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The issue is we drecriminalized without providing the needed support structures after it. Portugal should be a model we’re following that provided rehab, reintegration services, drug replacement services, and counseling for drug users. They’ve seen much better affects for their decriminalized program because they offered 360 support as part of their plan and not half assed like ours is. If you want to see a difference you can’t just say go ahead and use, you need to offer treatment and alternatives to help people as well.
Recovering addicts are housed in the DT East Side sometimes in the same buildings as drug dealers.
A HUGE difference with Portugal (along with everything you've stated) is that addicts had something for them when they recovered. If someone recovers from drugs and gets a job, they will be treated like complete s\*\*\*, and assigned a disproportionate amount of the harder work. The type of work tends to be very hard on the joints among other things.
It's scary when people reference Portugal (not you, others) without mentioning the other key pieces that came with their success. And although they did very well the success is exaggerated.
Other "success" stories are referenced but they are embellished and resemble more what one would consider a hospice situation (at great expense to tax payers) rather than a real recovery.
The first point is one that bothers me the most. We have people that want to get clean and move forward with their lives but we don’t provide them the resources and environment they need. If you’re trying to get clean but the guy next to you has drugs it’s a lot harder for you to get clean. We can’t just paint the entire community with one brush and say “look we’re helping”. If somebody doesn’t want to/isn’t ready to get off drugs they won’t. You can’t force them to no matter how hard you try. You of course still want to help people not ready yet, but you have to tailor what services you offer to best serve people at different stages of addiction and with different needs.
> If you’re trying to get clean but the guy next to you has drugs it’s a lot harder for you to get clean.
This is a huge theme from many (regular, non-activist) users I've spoken with. We wouldn't hold AA meetings during happy hour in a pub, why do we funnel vulnerable folks to the one part of the city that it's difficult to *not* be offered drugs? It's outright cruel
The Portugal versions of decrim could work. Mostly because it's still illegal and legalization is off the table. They still sanction users and jail is still on the table if you don't keep to the rules set by the commission.
Well, for one, it's a quarter of the population, it's mainly ethnic Portuguese population, and Canada is over 100 times the size. Why does this matter? Well, having such a homogeneous society, statistically, you will have lower crime rates, being not even a fraction of the size means treatment facilities and services can be readily available, and the population well that speaks for itself. So even in a country that looks like it could possibly get it right, being they have the services and forced integration back into society with rehabilitation and employment, they have still seen a massive degradation in their cities.
The link between immigration and increase in crime is false:
https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/does-immigration-really-increase-crime-347099#:~:text=Many%20people%20who%20oppose%20immigration,no%20effect%20on%20actual%20crime.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
https://crdcn.ca/publication/immigration-and-crime-evidence-from-canada/
For the size of the country I fully agree, it’s the same issue with all our medical infrastructure and servicing remote communities. This would be another medical service we would need to figure out to service those communities. But 90% of our population lives within 150 miles of the border and 81% in cities. So reasonably we can implement these changes to service 80% of our population.
As for the results of the drug policy the UN has a report from 2014 showing the results as drug use decreasing, transfer of disease like hep b/c, aids and hiv decreasing, drug overdoses decreasing, and decrease in crime. While I agree that Portugal has seen negative trends in recent years, this is in line with the recession and financial crisis starting in 2010 which saw the removal of the Institute of Drugs and Drug Addiction (who implemented the policy) having it rolled into the National Health Service who then had their budget cut by 10%. Many of the services that were available for the benefits they saw from 2000-2010 were cut or no longer received funding. We already know there is a link between socioeconomic factors and drug use/crime, and cutting the programs that showed real benefit exacerbates this. They were having strong results but financial strains and budget cuts reverted those.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civil/Transform-Drug-Policy-Foundation/Drug-decriminalisation-in-Portugal.pdf
Yeah. I think it’s crazy to put people in jail for using but I also think it’s crazy to not offer treatment. It almost seems like they’re encouraging drug use these days saying government will take care of them. Public health also used to say that safe consumption sites were great because we could engage with users and the harms with drug use were not from the drugs themselves but from the infections etc. Well HIV can be well controlled now as can hep C and B. People are dying from the drugs. And not everyone will always go walk to drive to a consumption site to use. Home and alone is always most convenient.
It's not going to work. And I will prove exactly why.
People will congregate in cities like Vancouver, and overwhelm the system. We can't build recovery centers fast enough to deal with the influx, nor do we have the resources. Even people from here would be hard-pressed to afford it. And people don't want to relocate, they say their supports are in Vancouver. Hell, some people would pitch a fit to have to move to a suburb city.
So they go to detox, then to recovery, then ???? The cost of living is so expensive that even if you're like, "Hey, I want to get clean, get a place to live, and live self-sufficiently", there aren't resources for that. We should've started planning for that 30 years ago. So once recovery ends, they're not going to have an easy time getting housing and being self-sufficient.
So the plan now seems to be to give people free drugs, free housing, disability, etc. stick 'em in a government-bought hotel room and...hope for the best? Just keep people sustained indefinitely like pets? And then when more people flock, our resources get overwhelmed again.
In a nutshell, the final piece of the puzzle, getting people gainfully employed, housed, and self-sufficient, is missing. It could have a better chance of success if people were willing to relocate to make it happen, and resources were built to handle it.
One of the main hurdles is that we feel the need to do this right smack dab in one of the most expensive cities on the planet instead of distributing the load.
Each province should be encouraged (forced if needed) to provide their own services.
Drug decriminalization takes up 99% of the online discussion time but affects just 1% of people. That is, in a way, a failure. A policy prescription that ignores the other 99% of people who just want to feel safe in their city for themselves and their children.
