Sarmishta: Last week, the Canadian Association of the Chiefs of Police came out with a gobsmacker of a report. In it, they announced their support for decriminalizing the personal possession of illicit drugs. Drug use addiction, they said, is a public health issue. And so simple possession should be treated with health and social services, rather than through the criminal justice system. Instead of arresting drug users, they would support getting them help, and access to safe consumption sites, and even safe versions of drugs. It’s an idea researchers and people who work in addiction have hammered away at for decades. But it’s quite another thing when the association representing police chiefs stands behind it as a way to save lives and address the opioid crisis. What does this mean for drug policy in Canada? Is it the first serious step toward decriminalization? And what happens next? I’m Sarmishta Subramanian, sitting in for Jordan Heath Rawlings. And this is The Big Story. Joining me today is Justin Ling, an investigative reporter based in Montreal who’s covered these issues at length. Hi Justin. Thanks for joining us.
Justin: Hey, thanks for having me.
Sarmishta: So, last week, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police released this report that endorsed decriminalization for simple possession of illicit drugs. Can you break down that report for us a little bit? What did their recommendations entail?
Justin: Yeah, I mean, it’s a pretty extraordinary report. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police basically said that they want to see a system where individual drug users are not arrested or even fined or prosecuted or even jailed for simple possession. It might not sound extraordinary in our current context, I mean, this is something that public health officers in Toronto and British Columbia have both endorsed, and it’s something that has been surprisingly in the mainstream in the last couple of months. But this is a group of police chiefs. I mean, these are not necessarily who you think of when you kind of imagine somebody calling for wholesale drug decriminalization. This is a group that was even, I think, skeptical of the idea of marijuana legalization, now calling for what could be the most extraordinary and substantive change to not just policing, but the justice system in maybe a century, or at least decades at the very least. I mean, it’s a pretty significant shift and it’s a pretty, you know, noticeable shift in their policy.
Sarmishta: Yeah. I mean, it is astonishing. I have to say, I was pretty gobsmacked. I mean, things like harm reduction and so on are ideas that have been around for a couple of decades, but not in this precinct. What is the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police?
Justin: I mean, it’s exactly what the name implies. It is an association of all of the chiefs of police of pretty much every police service across the country, including the RCMP. You know, it is a group that is the highest level of law enforcement in this country. I mean, you don’t really have any other form where police agencies sit around a table and discuss issues like this. You know, I think that the direct comparison would be kind of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, where you have the mayors sitting around a table, discussing infrastructure and public transit and so on and so forth. This is basically that, but for policing.
Sarmishta: So, this is very, very significant. And their position before this was clearly not– did not lead one to think that this announcement would be coming now. Do you have a sense of what triggered these recommendations? Do they say? Or do you have a sense of how long this might have been in the works?
Justin: I think it’s the evidence. So, you know, I don’t wanna make it sound like the CACP was entirely, you know, throw the book at them, you know, old school policing tactics for drug users before this. Cause that’s not quite right. For some time they have been coming around to the ideas of harm reduction. They have been supportive of safe consumption sites. They’ve been supportive of some of the tenants of harm reduction for some time. But you know, they wrote a report in 2007, that basically said any sort of principles around harm reduction, you know, should sort of take a back seat to policing and, you know, sort of expressed a skepticism around a lot of those harm reduction tactics. And you know, these are police agencies. They still believe, or at least, you know, publicly state, that arresting people for drug possession, especially in significant quantities, arresting people who are using drugs in public areas, arresting people who have a stash of drugs, you know, these are police departments who still believe in arresting and charging and prosecuting and potentially jailing those people. This statement is almost a contradiction of what a lot of police agencies across the country are doing on a day to day basis. So you know, what led to this shift? I think it’s the numbers and the research, and I think the seismic shift in the conversation that has happened over the last couple of years. Like I said, you have two of the most prominent health officials in the country saying that drug decriminalization and safe supply are the only routes forward to address what is essentially a pandemic. And you know, the only sort of path forward is one that scales back the police and let’s health agencies take the sort of driver’s seat when it comes to managing this crisis. And, you know, I think the numbers themselves are underscoring an urgency. You may have seen, in the last year, some optimism because the number of overdose deaths in this country declined in 2019. It looked like we were getting this crisis under control. That has gone out the window. We may not have noticed it because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the overdose crisis is worsening right now. Just in May 2020 alone, 170 people died in British Columbia.
