Has decriminalization failed in BC?

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Jordan: It began with the best of intentions and a desperate need to try something different to save lives.

Clip 1: A Canadian first in British Columbia starting Tuesday. Possession of small amounts of hard drugs like heroin, crack, and fentanyl for personal use will not lead to arrest or criminal charges Because substance use is a public health matter, not a criminal justice one.

Jordan: One of the aims of BC’s drug decriminalization was to remove the stigma around drug use in order to help more users survive. The province asked the federal government for a three year exemption and they were granted it. And then just over a year later, they essentially asked the federal government again, this time to end. Most of that exemption,

Clip 2: BC’s request to criminalize the use of illicit drugs in public spaces has not only been approved by Ottawa, but will take effect immediately says the Federal Minister for Mental Health and Addictions.

Jordan: Why did this project fail, at least in the eyes of the BC government who took steps to end it? How did it fare in the eyes of those who work with users at street level and what does it mean for the decriminalization movement in general? And for Toronto, which has been considering a similar initiative but was warned against it last week by the Ontario Provincial Government. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jen St. Denis is a reporter with The Tyee. She covers housing and civic issues with a particular focus on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, sort of ground zero for BC’s decriminalization program. Hey Jen.

Jen St. Denis: Hello.

Jordan: Why don’t you take us back in time a little bit, not as far back as it was supposed to go when this project was announced, but to the legislation that was passed that made decriminalization possible, I guess just a bit over a year ago now.

Jen St. Denis: Yeah, that’s right. It came into force on January 31st, 2023. And what the legislation did was make possession of 2.5 grams of a number of drugs that are otherwise illegal to have it made that actually legal and the drugs were cocaine, MDMA, fentanyl, heroin, and meth.

Jordan: In a moment, I’ll ask you what the experts expected from this program and the people who work with users. But first, just broadly speaking, what was the provincial government hoping this would achieve? What was their aim?

Jen St. Denis: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a little bit useful to go back a little bit and take off the D from decriminalization and talk about what was happening to people who use drugs when they are criminalized. So I had done some reporting on this in 2020. I talked to a woman named Simona Marsh who had been sitting on the sidewalk in the Downtown Eastside and she was busted by the cops. She had some cocaine and they judged that it was just too much for her own personal use and they actually charged her with possession for the purposes of trafficking. She showed me the amount that she was charged for and it was kind of like a pebble sized, it didn’t look like a lot, but it was enough for them to charge her with that. She ended up serving jail time on the weekends for a while. She said it didn’t prompt her to go to addiction treatment. She wasn’t interested in that at that point, and she was just left with a lot of disruption in her life, and at the end there was no real change in her lifestyle. And it kind of illustrates what is the point of charging people with possession of drugs. There’s kind of questions about that, the argument that it really should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue. And so that was kind of the background of calls to try to lessen that effect of criminalization on people who use drugs. And that was kind of the point. And there were some things that were expected. It was expected that there is a strong link between drug seizures and fatal overdoses. So there was maybe some expectation that it would help with lowering the death toll. I don’t think that happened, but just lessening that cycle of people going to jail and then coming back out repeatedly.

Jordan: And what at the time were advocates saying about the way the government was approaching this, the drugs that they were decriminalizing in the amounts? What was the initial commentary?

Jen St. Denis: The initial commentary from a lot of drug policy activists was that the 2.5 grams was actually too low, that a lot of people would still be criminalized. I should point out that a lot of times police weren’t actually charging drug users with possession, especially in Vancouver. They hadn’t really charged a lot of people with possession for a number of years, but they were confiscating the drugs often. And that was leading to another problem of people going back to the illicit market, maybe having to do risky sex work or crime to find more funds to buy drugs because they were going into withdrawal. So initially there was sort of cautious optimism, but a lot of the policy activists were kind of raising the alarm about this actually not being a high enough amount.