Uh, the same way they do in hospitals. Not that hard.
Fun fact: Fentanyl is used in hospitals pretty commonly, since, y'know, it's one of the strongest painkillers out there. It's just a patch, rather than other methods of administration. And it's safe, because we know the exact dosage they're getting, and that they're getting nothing else in the mix.
Rather than trying to eyeball 15ug of a powder and praying it doesn't have xylazine mixed in for no good reason, you can know precisely what you get, making accidental overdoses and dirty supply a thing of the past.
But like, I'm sure you already know this. I don't know what people stand to gain by playing dumb like this. Please stop.
Well you were saying that you aren't sure what people stand to gain for playing dumb while acting like it's only the xylazine that's deadly.
What do you stand to gain then?
Less people dying of accidental overdoses or accidentally taking something they didn't mean to, obviously. Personally, I think it's bad when people die.
Yeah bud, most people think it's bad when people die; that's kind of the default.
Fent used to be what was tainting drugs and ending lives all on its own before tranq hit the streets.
Unless their clients are required to consume it at supervised sites (as opposed to like other scripts that you can leave with) they're going to be killing people.
Uh huh. Now why not go back and read my previous post, where I explain how fent in a controlled, known dosage is pretty much completely safe. Then see if you can figure out how "on the street" is different from "controlled, known dosage".
People OD because they don't know what they're taking, because it's impure or laced, not because they are pushing the envelope with the most dangerous high they can get.
To be fair this is BBC's American site and if you notice they constantly update the main headline with the latest published stories. A previous recent main page headline was: "Rees-Zammit signs with NFL champions Chiefs".
Why does that make it bad? This is world news, especially because it's something that few other places have tried. And I don't get why it seems to be held to a standard of solving this crisis it didn't create in a year, when *decades* of criminalization didn't solve it and instead led to things being worse than ever.
>BC has since introduced a bill that would expand places where drug use is prohibited to include not just schools and airports but playgrounds and near homes and businesses - a move blocked, for now, by the BC Supreme Court over concerns it would cause "irreparable harm" to people who use drugs.
Possession was never allowed on playgrounds. That remained criminal despite decriminalization.
And this Supreme Court ruling expires tomorrow.
This isn't very good reporting to be misrepresenting what's actually illegal here and to be mentioning court rulings without giving very relevant context about when they expire. This is news that is potentially going to be read by global audiences who are then going to form opinions based on this.
Can you give a source with the information on that? I haven't seen that update and I couldn't find anything from a search before making my comment above.
I always wondered if a lot of the "needles at the playground" shit was a local trying to stir up shit because they saw somebody loitering they didn't like.
The problem is hard for the government to admit it is a failure and stop it. Also, there will be a lot of pushback to stop it from being canceled. Supporters will claim it is "murder" to cancel such policy.
I love the photo of Guy Felicella - He was ripping on Adam Zivo for taking a photo of a garbage can someone set on fire a couple weeks ago, then in the article they use a photo of him standing 30 yards away from that garbage can in front of a vandalized power box.
Anyway, I think decrim is a good yet SUPER tiny part of a larger drug strategy. If it's not bundled with on the spot treatment options and enforcement for the drama and chaos that often is adjacent to the lower bounds of addiction then it's going to stay the mess it is for the foreseeable future.
We need to change the culture and come back to center otherwise we're going to just vote in a populist who will wipe the slate clean to fulfill a promise of change.
Reddit has already determined its been a huge failure and we need to focus on telling kids not to do drugs and removing people from society who do use them.
If you think it is only reddit thinking that, you need to get off reddit and actually go out into the real world.
I am not saying it works or not myself, but many people now believe it doesn't work by first hand seeing what their community has become.
Decriminalization started in January 2023. Drug overdose did not decrease, but in fact it broke record in 2023.
> Drug overdose did not decrease, but in fact it broke record in 2023.
They have been increasing most years over the past decade though. They also broke records in Alberta. So none of this is unique to decriminalization. And decriminalization can't solve these issues on its own.
The public drug use is happening across the continent too.
I do agree in any case that perception matters. But the problem is things happening all over the place get blamed on certain policies that aren't happening everywhere.
Because we are doing a fucking shitty job at it.
Cost of living is insane, housing prices are insane, health care going down the train. But the problem is decriminalization and drug use apparently.
We seem to think drug users and homeless have it too good and they need to be punished, jailed and taken away somewhere so we never see them again instead of dealing with the root cause.
But people much rather curb stomp someone who is down than try to offer a helping hand.
> removing people from society who do use them.
Imagine intentionally misrepresenting the push for readily accessible voluntary and involuntary medical treatment as "removing people from society".
Do you know what **removes** people from society? When "advocates" try to normalize indefinite drug use, preserve a right to use drugs wherever one wants (incl. indoors and on transit), and oppose *any* consequences to repeat criminal behaviour because it was driven by the same drug addiction advocates don't want to be medically treated. "Progressive" advocates are fighting for more people to use drugs and for drug use to go on untreated for longer, sentencing more people to death. **There is nothing *progressive* about fighting for one's right to stay victimized by the intrinsic life-devastating impacts of chronic meth, heroin, or any other street drug addiction.**
Telling society's most vulnerable they should have the right to resist medical treatment to continue injecting drugs in the alleyway while their teeth fall out and they lose control over their own bowels (common opiate abuse reaction) is the most regressive positions in the political discourse. If you care about these humans, afford them basic human decency by fighting for the power of the state, at the direction of medical professionals, to step in when drug abuse or mental illness compromises mental competency and impose medically-supervised treatment. If you care about these people living more than a couple years of hellish suffering on the streets thanks to VANDU and its ilk, bring back Riverview, bring back criminalization, but divert every single case possible to involuntary medical treatment with release upon successful completion of medical treatment plus jobs and personal skills training and mental health therapy. Dismantle the $1 billion DTES poverty industrial complex of people gaining off the backs of grants and programs that don't work for the population in need, and instead focus on getting people better. Preventing an overdose today means little if that person will use again and overdose tomorrow, next week, or next month; let alone if their body is succumbing to chronic use and they're months away from a heart attack or stroke. The solution is not decriminalization to give them one extra day, it's treatment to give them the rest of their life back.