Sarmishta: Wow.
Justin: That’s more than the entirety of the province lost to COVID-19. It’s double the overdose deaths from the same month in 2019. It is on track to be just as bad as 2017 and 2018, the two worst years for the overdose epidemic in British Columbia. And British Columbia has sort of been a bellwether, or a weather vane for the rest of the country. You know, we’ve seen a lot of the problems start there and then move eastward. So, you know, by these numbers, things are bad, getting worse, and showing no sign of abating.
Sarmishta: You’ve been on this show before talking about the opioid crisis. For those who aren’t aware of the full scope of it, and you’ve talked about the recent months, can you give us a quick sketch of the crisis and how much it’s impacting the country?
Justin: Yeah, I mean, this is devastating. We’ve lost tens of thousands of lives to the overdose epidemic. And, you know, I think we as a country have gotten quite complacent about it. We tend to think these are heroin users. It was a matter of time. These are people who, you know, just use and use and use and will just always eventually die. But it’s just not real, that’s not the reality of what’s happening here. You know, a lot of the people who we’re losing to the overdose epidemic, yeah, some of them are longterm drug users, some of them are longterm heroin users. But plenty of these people, you know, were still able to hold down a job. Plenty of these people were still able to, you know, interact with friends and family. They were, you know, what we would consider sort of fully functioning people. And they’re being lost to this epidemic because of the tainted supply. Now on the flip side of that, I don’t want to make it sound like there are still a huge number of people who are just naturally going to die here. You know, there’s plenty of drug users who, if were given a little more time, could get their addiction under control, could get it managed, could seek support, could seek treatment, and could go on to kind of get out of the depths of addiction. And of course there’s plenty of people who we just needed to reach and who I think had a real path forward. Maybe not to stop using all together, but at least to get their usage under control so that they could hold down a job or, you know, could hold down more stable relationships. So, you know, there is a real diversity of drug users in this country. And I don’t think we often think of it in that respect.
Sarmishta: Has the fentanyl crisis kind of changed the face of that a little bit?
Justin: That’s exactly what it is. So, you know, the actual number of drug users in this country has not shifted all that significantly from the eighties, nineties, two thousands, to today. What we’ve actually seen the shift in, is what drugs are in the supply. You know, heroin use has been relatively steady, but overdoses due to heroin have skyrocketed. Why is that? It’s because fentanyl, Carafentanyl, and other similar drugs have gotten into that supply, and have made using some of these drugs basically a game of Russian roulette. In a lot of circumstances, the drug users don’t know it’s in the supply, aren’t sure to what degree is in the supply, or don’t know the potency of what’s in the supply. It is fundamentally not an issue of drug use. It is fundamentally an issue of drug supply. There is no way you can police your way out of that problem. It is not possible. We have tried this– you know, the old definition of madness is trying the same thing and expecting different results. That’s exactly what we’re doing. And what we’re doing is pushing a lot of these people to the fringes of society. And we’re forcing them to use inside their home or a friend’s home, you know, in the shadows, away from the public. And that’s when people overdose and die. When there’s no one around to save them, there’s no one around to administer Naloxone, there’s no one around to call 911. And that has been the great success of safe consumption sites, is that we’ve managed to save thousands and thousands of lives because they are in public, because we can revive them. But they can’t fix this problem. This problem can’t be fixed with bandaids and temporary solutions. This requires a wholesale change that is going to be uncomfortable for people. I don’t think people are really excited about the idea of fully decriminalizing drugs. The idea of letting people use down the block for them, or the house next door, or on the street, or in a park, or so on. But that is something we’re going to have to deal with, because the reality is people dying behind closed doors in the block down the street. And it might be easier for you cause you don’t have to see them, you don’t have to acknowledge it. But it’s not better for society, because we’re losing tens of thousands of lives this way.
Sarmishta: So decriminalizing drugs isn’t the same as legalizing. What the distinction and what is the basic argument for decriminalizing beyond what you have just described? It is literally the pathway to saving lives.
