used as a tool when there are exceptional circumstances where there is problematic drug use in public. I did speak to the head of the BC Chiefs of Police Association, and she told me she expects the number of charges for drug possession and use to go back to what it was before decriminalization. So if that ends up being the result,

then the pendulum really will have swung back to where it was. The one upside will be that there is a commitment to do more in terms of providing supports. And that's a piece of the progress that we needed all along. Justine, let's dig into the politics of this a little bit more. BC isn't the only jurisdiction to reverse course, as you mentioned. Oregon went back on its decriminalization plans as well. So I guess broadly speaking, what is it about these policies that are making them hard to get right? In Europe, Portugal was ahead of the curve in terms of dealing with both homelessness and addictions. They went ahead with a decriminalization program,

but there was a stick attached, not just a carrot. So they would say, well, we're not going to charge you, but we are going to make sure that you get into some kind of treatment. It is the idea that you need to have not just one piece, decriminalization on its own, as shown that it's not working in Oregon, that you need to have those wraparound supports. And I think people will be asking whether or not we need to have more of an attitude of ensuring that people are connected to supports, not just a kind of passive thing where you say, well, here, if you feel like getting some help, here's a place you can get in touch with, but actually encouraging, actively encouraging people to get treatment for their addictions. And I don't think we're there yet in BC in terms of public health policy.

That's not the attitude. But I think what we saw in British Columbia was this era of permissiveness where people felt like it was okay to use hard drugs in public. And there was a lot of people that didn't agree with that. And that's caused people, I think, to lose support in an important way for harm reduction. There is, I guess, a line, though, between, you know, encouraging people to get treatment and forcing people to get treatment. Has, I guess, has the province, had they discussed kind of where that falls? No, the province has, in terms of public health, the attitude has been that we should provide treatment support for when people feel like they want it. That there's no stigma attached to drug use.

So we've de-stigmatized drug users, which we've all agreed is a good thing to do because that can be a barrier to getting treatment. But the question I think now is do we need to encourage an attitude of stigma around drug use, not the drug users, but the use of it so that people don't feel it's okay. As you mentioned, there is an election coming up in British Columbia this year. So I guess I'm wondering how the internal politics are playing out in the province. What has the BC United Party, which is the opposition party, what have they said about this decriminalization policy? When decriminalization was first proposed in British Columbia, the opposition supported it, as did the police, as did the mayors. It is a symptom of the crumbling support for this measure that the opposition has done

in an about face and said, we would tear this up. It has been a disaster. Does that actually represent public sentiment against this policy? Or is this kind of playing politics? Do we know how that breaks down? I think it's becoming a wedge issue. Now, the question I can't answer yet is whether or not what happened on Friday with the province essentially recriminalizing the use of hard drugs, whether or not that will diffuse the issue or whether they will still go into the election being vulnerable on this accusation from the opposition that they've been soft on crime and that they have allowed this issue, this problem with drug use to get out of hand. Let's also look at the effect that this is having outside of B.C. in terms of politics. On Tuesday, federal conservative leader Pierre Polyev called decriminalization a, quote, wacko policy, as well as calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a, quote, wacko prime minister.

And that, of course, led to him actually being kicked out of the House of Commons. Mr. Polyev, I have to name you for disregarding the authority of the chair. Pursue it to the authority granted to me by Standing Order 11. I order you to withdraw from the House from any participation by vide by video conference to the remainder of this day's sitting. Justine, I guess what should we make of how these politics are playing out beyond B.C.? Well, there are definitely lessons that the rest of Canada can look to and other jurisdictions that are thinking of decriminalization. It has probably made it very difficult for Toronto to move forward at this point with their quest for decriminalization. Yeah, Toronto has asked Health Canada to grant the city some decriminalization exemptions as well. Yeah. Yeah. And right now, this is not a great time to be

championing moving forward decriminalization because BC's experiment has more or less been wiped out 15 months in. Now, there are lessons that could be learned that you could say, well, we will move forward, but we will be informed by the mistakes that BC made. And those mistakes would be to make sure that you have some plan in place so that police can deal with problematic drug use in public. But it also means that you need to actually have the plans in place to make sure that people can get help and that people have safe places to consume drugs. Did any good, I guess, come out of this one-year version of BC's pilot? Were there things that were beneficial that we actually learned from? I think the one thing that we can say is that we've recognized clearly that you cannot just change one piece of this very complex issue.

It's one thing to decriminalize and destigmatize, but where is the help? Where are the alternatives? If you don't want people smoking opioids in a park, then where can they safely go and hopefully get connected with the supports and treatments that they need? Just before I let you go, Justine, what might be the lasting impact of this 15-month pilot? It might be hard to tell now, but I guess from the people you're talking to, what is the sense of the impact here? I think the question will be whether or not BC's support in general for harm reduction, because BC has been on the leading edge in Canada for decades around harm reduction, and whether or not the government's failure to map this out properly will have a lasting impact on public support for those measures and to help the thousands of British Columbians who are struggling with addiction.

Justine, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Raisa Alibi. Zura Jabril joins us as a fellow of Carleton University's Brooke Forbes Award. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.