Jordan: What happened on the ground in the Downtown Eastside and elsewhere in bc in the wake of this change, you mentioned it’s the end of January last year, how did the way the amount et cetera of drug use change or not once these drugs were decriminalized?

Jen St. Denis: Well, we know that drug seizures below 2.5 grams, which is the limit, we know that they dropped dramatically. They dropped from 1,283 seizures in 2022 to just 86 in 2023. So people’s drugs were less likely to be taken away from them. And we know that possession offenses dropped from nearly 5,000 in 2022 to about 1500 in 2023. But I think there was also a lot of concern from the public during COVID, homelessness increased, open drug use increased, and that trend I think has kind of continued in British Columbia’s cities and towns, not just big cities, but also small towns. There’s there’s more homeless camps and there I think there is more open drug use that people are seeing. And I think there was a ton of concern, especially from local municipalities. I remember David Eby, the premier, just getting an earful at a convention of BC municipalities, and they wanted more tools to kind of do something about public drug use.

Jordan: And how did they approach that? Did they get more tools? How did they react? What were they actually asking for beyond obviously venting frustration?

Jen St. Denis: Yeah, and I think this is really understandable. No parent wants to be in the playground and have somebody smoking crack even maybe across the park. Maybe you’re really uncomfortable with that. That’s totally understandable. And what the government tried to do in response was try to put in a law kind of setting out where you can and can’t use drugs. It was within 15 meters of a playground within six meters of this or that facility. That law though, was challenged by an organization called Harm Reduction Nurses. And what they argued was that in the midst of British Columbia’s deadly overdose crisis, that this law could actually lead to irreparable harm. And the judge actually agreed with them. And so that law has not been allowed to be put into place. There’s an injunction and that court case continues.

Jordan: And so the public use then has continued to pace, I guess.

Jen St. Denis: Yeah, and I think there’s a question about whether public use actually did increase, but there were certainly some really troubling stories that started to circulate into the media. And I think the most troubling thing was drug use in hospitals. Nurses were really complaining that in certain hospitals there was open drug use like people smoking like meth or crack, and they were being exposed to that smoke, patients were being exposed and that their employer was really not doing anything to curb it. Obviously you’re not allowed to smoke a cigarette in a hospital, but for some reason in some of these hospitals, the nurses say there just wasn’t anything being done to say, no, you really can’t use drugs in the hospital for very good reasons. So there was a number of stories about that in the nurses’ union and nurses were really speaking out strongly against that. Another story in the media showed a video of somebody smoking possibly crack or something in a Tim Horton’s in Maple Ridge, and that obviously caused a lot of public concern too. Now, in both of those cases, neither of those things were actually allowed. Even under the decriminalization, you’re not allowed to openly smoke drugs in a restaurant or in a hospital. But I think there was fear that or concern that the decriminalization attempt had kind of normalized drug use in a way.

Jordan: You mentioned that the number of drug seizures and charges and everything were down. The ultimate purpose behind this is that we’re in an overdose crisis and a lot of people are dying. And when we covered this story last year, I think it was in May or so, so a couple of months after Decrim came in, we were told that it was really too early to get a sense of its overall impact on saving lives. Do we have a sense of that now? How last year compares to previous years of the overdose crisis?

Jen St. Denis: Yeah, we do. So we know that in 2022, so that was before decriminalization, we had a 4% increase in overdose deaths in British Columbia. And then in 2023 we had a 7% increase. So if people were expecting to see decriminalization have a big impact on actual drug deaths, that didn’t happen. But it’s also a very complicated health problem, and there’s other things that had to happen with decriminalization wasn’t just the only thing that had to happen. You probably had to have an increase in safe consumption sites or overdose prevention sites. Some drug policy advocates would’ve said that BC’s Safe Supply Program, which has been running for a while and is supposed to prescribe untainted prescription versions of the drugs to people that are not going to kill them, that maybe needed to be expanded. So I don’t know. Looking at the decriminalization in itself I think is probably not the thing to do.