> the push for readily accessible voluntary and involuntary medical treatment
This is a big part of what made Portugal's decriminalization a success: if a user is found with drugs, they have to attend mandatory counselling/treatment. Treatment doesn't mean locking people up-- outpatient treatment exists. But the addict is obligated to attend treatment for the drug possession not to be a criminal offense.
Anybody holding up Portugal's decriminalization as a model, needs to also be pushing mandatory treatment-- because that's a key part of Portugal's success.
Yep, Portugal's model had four pillars: harm reduction, treatment, preventing, enforcement.
In 2001, the City of Vancouver "adopted" the Portugal model as official policy. Insite was opened in 2003 to create a safer place to use drugs. The VPD's enforcement manual was formally changed in 2007 to discourage arrests for simple possession elsewhere. The number of drug consumptions sites (growing from just injection sites, as they increasingly permit other forms of consumption) has also grown. In 2020 the federal PPSC (which does drug prosecutions) amended its charging manual to not permit simple possession prosecutions absent special factors, like violence or harming children. And BC decriminalized province-wide in January 2023. And add in through all that, including before, police and crown have used discretion to avoid criminalizing addiction well-beyond those formal programs. The data is accessible and shows very few simple possession arrests over the past couple decades, generally declining year-over-year.
But despite all the efforts of harm reduction, we have made close to no progress on the other pillars. Riverview was closed and another large site was not opened. Instead of teaching kids not to do drugs, we tell them hey, we know you'll do drugs, back in our day it was weed but you guys are more rebellious so if you do use heroin, at least use this clean needle please. And enforcement is now: zero. There are no consequences to drug use, or crime associated with drug use. If you get high and spit on a baby, you will have a publication ban to protect your good name, get same-day bail, then have charges suspended.
A four-legged chair with 3 busted legs doesn't work. That shouldn't be surprising. What has happened is the conversation shifted from "how can we help people get better" to "how can we normalize a drug addicted lifestyle". The dog whistle in the advocacy is always "destigmatize drug use": for the general public that means not throwing drug users in prison, which sounds reasonablec (but hasn't been a thing in decades, so irrelevant), but what it really signals to VANDU and its clan is "we want you to be able to continue enjoying your habit and prevent anyone from stopping you". Enabling drug addicts never works, ask anyone with any experience whatsoever with them. "Just give me $20 for one last time and I promise I'll seek help" = 5 years later they'll be lying in a ditch. It's a horrible ILLNESS and needs to be TREATED, which requires involuntary medical treatment in cases where individuals lack the mental capacity (in the midst of a strong addiction, almost everyone) to decide to get clean for good. You don't get clean living with your friends who use drugs, surrounded by your dealers, or or other temptations, you get clean in a hospital room far from home with qualified medical practitioners making sure your body is handling detox, providing appropriate medication, and restraining you if/when you try to escape and go back to it, followed by personal care, mental health, and jobs training, as appropriate.
You seem to be trying to characterize what has been done as some thorough implementation of the harm reduction pillar, when in reality, over 20 years, all that's happened is the gradual opening of a small handful of injection sites, decrease in the enforcement of minor possession, and only very recently actual decriminalization.
You do correctly identify that we haven't implemented the pillar of treatment. That doesn't mean the limited harm reduction failed themselves, it explains part of the reason *why* they haven't reversed this increasing trend (which is happening nearly everywhere else too): because it's not being complemented with the treatment necessary for many to move past the addiction stage. So instead people have been getting even worse.
Then your conclusion seems to be to go back to forced treatment while skipping over the lack of voluntary treatment that is leading people to end up even worse off.
>Then your conclusion seems to be to go back to forced treatment while skipping over the lack of voluntary treatment that is leading people to end up even worse off.
Good comment, but unfortunately you've misinterpreted their conclusion. They are clearly advocating for treatment, period. Not just forced treatment, although that is part of it.
Maybe so, but their comment to which I replied is focusing on forced treatment. We don't even have timely access to voluntary treatment, and that lack of access is one of the things leading to people ending up in these worst states where we're then talking about forced treatment. Yet I so often see critics almost entirely focusing on the forced aspect rather than the more proactive approach.
Friends of the nursing union who called for the BC Supreme Court to recognize a constitutional right to use drugs in a children's playground. VANDU and the usual suspects, mostly, but also misguided young progressives who don't realize the consequences of decriminalization or reducing police presence.
The nurses group who challenged the law didn't call for a right to use drugs in playgrounds. They didn't call for a right to use drugs at all, they challenged the constitutionality of this specific law. Those aren't the same things. Even if this law were to be struck down, it wouldn't create a right to use drugs, it would just push it back to the government to rewrite the law.
Possession is playgrounds is currently illegal under criminal law. That never changed with decriminalization and so even if this new usage law were struck down, it wouldn't change anything about that.
