On Day 4 of the election, the BC Greens staked out a “health-focused” drug policy based on flawed notions and extreme positions. Their election promise to distribute “regulated” hard drugs through non-medicalized avenues such as compassion clubs is far to the left of the New Democrats, who most recently retreated from decriminalization.
Premier David Eby and BC Conservative Leader John Rustad have both said legalization would not be an option if they formed government, with Rustad saying his party would roll back decriminalization completely.
Interestingly, the Greens’ position may appeal to some on the far left and far right, given libertarians like those at Reasonmag.com have continually called for legalization of all illicit drugs.
But the BC Greens are wildly out of step with public opinion on this.
A 2022 poll by Research Co., revealed less than 10 per cent of British Columbians favour legalization of hard drugs. Given the public drug use and unmitigated public disorder that ensued from decriminalization, it’s had to believe that approval rating has done anything but drop since the survey two years ago.
Yet legalization of all drugs is basically what the Greens are proposing.
Flawed logic
The backgrounder to the Greens news release reveals some of the flawed logic behind what is objectively an extreme policy position.
“Most people who are dying are not diagnosed with a substance use disorder – rather, they are recreational users accessing a poisoned supply,” the document states.
That is just not the case.
According to the 2022 B.C. Coroner’s Death Panel Review report, “73 per cent of decedents were identified as using illicit drugs on a regular or chronic basis and 13 per cent were identified as using illicit drugs occasionally/infrequently. The pattern of use remains unchanged since the last death review panel.”
Thirteen per cent is a significant proportion but it’s far from a majority. Former B.C. Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe, who commissioned the report, would know that. Nevertheless, she has cast her support behind the Greens on this policy.
That’s not the only flawed reasoning in the B.C. Greens proposed drug strategy. They revive the spectre of Prohibition-era tainted booze deaths while ignoring evidence that overall deaths associated with alcohol declined during that ill-fated experiment in social engineering.
The Greens position is also based on wishful thinking that organized crime will magically exit the drug trade once regulated alternatives are available and — most incredulously — that people with escalating meth and opioid addictions won’t partake of too much and overdose on legal drugs as well.
Another substantial flaw is how much of their proposal falls within federal jurisdiction. Burned already by the failed decriminalization experiment in B.C., the federal government isn’t likely to revive that dead horse any time soon. If the Conservatives win the next federal election, they most certainly won’t.
The Greens news release ends with a comment that only a fraction of containers at Canadian ports are inspected for smuggled fentanyl precursors. That too is federal jurisdiction. It’s also a problem for which the party offers no remedies — not the least ones that wouldn’t toss sand in the gears of the country’s import and export economies.
A huge leap in the Green proposal is that it is based on scientific evidence.
“We are guided by evidence and rooted in the belief that government should focus on saving lives and ensuring services are available to all British Columbians. People cannot seek treatment or recovery if they are not alive, which is why regulated pharmaceutical alternatives to the toxic illicit drug market must be part of the response to this public health emergency,” the Green release states.
There is no evidence that legalization works anywhere in the world or that the current iteration of safe supply/prescribed alternatives is helping anyone stop using fentanyl or prevent overdose death, the two main goals of the program. And there is no provincial data showing either approach has led people successfully into treatment or recovery.
Most safe supply studies are based on self-reporting, selective data, don’t account for confounding factors, as well as lack scientific analysis and measurable outcomes.
Another big flaw in the B.C. Greens’ reasoning is the assertion it’s guided by people with lived/living experience of drug use, because legalization advocates only tend to listen to people in favour of their policies. For instance, many in B.C. categorically reject the concept of recovery, let alone the ideas of Marshall Smith, who is spearheading Alberta’s addiction recovery efforts. Yet Smith not only has lived experience successfully navigating his own substance-use disorder, he’s several years into setting up the type of recovery-oriented addictions treatment system B.C. so desperately needs.
As for addictions physicians, Simon Fraser University psychologist Julian Somers and addictions doctor Vincent Lam have substantial expertise in addiction medicine, but they and many of their peers are likely skeptical of the claim that the only way to decrease overdose deaths is by “providing a regulated alternative to the illicit toxic drug market.”
On the plus side of the Greens drug strategy are recommendations for drug education and mental health supports in schools to prevent substance use before it begins. As well, their call for the regulation of treatment and recovery programs is overdue, as is a genuinely evidence-based standard of care, along with a centralized database to track outcomes and availability.
The BC NDP have not argued against these recommendations, but neither have they acknowledged their absence or committed to trying to achieve any of them.
Given the provincial government’s mantra that addiction to substances should be treated as a health, not a criminal, issue, as well as the cross-party agreement on this point, and the mounting societal appetite for treatment services, the Greens might earn some much-needed public support by emphasizing this thread of their policy proposal.