Justin: Right, so this is where it gets a little bit complicated. What the CACP is calling for as a baseline, and the big shift in their policy, is that they want to decriminalize personal possession. Now, you know, this is significant, but it’s only part of the equation. So decriminalizing for personal possession means, you know, no longer arresting people when they are found with a couple of grams of cocaine or heroin or what have you. And I think a lot of people think that we’ve already functionally done that to some degree, and they’re not entirely wrong. It is harder today to go to prison for simple possession than it was, you know, 20, some odd years ago. That being said, when you look at the crime statistics, you know, reported by police, you’re still looking at about 4% of court processes per year, where the most serious offense the person is facing is simple drug possession. So there’s still, you know, upwards of 10,000 people a year being prosecuted, charged, and potentially incarcerated because of drug possession. And you’re also talking about a significant number of young offenders in that camp as well. Of course, you know, once you start sending drug users to prison, that is really only going to negatively impact their future career prospects, their future prospects of kicking certain drug use habits, and it’s going to seriously impact their ability to kind of get away from a certain lifestyle, if they so choose. So, you know, that is a baseline. That is a big step. It’s significant. But what a lot of harm reduction advocates are saying needs to happen beyond that, is safe supply. You need to figure out a system where. You know, even if you’re going to continue criminalizing drug trafficking and drug production, you need to give people who use drugs an avenue to obtaining those drugs legally and safely. So drugs where you know, what is in that supply where you know the potency, where you know whether there is or is not fentanyl, and so on. So, you know, that is a really core problem here. And it’s one we’ve not quite figured out. So the federal government has given provinces some leeway to set up their own safe supply programs. So programs where doctors can prescribe to patients certain opioid alternatives, or heroin itself. That program is getting off the ground. You’re seeing about. 1300 people who have access to that program, which only kind of recently began in British Columbia. But other provinces haven’t followed suit. So it’s really only available if you’re in British Columbia. And the federal government really hasn’t incentivized or encouraged provinces to go down that path. So, you know, the safe supply system is still quite well limited. And it’s still kind of hindered by significant barriers. Now here’s the upside. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are actually encouraging that program expand as well. They’re encouraging the government to eliminate barriers and to make it easier for people to access safe supply programs, especially overseen by doctors.
Sarmishta: So was this in the recommendations that they just put out as well?
Justin: It was, yeah. It’s kind of buried a little bit, you know, the biggest top line thing is drug decriminalization. You know, no more policing people for simple possession. But you know, they’re also saying specifically, we need to figure out a way to not just expand safe supply, but also make it accessible and make it easy for people to access. Because, you know, I think we’ve seen quite evidently from the marijuana legalization process, that if people have an easier simpler, cheaper, illegal option, they’re going to take that over the cumbersome, expensive government system. So, you know, I think what the CACP is saying here is we’ve learned our lesson. People want, you know, the simple, elegant solution, and that is going to be a safe supply system where a doctor or a nurse or a clinic can hand it to you without too much trouble.
Sarmishta: Wow, it is really remarkable because beyond steering people towards public health resources, rather than the criminal justice system, you presumably have some pathway to steer them away from the dealers who, when they get arrested, there’s a chain reaction of people being driven further underground. And so if you have a way to get a safer supply, it’s safer for the users. And then they’re also within this system that can support them. And possibly help them on the path to recovery.
Justin: So that’s exactly right. And I think that is the big sort of caveat in this whole report from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, is that there’s still saying we need to focus on interdicting traffickers and dealers. We need to figure out how to continue breaking up supply chains and arresting dealers and ensure trafficking, especially by organized crime, comes to an end. And there’s a problem there. There’s sort of a tension, because if you’re disrupting supply flows, then you’re potentially, you know, jacking up prices, you’re affecting, you know, supply and demand pricing. You’re potentially forcing people into dealers they don’t know or don’t trust. And we’re already seeing this. It seems like part of the reason why overdoses are spiking right now in British Columbia is because the supply chains have been so disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. And because those supply chains are so disrupted, you’re seeing people go to dealers they don’t know, you’re seeing certain drugs enter the market they might not otherwise be there, you’re seeing prices drop because maybe there’s a glut because, you know, the drug themselves can’t move to other cities. So, you know, trying to continue policing the supply part is troubling. It’s problematic. Because it does ultimately impact many, many people or drug users than you’re ever going to get into a government run safe supply program, at least at its current state. So, you know, this is sort of the tension, and this is what a lot of drug policy advocates are saying needs to happen next, is that we need to go beyond these very small safe supply programs. We need to go beyond thinking that we can police our way out of the supply problem. We need to figure out how to get people, the drugs they want to use in as safe a way as possible. Because fundamentally the drugs they’re using or not really threats to society, Vancouver used to be lousy with opium dens, you know, people using essentially the same compounds that are in heroin today, and they used them in bars and cafes throughout the city. We’ve shut them down partly as a racist campaign against Chinese immigrants. So you know, we can have all of the opinions we want about whether or not heroin is a good or bad drug, you know, it is something that has been around for centuries, and we need to figure out how to live with it.