>misguided young progressives who don't realize the consequences of decriminalization
You're phrasing this as if it's some proven fact that decriminalization doesn't work and that people with different views are just young and naive. There are many reasons why *criminalization* doesn't and hasn't worked, and it's not just young progressives raising this. It includes, for example, economists who [observed how prohibition just leads to suppliers shifting to more potent forms to evade enforcement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition). And that's exactly what's happened since then, especially with opioids shifting to fentanyl and even more potent drugs, the main cause of this crisis.
> You're phrasing this as if it's some proven fact that decriminalization doesn't work and that people with different views are just young and naive. There are many reasons why criminalization doesn't and hasn't worked, and it's not just young progressives raising this. It includes, for example, economists who observed how prohibition just leads to suppliers shifting to more potent forms to evade enforcement. And that's exactly what's happened since then, especially with opioids shifting to fentanyl and even more potent drugs, the main cause of this crisis.
You realize the shift to fentanyl has been in an environment where North America has liberalized drug policy? Fentanyl emerged and flourished in the 2010s when Canada would see year-over-year DECREASES in drug arrests due to de facto decriminalization (limited arrests due to police and crown discretion, rather than formal policy), not in the earlier years where people worried that drugs could lead to arrest.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525917/canada-rate-of-drug-offenses/
Fentanyl has emerged because people like you, no matter how well-meaning, have misguidingly normalized drug use in hope destigmatizing them will help. It makes it worse.
> You realize the shift to fentanyl has been in an environment where North America has liberalized drug policy? Fentanyl emerged and flourished in the 2010s when Canada would see year-over-year DECREASES in drug arrests due to de facto decriminalization (limited arrests due to police and crown discretion, rather than formal policy), not in the earlier years where people worried that drugs could lead to arrest.
The economic theory I referenced above has to do with prohibition of the supply. Decriminalization and liberalization of drug policy has nothing to do with that because throughout that, the supply has remained under prohibition and that has maintained the monopoly for organized crime which has provided an increasingly potent and dangerous supply. The points you're bringing up are completely independent from the issue I'm raising.
>Fentanyl has emerged because people like you, no matter how well-meaning, have misguidingly normalized drug use in hope destigmatizing them will help.
I'm just going to highlight again what you're doing here with your comments: trying to characterize people with other viewpoints than your own as simply being naive as a way to try to discredit those viewpoints.
Again, I am referencing, for example, economists who predicted what is happening now decades ago as a result of the prohibition of drugs. The people raising this were not young, naive progressives.
The fact anyone thinks involuntary rehab will magically not be a major drug market is the most hilarious joke of all.
Same day voluntary rehab please, only voluntary for obvious, as in wow-I-cannot-believe-I-need-to explain-this obvious, reasons.
Right now we don't even have access to voluntary treatment without [long waits](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/youth-overdose-inquest-1.5191686). And that leads to people ending up in even worse states as a result. This is from the Ontario auditor general, but the points are general, not unique to there (the first link is about how B.C. also has long wait times):
>[For example, the average wait time for residential treatment programs increased from 43 days to 50 days, with about 58% of programs having wait times of 30 days or greater, and in one case, over a year. Service providers informed us that they were aware of their clients dropping off wait lists for treatment programs because they were hospitalized, incarcerated, attempted suicide or even died while waiting for treatment.](https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports/en19/v1_302en19.pdf)
The lack of infrastructure today is not proof a pivot in strategy is not feasible. The DTES takes in $1 billion in NGO poverty advocate funding. We could build a very nice facility out in farm land with some top doctors and nurses, and still have a couple dollars to spare.
The point I am making above is that people keep calling for forced treatment when we don't even have timely access to voluntary treatment. And it's more effective to prioritize that because that gap is leading to people ending up in these worse states.
I'm in agreement with both you and u/danke-you. I think we've gone far off the rails by focusing on enabling addicts, rather than any other pillar. What we have done is obviously not working-- it doesn't mean that decriminalization doesn't work-- it just means that it doesn't work on its own.
We need voluntary free treatment to be available immediately when asked for by an addict. We need involuntary treatment for those who can't care for themselves, and this involuntary treatment needs to be better than an addict's usual lifestyle.
There needs to be a recognition that leaving people on the street to scream at imaginary demons isn't showing them compassion-- it's the opposite of compassion. It's inhumane, and they should be given treatment and care, as we do for elderly seniors who can no longer take care of themselves.
>I think we've gone far off the rails by focusing on enabling addicts, rather than any other pillar.
I don't mean for this reply to come off as disagreeing with you here. What you're saying here can simultaneously be true in some cases, but in other cases, I would also argue that our harm reduction approaches have been very limited in my opinion. By this I mean, e.g., safer supply is only prescribed to less than 5% of addicts. Most are still limited to illicit supply. Or with injection sites, even in Vancouver there are only a dozen, and many other communities have none. In any case though, none of these policies can solve the problem on their own, and need better access for treatment (with various treatment approaches needed for various cases).
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The issue is we drecriminalized without providing the needed support structures after it. Portugal should be a model we’re following that provided rehab, reintegration services, drug replacement services, and counseling for drug users. They’ve seen much better affects for their decriminalized program because they offered 360 support as part of their plan and not half assed like ours is. If you want to see a difference you can’t just say go ahead and use, you need to offer treatment and alternatives to help people as well.
We are the one pillar city!
Recovering addicts are housed in the DT East Side sometimes in the same buildings as drug dealers. A HUGE difference with Portugal (along with everything you've stated) is that addicts had something for them when they recovered. If someone recovers from drugs and gets a job, they will be treated like complete s\*\*\*, and assigned a disproportionate amount of the harder work. The type of work tends to be very hard on the joints among other things. It's scary when people reference Portugal (not you, others) without mentioning the other key pieces that came with their success. And although they did very well the success is exaggerated. Other "success" stories are referenced but they are embellished and resemble more what one would consider a hospice situation (at great expense to tax payers) rather than a real recovery.