Jordan: What do the advocates think of the success or failure of the one year plus that this program has been in effect? Would they say that it’s been a success?

Jen St. Denis: Well, I actually think the BC government’s own Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions has kind of pointed out some metrics that show that the program was actually working as intended. Those statistics I read out at the top of the interview about possession offenses being weighed down, drug seizures being weighed down, and they’ve also tracked that visits to overdose prevention sites and safe consumption sites also increased. Those are some metrics that do show that decriminalization was working as intended. But I made a map for my story of all of the overdose prevention sites and safe consumption sites in BC. And if you go anywhere outside of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, it’s quite hard to find an overdose prevention sites. There’s entire swaths of the province that have absolutely no overdose prevention sites or some communities that do have one, but there’s one location and the hours are limited. So when we’re talking about saving lives, that’s probably something that’s not adequate and probably had to be ramped up in conjunction with decriminalization.

Jordan: The BC government has now asked that that exemption they got from the federal government be reversed. The federal government has not only agreed, they’ve said it can take effect immediately. Beyond the successes you just mentioned, what wasn’t working for the government to ask for this?

Jen St. Denis: So this goes back to that attempt to put in the law. Back in October, the BC government attempted that law to prevent people from using drugs within a certain distance of different facilities and playgrounds and stuff. That law failed because of the court challenge. And so this is their response and it’s also after a very intense news cycle of drug use in hospitals being a concern. So they’re obviously reacting to that as well. So now they have made it illegal to use illicit drugs pretty much in any public space. I think that the intent was like, we need to have boundaries around this. It can’t just be a free for all. Police do need the tools to be able to move people along if they’re in an inappropriate place and using drugs in public. We need some sort of way to curb this behavior. And the BC Nurses Union has welcomed this. They say it was up to the employers like the hospitals to enforce their own policies, but they are glad that there’s kind of some curbs on public drug use. But on the other side, advocates are saying this now leaves very little options, especially for homeless people who are drug users. This law is not going to apply to homeless shelters and overdose prevention sites. But if you’re a homeless person in a community that does not have any overdose prevention site, or if you live in a neighborhood that’s far away, you really have no option but to maybe go and hide your drug use now because if you use in public, you can be criminalized by the police or told to move along. And so they’re kind of warning this could lead to more people going into alleys where people can’t see them and then overdosing. And we’re kind of back to the same problem of drug use being so stigmatized that people hide their use and then that’s what leads to death.

Jordan: So just to be clear, the whole decriminalization has not yet been canceled, but drug use in public has been so theoretically you can still hold up to 2.5 grams of those drugs. You just can’t use them anywhere in public.

Jen St. Denis: That’s right. And the decriminalization is a pilot. It’s supposed to go for three years. So until 2026.

Jordan: In the bigger picture, there were a lot of eyes on this project, and obviously BC is kind of seen as, at least in Canada, the center of the overdose crisis. What kind of message does this send about the future of drug policy?

Jen St. Denis: Well, I think that we are in a very interesting political moment here in Canada. We see right wing, the right wing parties like the federal Conservatives, BC politics is complicated, but we see a BC Conservative party kind of forming where there wasn’t one before and really on the ascendancy. And those parties have been really energized by this issue, and they have taken a really hard line tactic that harm reduction is not the thing to be focusing on, and that includes decriminalization safe supply in some provinces, even things like needle exchanges or safe consumption sites like in Alberta, they’ve closed some overdose prevention sites. Pierre Poilievre was really, really energized by BC’s decision to go back to rejig decriminalization. He was in parliament, he was calling the Prime Minister wacko. He was saying all sorts of things. And so I think that we’re seeing that it’s going to be a real battle and it’s becoming really polarized between the harm reduction advocates are out there battling on social media or whatever, and then you have the Conservative politicians and their supporters battling back, and I think we’re really going to see that play out in the next few election cycles, provincially and federally.