Sarmishta: Yeah. So this is my next question. Just, you know, it requires a political will and it requires some sort of shifts in public opinion. And I can kind of see the political counter narratives forming, because you’ve now gone from legalizing pot, to talking about safe supply of hard drugs. And it’s a hard project to push through politically. Do you have a sense of what the federal government’s responses to the report?
Justin: The government deserves some credit. I mean, they have been the ones to open up this limited safe supply program. You know, they’ve spoken seriously about how to get safe supply into the market. And you know, they’ve called this a fundamentally health problem, not a policing one. So they deserve credit on all those fronts because they’re saying and doing some of the right things. That being said, the Prime Minister has said bluntly several times, decriminalization in any form is not on the table. That he’s not there yet, he’s not probably not going to be there, then I’ve spoken to the former health and justice minister, who have said that they pressured him to do exactly that. And he said, no, the polling is not going to let us do it. Basically, we’re worried about losing an election on drug policy. Don’t care how many lines it saves. I don’t see us winning the next election if we push for that. So it’s not happening. That’s really disappointing, because what’s been done thus far has fundamentally opened up safe supply for 1000, 2000, maybe 3000 people across the country. We’re talking about tens of thousands of drug users, all of whom are at risk. And if they’re not at risk right now, that could be at risk very soon once their supply changes. So, how do you figure out how to expand those small programs from 2000 people to 20,000? And fundamentally you can’t get there unless you’re willing to talk about the criminal aspect. You can’t help those people if they’re worried about going to jail. You can’t figure out how to get it’s safe supply of heroin, as long as you’re spending enormous resources, trying to go after the people who are actually dealing it and who actually own the supply networks. You can cut them out, there is really good ways in which– and I think cannabis legalization shows us that– there are really good ways in which you could build your own supply network, build your own production and cultivation network to supplant and replace those groups. But you need to have that conversation. I think everyone acknowledges this freaks people out. These conversations freak people out. The idea of importing heroin in bulk by the federal government, that that should freak people out. It’s a huge shift. I get it. But also keep in mind who’s recommending this. Like Dr. Bonnie Henry, you know, one of the frontline soldiers in the fight against COVID-19, is saying more or less this, that we need to figure out this supply piece. She’s been banging this gong for a long time, saying that this is the pressing pandemic, or at least was before COVID-19 hit. This is the pressing pandemic, we need to take a real serious– you know, we need to put our shoulder to the wheel and take very seriously. And people just haven’t been listening. So this is really frustrating. And I get a freak people out, but you know, you should be uncomfortable. Tens of thousands of people are dying. Surely we can get past some of this discomfort about drugs and start saving these lines.
Sarmishta: Okay. So data is our best guide in lots of complex situations. What does the data show us about how decriminalization has worked in other places? There are other countries that have decriminalized.