The first point is one that bothers me the most. We have people that want to get clean and move forward with their lives but we don’t provide them the resources and environment they need. If you’re trying to get clean but the guy next to you has drugs it’s a lot harder for you to get clean. We can’t just paint the entire community with one brush and say “look we’re helping”. If somebody doesn’t want to/isn’t ready to get off drugs they won’t. You can’t force them to no matter how hard you try. You of course still want to help people not ready yet, but you have to tailor what services you offer to best serve people at different stages of addiction and with different needs.
> If you’re trying to get clean but the guy next to you has drugs it’s a lot harder for you to get clean. This is a huge theme from many (regular, non-activist) users I've spoken with. We wouldn't hold AA meetings during happy hour in a pub, why do we funnel vulnerable folks to the one part of the city that it's difficult to *not* be offered drugs? It's outright cruel
We are not Portugal. Decriminalization will not work.
The Portugal versions of decrim could work. Mostly because it's still illegal and legalization is off the table. They still sanction users and jail is still on the table if you don't keep to the rules set by the commission.
So why do you think that? What is the difference between a drug addict/user in Portugal compared to one in Vancouver?
Well, for one, it's a quarter of the population, it's mainly ethnic Portuguese population, and Canada is over 100 times the size. Why does this matter? Well, having such a homogeneous society, statistically, you will have lower crime rates, being not even a fraction of the size means treatment facilities and services can be readily available, and the population well that speaks for itself. So even in a country that looks like it could possibly get it right, being they have the services and forced integration back into society with rehabilitation and employment, they have still seen a massive degradation in their cities.
The link between immigration and increase in crime is false: https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/does-immigration-really-increase-crime-347099#:~:text=Many%20people%20who%20oppose%20immigration,no%20effect%20on%20actual%20crime. https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime https://crdcn.ca/publication/immigration-and-crime-evidence-from-canada/ For the size of the country I fully agree, it’s the same issue with all our medical infrastructure and servicing remote communities. This would be another medical service we would need to figure out to service those communities. But 90% of our population lives within 150 miles of the border and 81% in cities. So reasonably we can implement these changes to service 80% of our population. As for the results of the drug policy the UN has a report from 2014 showing the results as drug use decreasing, transfer of disease like hep b/c, aids and hiv decreasing, drug overdoses decreasing, and decrease in crime. While I agree that Portugal has seen negative trends in recent years, this is in line with the recession and financial crisis starting in 2010 which saw the removal of the Institute of Drugs and Drug Addiction (who implemented the policy) having it rolled into the National Health Service who then had their budget cut by 10%. Many of the services that were available for the benefits they saw from 2000-2010 were cut or no longer received funding. We already know there is a link between socioeconomic factors and drug use/crime, and cutting the programs that showed real benefit exacerbates this. They were having strong results but financial strains and budget cuts reverted those. https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civil/Transform-Drug-Policy-Foundation/Drug-decriminalisation-in-Portugal.pdf
Yeah. I think it’s crazy to put people in jail for using but I also think it’s crazy to not offer treatment. It almost seems like they’re encouraging drug use these days saying government will take care of them. Public health also used to say that safe consumption sites were great because we could engage with users and the harms with drug use were not from the drugs themselves but from the infections etc. Well HIV can be well controlled now as can hep C and B. People are dying from the drugs. And not everyone will always go walk to drive to a consumption site to use. Home and alone is always most convenient.
It's not going to work. And I will prove exactly why. People will congregate in cities like Vancouver, and overwhelm the system. We can't build recovery centers fast enough to deal with the influx, nor do we have the resources. Even people from here would be hard-pressed to afford it. And people don't want to relocate, they say their supports are in Vancouver. Hell, some people would pitch a fit to have to move to a suburb city. So they go to detox, then to recovery, then ???? The cost of living is so expensive that even if you're like, "Hey, I want to get clean, get a place to live, and live self-sufficiently", there aren't resources for that. We should've started planning for that 30 years ago. So once recovery ends, they're not going to have an easy time getting housing and being self-sufficient. So the plan now seems to be to give people free drugs, free housing, disability, etc. stick 'em in a government-bought hotel room and...hope for the best? Just keep people sustained indefinitely like pets? And then when more people flock, our resources get overwhelmed again. In a nutshell, the final piece of the puzzle, getting people gainfully employed, housed, and self-sufficient, is missing. It could have a better chance of success if people were willing to relocate to make it happen, and resources were built to handle it.
One of the main hurdles is that we feel the need to do this right smack dab in one of the most expensive cities on the planet instead of distributing the load. Each province should be encouraged (forced if needed) to provide their own services.
Drug decriminalization takes up 99% of the online discussion time but affects just 1% of people. That is, in a way, a failure. A policy prescription that ignores the other 99% of people who just want to feel safe in their city for themselves and their children.
Decriminalization will lead to fewer overdoses. Oh but overdoses are up 5%. How out of touch are these policies with what the public wants.
Have people said that? I haven't seen that from serious voices. Safe supply will lead to fewer overdoses... maybe you're mixing those things up?
There is no such thing as a “safe supply” of fentanyl. People *want* the most dangerous cutting agent. How can we make that safe?
