B.C. to decriminalize small amounts of ‘hard’ drugs – a North American first
theglobeandmail.comI'm not opposed to this. But I also suspect it will do almost nothing to help with the drug overdoses. Bluntly, how is making it legal to possess a fatally contaminated dose of heroin or cocaine supposed to help?
> Fear of arrest can keep people who use drugs from seeking help, incarceration is associated with increased overdose risk, and Indigenous and racialized communities are disproportionately impacted.
All true, technically. But it's also time to put to rest our stereotype of the overdose victim: a homeless young person, on heroin, living on the street. It's the public face, but not the bulk of the numbers. The median overdose victim is housed, employed, without a criminal record, and in his late 30s.
Most people who use drugs, and most people who fatally overdose, never interact with the police over their drug use, at least in Canada. Speaking anecdotally about my larger social circle, fear of legal consequence isn't even on the radar for the guys who like cocaine on the weekend at the bar. Their blasé attitude to the cops is entirely justified. Prosecutions in Vancouver for cocaine possession are at an all-time-low -- only several hundred per year, mostly of people who interacted with the cops for other reasons. Many tens of thousands of people regularly use cocaine in Vancouver and essentially all of them get away with it. And most of them understand this.
So, how does decriminalization help there? Of course, there are compelling reasons to decriminalize anyway. For people at the intersection of homelessness, drug addiction, etc., such a change might well save their lives. The law gives the police a tool to, in effect, harass the homeless, and publicly visible addicts, and it is racially skewed in practice. Ending that, is a just cause in itself. But don't confuse that with having a meaningful impact on the OD statistics. Even if every single prosecution of possession could be transmuted into an addiction ended and a life saved (a fantastical proposition) it still wouldn't even halve the current overdose rate.
This could be an expanded version of the Good Samaritan Laws[0] with similar intent. The theory is that bystander of an overdose, likely fellow users, will be less wary to call emergency services if they know there is no possibility of catching their own possession charge. This isn't explicit in the article but has been discussed related to American harm reduction policy recommendations.
Ideally this would allow lab testing of your drugs. For example, a group of friends could buy 10 MDMA pills but can’t know if one or all of them are potentially fatal.
They could crush up and thoroughly mix the 10 MDMA pills, send 10% to a local lab to get the purity and amount confirmed by a local chemist. Then they know the remaining 9 doses are non fatal (and how much to take for a specific dose of MDMA).
That is already legal in Canada, there's an exemption in the CDSA. Public health labs run testing programs in several cities. Unfortunately it is not very widely known.
Decriminalisation can lead to better control over who gets how much, information to users about usage and dosage and also getting the topic on the table for every normal househould. These effects don't need to be underestimated as they can lead to a more smart and healthy use of a toxic substance, thus leading to less overdoses.
Measure 110 already did this in Oregon, the headline is factually incorrect.
Mexico is also generally considered to be a part of North America, it decriminalized hard drugs years ago.
Curiously, Mexicans do not talk about themselves as "norteamericanos" if I am not mistaken.
Yet they are part of NAFTA.
Culturally Mexico is in Latin America (though people drastically underestimate how similar Mexican culture is to American culture), physically and economically it is in North America.
The best thing they could do would be to license and regulate distributors so that consumers could buy products of known purity, but they explicitly aren’t doing that.
2mg is considered a potentially lethal dose[0] of fentanyl. The new law decriminalizes up to 2.5g of it, or enough fentanyl to potentially kill 1200 people. I wouldn't consider that "small amounts".
[0] https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/drug-profiles/fent...
It’s due to an interaction with the way drug possession is charged and prosecuted. 0.1mg of cocaine in a bag with 2.499 grams of wheat flour is successfully prosecuted as “possession of 2.5 grams of cocaine”.
Thus, 0.1mg of fentanyl on 2.499g of heroin can theoretically be prosecuted as “2.5 grams of fentanyl”.
I agree that 2.5 grams of fentanyl should not be considered a personal amount. But I also understand why the law is written this way.
The intent of specifically including fentanyl is to not criminalize having drugs that have it mixed in. Ideal world, we remove fentanyl from the supply all together, sadly in Vancouver many of the deaths are from contaminated supply. There are general fears of getting drugs tested (its free) so people don't. This will help, but it's not a total solution.
Based on my understanding, the more recent surge in overdose-related deaths (since March 2020) is less related to contaminated supply and more related to a combination of 1. fentanyl becoming a popular drug-of-choice; 2. fentanyl being incredibly dangerous; 3. availability of COVID-related government support funds.
My brother has been an addict for his entire adult life - for the last 20 years. His drug-of-choice started at cocaine, then crack, then heroin, and for the past few years has been exclusively fentanyl. So I have a lot of first-hand information perhaps biasing this point-of-view.
There was a big spike in deaths related to contaminated supply between 2015 and 2018 [1] which led to a lot of media coverage [2], which is completely understandable: many ordinary citizens ("normies" as my brother calls us) partaking in recreational drug use lost their lives during this period and so it created a lot of buzz.
You see though that there's another big spike starting 2020 [1], particularly starting April 2020 [3], which is not backed up by any growth in media coverage [2], suggesting that it did not have as much of an impact of "normies". And during this same period, there was a additional government assistance money available to addicts, beyond the normal welfare payments, which allowed addicts were able to purchase and use more drugs. Overdose deaths are 50% more likely in the days following receiving government assistance [4]. And this makes sense, when you're flush with cash, you can do more drugs. When you're an addict, you'll do as many drugs as you can. When those drugs are fentanyl, you're constantly teetering with death.
My brother claims to use a naloxone kit nearly every day on somebody - all people who are part of the community. And they're used on him very regularly too - even as an experienced addict, he overdoses regularly. In fact, he sometimes does this on purpose, because the high of an overdose is apparently second-to-none. But he says that he only does that when there's somebody else with him who can hit him with naloxone before he dies. This is not uncommon. I know a firefighter at the fire hall: regularly addicts will bash on their door and then immediately shoot up a huge dose, because they know the firefighters will rescue them.
That's not at all to say that a contaminated supply isn't the problem now: I'm just not convinced that it's the primary factor in deaths today.
[1] Page 3 of https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/birth-adoption-death-marri...
[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=CA&q=f...
[3] Page 4 of https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/birth-adoption-death-marri...
[4] Page 7 of https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/birth-adoption-death-marri...
The 2.5 gram limit is pretty stingy. You can't buy an 8 ball without breaking the law.
Paywall, please use https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opioid-crisis-bc-canada-1.6...