The federal ministers of health and justice just finished a fact-finding trip to Portugal – a country known for its success in battling a public health crisis through drug decriminalization.
But health ministry staff say while the trip was about looking at solutions to Canada’s growing opioid crisis, the ministers weren’t making the trip to look at legalizing hard drugs – just at how the country treats drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one.
Jody Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpot met with Portuguese Minister of Justice Francisca Van Dunem and discussed impaired driving, drug policy and harm reduction, according to Wilson Raybould’s Twitter account.
But not discussing widespread decriminalization is a missed opportunity, says Karen Ward of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.
“They’ve got to make a choice and take a risk. Say that lives of drug users matter. That’s a risky thing to do,” Ward said.
At least 640 people have died in B.C. so far this year, with the B.C. Coroner Service saying some four people are dying a day in the province of drug overdoses.
“It’s devastating. Absolutely devastating. This is the battlefield and we’re dying,” Ward said. “I don’t have words to describe how much this is tearing us apart.”
That works out to a death rate of 320 per million people, according to the Coroner – more than 60 times higher the equivalent rate in Portugal.
There, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction estimates about 5.8 people per million die of drug overdoses each year.
Vancouver police have backed off prosecuting some possession charges, some RCMP detachments haven’t – and that means drug users are still arrested for minor drug offenses.
And the criminal busts of production facilities can shut them down – but it can also drive other production facilities underground, where the drugs they produce can be toxic, and also difficult to trace.
B.C.’s top health officials also support a decriminalization approach, because that would bring drug use into the open where it’s treatable – not something people do alone, which means help isn’t available during an overdose.
“I am strongly in favour of decriminalization to address stigma,” said Vancouver Coastal Health’s Patricia Daly.
“Public health officials have called for a regulatory approach. Drugs would be legally available and strictly regulated,” Daly said.
That would tackle the underlying cause of the overdose deaths: that irregularities in the drug supply mean users don’t know how much they’re about to use – and that can lead to an overdose, she said.
“The underlying realization is a contamination of our drug supply. If we were to legalize, we would control the quality and quantity and we wouldn’t see the fentanyl and carfentanyl contamination,” she said.
But she said the approach should be cautious.
“We need to do this carefully. We don’t want to see a process that leads to the harms of nicotine and alcohol. They account for more deaths than even the opioid crisis,” she said.