Justin: Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot. You know, there’s not been a lot of other countries who have gone down this path. The ones we do have are really promising. Portugal is the most high profile example. They’ve full on decriminalized all drugs. They did this two decades ago and it has been, you know, aside from some hiccups, a massive success. Pick a metric and it has improved under decriminalization, whether it’s HIV, transmissions, overdoses, poverty, you name it, things have gotten better for the whole country, not just drug users. That being said, the data is still limited. Portugal has not done a massive amount of research into all of the ways in which society has changed, but the data that we have suggests it’s been a big success. The Netherlands, Switzerland have to varying degrees gone forward on safe supply and quasi-decriminalization tangents. And again, the data is really promising. But what we know from our own country is that when we’ve used safe supply in a very limited way, it has been a success. Research that has gone on for many, many years and has looked at thousands and thousands of drug users show that therapies where you replaced heroin or fentanyl, or what have you with similar drugs that have similar effects, but can be managed more effectively, it has saved lives. It has saved thousands of lives. But it’s going to require a scale up. We can’t keep doing tiny little pilot projects here and there for 200 people at a time. Real people don’t work this way. People don’t work by jumping from pilot project to pilot project. People don’t work by limited scale government projects. If people want to use a drug, they’re going to use it. They’re going to source it from the easiest, cheapest, most convenient way possible. And people have been organizing their own sort of alternatives to the government system. There have been buyers cooperatives, individual drug users who have gotten together, pooled their resources, and found a safe supplier, and have purchased from them directly and then distributed amongst their members. But under the law, these people are traffickers. These people have committed a crime for which they could serve time in federal prison. And that is really jarring, I think, when you consider what they’re fighting against. They’re fighting against an epidemic. And we’re trying to police them for it. And, you know, finally, I think it’s undeniable, the racial aspect of this. If you look at our federal prisons, which houses individuals who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced to more than two years in prison, some 30% are there on drug crimes. Obviously that’s not just possession, you know, that’s trafficking, cultivation, production, but you know, 30% of our federal prisons are individuals who are convicted on drug crimes. And you are twice as likely to be in federal prison on a drug crime Indigenous than if you’re white. It is undeniable that Black, Indigenous and nonwhite racialized people have been disproportionately hit by this criminalization project. And we don’t seem to want to grapple with that. You know, if you want to talk about defunding police, if you want to talk about criminal justice reform, sentencing reform, you name it, you cannot get away from the fact that drug criminalization is at the very centre of that problem. We spend an enormous amount of money, time and resources, policing and targeting racialized people as part of massive, expensive, drug investigations. To what end is that helping society in terms of breaking up families by putting people in prison, by financing criminal enterprises, by denying the individual drug users an access for a legal, safe, non-criminal supply, you know, the entire process, this entire system is wrapped up in an intricately interlaced racist system of policing and criminalization. And I think the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police deserve an enormous amount of respect for finally starting to acknowledge that problem and suggesting solutions that bring us away from that.
Sarmishta: So this is a big, big, big, first step, this report from the police chiefs. It’s only a first step as you say. What are the stakes if this just ends here?
Justin: People keep dying. Like, you know, I don’t think there’s any other way you can get past that. If things don’t– and let’s be quite real, you know, no matter what happens, people are going to continue to die. We are part of a, at the very least, North American drug market where fentanyl has sort of permeated every corner of the continent, where you’re starting to see massive overdoses in Mexico from fentanyl, where you’re seeing a meth crisis that is absolutely ravaging a lot of communities, especially in the American Northwest, where you’re seeing people use drugs that they could never imagine would include fentanyl, and dying at, you know– people who are not even longterm drug users, people who go to a wedding, get offered a little bit of cocaine, use it, and die of a fentanyl overdose that night. You know, you’re talking about a problem that is pervasive, that is really pernicious, and that is going to be really hard to fight. But you can’t fight with two hands tied behind your back. You can’t fight that while you’re fighting an unrelated war that, you know, we’ve long established is a quagmire. You know, this first step is the bare minimum necessary to avert the number of deaths that we could see. And we could see this year be the worst year of all time for drug overdoses in this country. That is on the table. And if that happens, there’s going to need to be some real, real reckoning with what this government has allowed to happen. Because you know, for all of this government’s great rhetoric and I’m talking mostly about the federal government, but provincial governments have a lot of responsibility to bear as well, especially governments like Jason Kenney’s and Alberta, which has repeatedly fought safe consumption sites, which is again, even the barest of minimum required to fight this pandemic. But, you know, I think there’s going to have to be a reckoning with the government that has consistently recognized how bad the problem is, has consistently said it wants to do something, and has consistently been woefully inadequate when it comes to actually taking the measures that everyone is telling them are necessary to fight against this.
Sarmishta: Well, that seems like a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, Justin, for coming on and sharing your thoughts.
Justin: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Sarmishta: Justin Ling is an investigative reporter based in Montreal. And that was The Big Story for more from us you can visit our website, thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can also follow us on Twitter at @thebigstoryFPN. And now you can write to us to let us know what you think, or even suggest an episode topic. The email address is thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. I’m Sarmishta Subramanian, we’ll talk tomorrow.
Back to top of page