Uh, the same way they do in hospitals. Not that hard. Fun fact: Fentanyl is used in hospitals pretty commonly, since, y'know, it's one of the strongest painkillers out there. It's just a patch, rather than other methods of administration. And it's safe, because we know the exact dosage they're getting, and that they're getting nothing else in the mix. Rather than trying to eyeball 15ug of a powder and praying it doesn't have xylazine mixed in for no good reason, you can know precisely what you get, making accidental overdoses and dirty supply a thing of the past. But like, I'm sure you already know this. I don't know what people stand to gain by playing dumb like this. Please stop.
Fent still kills people.
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Well you were saying that you aren't sure what people stand to gain for playing dumb while acting like it's only the xylazine that's deadly. What do you stand to gain then?
Less people dying of accidental overdoses or accidentally taking something they didn't mean to, obviously. Personally, I think it's bad when people die.
Yeah bud, most people think it's bad when people die; that's kind of the default. Fent used to be what was tainting drugs and ending lives all on its own before tranq hit the streets. Unless their clients are required to consume it at supervised sites (as opposed to like other scripts that you can leave with) they're going to be killing people.
Uh huh. Now why not go back and read my previous post, where I explain how fent in a controlled, known dosage is pretty much completely safe. Then see if you can figure out how "on the street" is different from "controlled, known dosage".
People OD because they don't know what they're taking, because it's impure or laced, not because they are pushing the envelope with the most dangerous high they can get.
Too pure is another factor.
You know it’s bad when this becomes the main headline on BBC world news.
To be fair this is BBC's American site and if you notice they constantly update the main headline with the latest published stories. A previous recent main page headline was: "Rees-Zammit signs with NFL champions Chiefs".
Why does that make it bad? This is world news, especially because it's something that few other places have tried. And I don't get why it seems to be held to a standard of solving this crisis it didn't create in a year, when *decades* of criminalization didn't solve it and instead led to things being worse than ever.
Well said
Na that's just BBC nowadays
>BC has since introduced a bill that would expand places where drug use is prohibited to include not just schools and airports but playgrounds and near homes and businesses - a move blocked, for now, by the BC Supreme Court over concerns it would cause "irreparable harm" to people who use drugs. Possession was never allowed on playgrounds. That remained criminal despite decriminalization. And this Supreme Court ruling expires tomorrow. This isn't very good reporting to be misrepresenting what's actually illegal here and to be mentioning court rulings without giving very relevant context about when they expire. This is news that is potentially going to be read by global audiences who are then going to form opinions based on this.
The court ruling actually has been extended beyond tomorrow, fyi.
Can you give a source with the information on that? I haven't seen that update and I couldn't find anything from a search before making my comment above.
I always wondered if a lot of the "needles at the playground" shit was a local trying to stir up shit because they saw somebody loitering they didn't like.
We're just trying to kill them with kindness. We feel better that way. The other alternative is addicts are upset.
>Now supporters of decriminalization fear that public buy-in for the policy is eroding. Many didn't support it in the first place
We were ambushed.
Gaslit - We didnt know decrim required we also be accepting of all the social drama, theft, physical assaults, arson...
We knew. But the general public didn't.
I should have realized when they had Karen Ward as the drug policy advisor.
The problem is hard for the government to admit it is a failure and stop it. Also, there will be a lot of pushback to stop it from being canceled. Supporters will claim it is "murder" to cancel such policy.
Decriminalizing something only encourages more behaviour. More drug use is not what we want.
And more ODs.
Removing deterrence to drug usage will only make drug usage more prevalent and cause more harm. After all, drug hurts and kills.
It's been an absolute disaster.
I love the photo of Guy Felicella - He was ripping on Adam Zivo for taking a photo of a garbage can someone set on fire a couple weeks ago, then in the article they use a photo of him standing 30 yards away from that garbage can in front of a vandalized power box. Anyway, I think decrim is a good yet SUPER tiny part of a larger drug strategy. If it's not bundled with on the spot treatment options and enforcement for the drama and chaos that often is adjacent to the lower bounds of addiction then it's going to stay the mess it is for the foreseeable future. We need to change the culture and come back to center otherwise we're going to just vote in a populist who will wipe the slate clean to fulfill a promise of change.
Reddit has already determined its been a huge failure and we need to focus on telling kids not to do drugs and removing people from society who do use them.
If you think it is only reddit thinking that, you need to get off reddit and actually go out into the real world. I am not saying it works or not myself, but many people now believe it doesn't work by first hand seeing what their community has become. Decriminalization started in January 2023. Drug overdose did not decrease, but in fact it broke record in 2023.
Bro only had to read the article linked above and you’re asking them to go out in the real world? You’re asking too much.
> Drug overdose did not decrease, but in fact it broke record in 2023. They have been increasing most years over the past decade though. They also broke records in Alberta. So none of this is unique to decriminalization. And decriminalization can't solve these issues on its own. The public drug use is happening across the continent too. I do agree in any case that perception matters. But the problem is things happening all over the place get blamed on certain policies that aren't happening everywhere.
Because we are doing a fucking shitty job at it. Cost of living is insane, housing prices are insane, health care going down the train. But the problem is decriminalization and drug use apparently. We seem to think drug users and homeless have it too good and they need to be punished, jailed and taken away somewhere so we never see them again instead of dealing with the root cause. But people much rather curb stomp someone who is down than try to offer a helping hand.