Jordan: I know Ontario is not your beat, but I’m also wondering specifically if anyone involved in this saga, federally or provincially has said anything about this decision’s impact on Toronto, which was and may still be considering following exactly in BC’s footsteps despite the Ontario government, Conservative government warning them just as we’re doing this interview on Thursday, not to do that, but they were, I believe, on the verge of making this same request to the federal government. Do we know if this decision changes anything?

Jen St. Denis: I don’t know if that would prevent Toronto from going ahead. Certainly they’re up against the same political headwinds with the Doug Ford government probably taking the same tack. And the federal Conservatives have really seen this as a win for their interpretation of how the drug problem should be handled. I think that Toronto should probably to maybe take some lessons from BC in terms of setting out what are the policies for hospitals, how are they going to be enforced, how to head off some of this stuff, how are you going to communicate to this, to the public? That drug war kind of language and ideology that we’ve been in for so long for the past 40 years is a really strong message. And we’re talking about kind of rolling it back. So how are we going to bring the public along, many of whom have experience with loved ones being in addiction and honestly hoping that they will stop using drugs, not continue, just making sure that we’re effectively communicating what’s happening and be aware that there’s a really, really strong counter narrative in the media right now as well with conservative politicians and other people kind of not twisting facts, but selectively using facts. So maybe think about how you’re going to kind of counter that as well.

Jordan: Last question. I will bring you back right to your beat. You mentioned just briefly about communicating what’s going on on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. How confusing has it been for the people most at risk as drug users? I imagine rampant policy changes either leave people not knowing what’s going on, or maybe even just not caring and continuing to just use as they always have. What’s your sense of how all this has played out on the Downtown Eastside?

Jen St. Denis: So I think on the Downtown Eastside, it’s kind of viewed by police and others as kind of a special area. Police have always said, we don’t really enforce possession laws, especially in the Downtown Eastside. You’ll walk along and it’s really common to see people using drugs, and I don’t really see that changing. But we also know that even though police were saying that they were taking people’s drugs away, if they’re arresting them for something else or if they were detaining them, they would take their drugs away. So I don’t think that maybe much has changed in the Downtown Eastside. There’s also quite a huge concentration of safe consumption sites in the Downtown Eastside. But I think the question for other municipalities is a little bit more interesting because you have communities like Richmond where there was some suggestion that we should plan for maybe putting an overdose prevention site in to Richmond, which is a suburb of Vancouver. And there was huge community opposition, very, very intense community opposition to that. And so I don’t think you can make drug use illegal again without wrestling with that question that, okay, if we’re making it illegal to use drugs in public, then we need to have more spaces, more overdose prevention sites where people can go to use their drugs safely. And if we can’t kind of increase those facilities and find a way to do that in the face of really intense public opposition often, then I think we really need to figure out that problem if we really want to improve this horrible and deadly problem.

Jordan: Jen, thank you so much as always for walking us through this.

Jen St. Denis: Thank you.

Jordan: Jen St. Denis reporting for the Tae. That was The Big Story. For more from us, including previous episodes on the beginning and the middle of the BC decriminalization effort, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can also send us some feedback. If you’ve got anything to say about this episode, the way to do that by email is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca and by phone it’s 416-935-5935. The Big Story is in every podcast player. If you’re taking a trip this weekend, preload a bunch of episodes and binge listen. Our downloads will thank you. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is also a producer, as is this week Marshall Whitsed. Chloe Kim is our editorial assistant. Mary Jubran is our digital editor. Stefanie Phillips is our showrunner. Diana Keay is our manager of business development. I am your host and executive producer, Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Together, we are Frequency Podcast Network, that’s a division of Rogers, and we are out of here for the long weekend. We have In This Economy for you on Saturday, we have an update to an episode we recorded a couple of years ago on Sunday. And we have your feedback with me and Joe on Monday, and we’ll be back with a fresh big story on Tuesday. We’ll talk then. Back to top of page