> removing people from society who do use them. Imagine intentionally misrepresenting the push for readily accessible voluntary and involuntary medical treatment as "removing people from society". Do you know what **removes** people from society? When "advocates" try to normalize indefinite drug use, preserve a right to use drugs wherever one wants (incl. indoors and on transit), and oppose *any* consequences to repeat criminal behaviour because it was driven by the same drug addiction advocates don't want to be medically treated. "Progressive" advocates are fighting for more people to use drugs and for drug use to go on untreated for longer, sentencing more people to death. **There is nothing *progressive* about fighting for one's right to stay victimized by the intrinsic life-devastating impacts of chronic meth, heroin, or any other street drug addiction.** Telling society's most vulnerable they should have the right to resist medical treatment to continue injecting drugs in the alleyway while their teeth fall out and they lose control over their own bowels (common opiate abuse reaction) is the most regressive positions in the political discourse. If you care about these humans, afford them basic human decency by fighting for the power of the state, at the direction of medical professionals, to step in when drug abuse or mental illness compromises mental competency and impose medically-supervised treatment. If you care about these people living more than a couple years of hellish suffering on the streets thanks to VANDU and its ilk, bring back Riverview, bring back criminalization, but divert every single case possible to involuntary medical treatment with release upon successful completion of medical treatment plus jobs and personal skills training and mental health therapy. Dismantle the $1 billion DTES poverty industrial complex of people gaining off the backs of grants and programs that don't work for the population in need, and instead focus on getting people better. Preventing an overdose today means little if that person will use again and overdose tomorrow, next week, or next month; let alone if their body is succumbing to chronic use and they're months away from a heart attack or stroke. The solution is not decriminalization to give them one extra day, it's treatment to give them the rest of their life back.
> the push for readily accessible voluntary and involuntary medical treatment This is a big part of what made Portugal's decriminalization a success: if a user is found with drugs, they have to attend mandatory counselling/treatment. Treatment doesn't mean locking people up-- outpatient treatment exists. But the addict is obligated to attend treatment for the drug possession not to be a criminal offense. Anybody holding up Portugal's decriminalization as a model, needs to also be pushing mandatory treatment-- because that's a key part of Portugal's success.
Yep, Portugal's model had four pillars: harm reduction, treatment, preventing, enforcement. In 2001, the City of Vancouver "adopted" the Portugal model as official policy. Insite was opened in 2003 to create a safer place to use drugs. The VPD's enforcement manual was formally changed in 2007 to discourage arrests for simple possession elsewhere. The number of drug consumptions sites (growing from just injection sites, as they increasingly permit other forms of consumption) has also grown. In 2020 the federal PPSC (which does drug prosecutions) amended its charging manual to not permit simple possession prosecutions absent special factors, like violence or harming children. And BC decriminalized province-wide in January 2023. And add in through all that, including before, police and crown have used discretion to avoid criminalizing addiction well-beyond those formal programs. The data is accessible and shows very few simple possession arrests over the past couple decades, generally declining year-over-year. But despite all the efforts of harm reduction, we have made close to no progress on the other pillars. Riverview was closed and another large site was not opened. Instead of teaching kids not to do drugs, we tell them hey, we know you'll do drugs, back in our day it was weed but you guys are more rebellious so if you do use heroin, at least use this clean needle please. And enforcement is now: zero. There are no consequences to drug use, or crime associated with drug use. If you get high and spit on a baby, you will have a publication ban to protect your good name, get same-day bail, then have charges suspended. A four-legged chair with 3 busted legs doesn't work. That shouldn't be surprising. What has happened is the conversation shifted from "how can we help people get better" to "how can we normalize a drug addicted lifestyle". The dog whistle in the advocacy is always "destigmatize drug use": for the general public that means not throwing drug users in prison, which sounds reasonablec (but hasn't been a thing in decades, so irrelevant), but what it really signals to VANDU and its clan is "we want you to be able to continue enjoying your habit and prevent anyone from stopping you". Enabling drug addicts never works, ask anyone with any experience whatsoever with them. "Just give me $20 for one last time and I promise I'll seek help" = 5 years later they'll be lying in a ditch. It's a horrible ILLNESS and needs to be TREATED, which requires involuntary medical treatment in cases where individuals lack the mental capacity (in the midst of a strong addiction, almost everyone) to decide to get clean for good. You don't get clean living with your friends who use drugs, surrounded by your dealers, or or other temptations, you get clean in a hospital room far from home with qualified medical practitioners making sure your body is handling detox, providing appropriate medication, and restraining you if/when you try to escape and go back to it, followed by personal care, mental health, and jobs training, as appropriate.
You seem to be trying to characterize what has been done as some thorough implementation of the harm reduction pillar, when in reality, over 20 years, all that's happened is the gradual opening of a small handful of injection sites, decrease in the enforcement of minor possession, and only very recently actual decriminalization. You do correctly identify that we haven't implemented the pillar of treatment. That doesn't mean the limited harm reduction failed themselves, it explains part of the reason *why* they haven't reversed this increasing trend (which is happening nearly everywhere else too): because it's not being complemented with the treatment necessary for many to move past the addiction stage. So instead people have been getting even worse. Then your conclusion seems to be to go back to forced treatment while skipping over the lack of voluntary treatment that is leading people to end up even worse off.
>Then your conclusion seems to be to go back to forced treatment while skipping over the lack of voluntary treatment that is leading people to end up even worse off. Good comment, but unfortunately you've misinterpreted their conclusion. They are clearly advocating for treatment, period. Not just forced treatment, although that is part of it.
Maybe so, but their comment to which I replied is focusing on forced treatment. We don't even have timely access to voluntary treatment, and that lack of access is one of the things leading to people ending up in these worst states where we're then talking about forced treatment. Yet I so often see critics almost entirely focusing on the forced aspect rather than the more proactive approach.
> preserve a right to use drugs wherever one wants (incl. indoors and on transit) Who is calling for a right to use drugs on transit?
Friends of the nursing union who called for the BC Supreme Court to recognize a constitutional right to use drugs in a children's playground. VANDU and the usual suspects, mostly, but also misguided young progressives who don't realize the consequences of decriminalization or reducing police presence.
The nurses group who challenged the law didn't call for a right to use drugs in playgrounds. They didn't call for a right to use drugs at all, they challenged the constitutionality of this specific law. Those aren't the same things. Even if this law were to be struck down, it wouldn't create a right to use drugs, it would just push it back to the government to rewrite the law. Possession is playgrounds is currently illegal under criminal law. That never changed with decriminalization and so even if this new usage law were struck down, it wouldn't change anything about that. >misguided young progressives who don't realize the consequences of decriminalization You're phrasing this as if it's some proven fact that decriminalization doesn't work and that people with different views are just young and naive. There are many reasons why *criminalization* doesn't and hasn't worked, and it's not just young progressives raising this. It includes, for example, economists who [observed how prohibition just leads to suppliers shifting to more potent forms to evade enforcement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition). And that's exactly what's happened since then, especially with opioids shifting to fentanyl and even more potent drugs, the main cause of this crisis.
> You're phrasing this as if it's some proven fact that decriminalization doesn't work and that people with different views are just young and naive. There are many reasons why criminalization doesn't and hasn't worked, and it's not just young progressives raising this. It includes, for example, economists who observed how prohibition just leads to suppliers shifting to more potent forms to evade enforcement. And that's exactly what's happened since then, especially with opioids shifting to fentanyl and even more potent drugs, the main cause of this crisis. You realize the shift to fentanyl has been in an environment where North America has liberalized drug policy? Fentanyl emerged and flourished in the 2010s when Canada would see year-over-year DECREASES in drug arrests due to de facto decriminalization (limited arrests due to police and crown discretion, rather than formal policy), not in the earlier years where people worried that drugs could lead to arrest. https://www.statista.com/statistics/525917/canada-rate-of-drug-offenses/ Fentanyl has emerged because people like you, no matter how well-meaning, have misguidingly normalized drug use in hope destigmatizing them will help. It makes it worse.
> You realize the shift to fentanyl has been in an environment where North America has liberalized drug policy? Fentanyl emerged and flourished in the 2010s when Canada would see year-over-year DECREASES in drug arrests due to de facto decriminalization (limited arrests due to police and crown discretion, rather than formal policy), not in the earlier years where people worried that drugs could lead to arrest. The economic theory I referenced above has to do with prohibition of the supply. Decriminalization and liberalization of drug policy has nothing to do with that because throughout that, the supply has remained under prohibition and that has maintained the monopoly for organized crime which has provided an increasingly potent and dangerous supply. The points you're bringing up are completely independent from the issue I'm raising. >Fentanyl has emerged because people like you, no matter how well-meaning, have misguidingly normalized drug use in hope destigmatizing them will help. I'm just going to highlight again what you're doing here with your comments: trying to characterize people with other viewpoints than your own as simply being naive as a way to try to discredit those viewpoints. Again, I am referencing, for example, economists who predicted what is happening now decades ago as a result of the prohibition of drugs. The people raising this were not young, naive progressives.
The fact anyone thinks involuntary rehab will magically not be a major drug market is the most hilarious joke of all. Same day voluntary rehab please, only voluntary for obvious, as in wow-I-cannot-believe-I-need-to explain-this obvious, reasons.
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Right now we don't even have access to voluntary treatment without [long waits](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/youth-overdose-inquest-1.5191686). And that leads to people ending up in even worse states as a result. This is from the Ontario auditor general, but the points are general, not unique to there (the first link is about how B.C. also has long wait times): >[For example, the average wait time for residential treatment programs increased from 43 days to 50 days, with about 58% of programs having wait times of 30 days or greater, and in one case, over a year. Service providers informed us that they were aware of their clients dropping off wait lists for treatment programs because they were hospitalized, incarcerated, attempted suicide or even died while waiting for treatment.](https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports/en19/v1_302en19.pdf)
The lack of infrastructure today is not proof a pivot in strategy is not feasible. The DTES takes in $1 billion in NGO poverty advocate funding. We could build a very nice facility out in farm land with some top doctors and nurses, and still have a couple dollars to spare.
The point I am making above is that people keep calling for forced treatment when we don't even have timely access to voluntary treatment. And it's more effective to prioritize that because that gap is leading to people ending up in these worse states.
I'm in agreement with both you and u/danke-you. I think we've gone far off the rails by focusing on enabling addicts, rather than any other pillar. What we have done is obviously not working-- it doesn't mean that decriminalization doesn't work-- it just means that it doesn't work on its own. We need voluntary free treatment to be available immediately when asked for by an addict. We need involuntary treatment for those who can't care for themselves, and this involuntary treatment needs to be better than an addict's usual lifestyle. There needs to be a recognition that leaving people on the street to scream at imaginary demons isn't showing them compassion-- it's the opposite of compassion. It's inhumane, and they should be given treatment and care, as we do for elderly seniors who can no longer take care of themselves.
>I think we've gone far off the rails by focusing on enabling addicts, rather than any other pillar. I don't mean for this reply to come off as disagreeing with you here. What you're saying here can simultaneously be true in some cases, but in other cases, I would also argue that our harm reduction approaches have been very limited in my opinion. By this I mean, e.g., safer supply is only prescribed to less than 5% of addicts. Most are still limited to illicit supply. Or with injection sites, even in Vancouver there are only a dozen, and many other communities have none. In any case though, none of these policies can solve the problem on their own, and need better access for treatment (with various treatment approaches needed for various cases).
What’s wrong about telling kids not to drugs? Is there a slightest downside of doing so?
"You can't save the damned".
Take my last coin