Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, and then Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart speak to the media before sitting down for a meeting at City Hall in Vancouver on Aug. 30, 2019.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Kennedy Stewart is the former mayor of Vancouver and author of Decrim: How We Decriminalized Drugs in British Columbia. He is an associate professor and director of the Centre for Public Policy Research at Simon Fraser University.
After doing all I could to save those dying from toxic drugs while serving as a member of Parliament and then mayor of Vancouver, including multiple face-to-face discussions with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, I’ve come to see Mr. Trudeau as Canada’s greatest drug policy reformer. By legalizing cannabis and broadening harm reduction efforts, he has boldly shifted the country away from criminalizing those consuming illicit substances and toward a health-centred approach to addressing drug use. However, as the toxic drug crisis worsens, he needs to convince Canadians to do even more if we are to save the 20 people dying every day from poisoned drugs – many of whom are just kids.
In 1908, the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier initiated Canada’s war on drug users by enacting the Opium Act to punish those who imported, manufactured or sold opium for non-medical purposes. Cocaine and morphine sales were prohibited in 1911, cannabis in 1923. Later, prime minister John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative government enacted the 1961 Narcotic Control Act, stiffening criminal sanctions for producers and retailers and adding tough penalties for illicit drug consumers. Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper added even more aggressive prohibition measures. All these laws pushed drug users into dangerous environments, unnecessarily burdened hundreds of thousands of Canadians with criminal records, and filled the coffers of organized criminal gangs.
In 2015, Mr. Trudeau cruised to a majority government at least partly because he offered a new drug policy vision, unexpectedly promising to legalize cannabis. Enacted in 2018, the move has substantially reduced life-altering cannabis-related arrests which disproportionately affected overincarcerated Indigenous people, Black Canadians and racialized people.
Around the same time, Canada’s illicit drug supply started to become increasingly toxic as organized crime gangs inexpertly mixed synthetic opioids into organic drugs to cut costs and increase profits. Drug users now ingest substances many times more powerful than what they expect to consume, causing their breathing and heart rates to drop, their brains to become starved of oxygen, their mouths to fill with foam, and eventually death, unless medical assistance is quickly administered.
Paramedics respond to an event every 15 minutes, with one drug user dying every hour across Canada. Toxic drugs are now the leading cause of death for British Columbian children aged 10 to 18, with 376 people under the age of 30 killed in 2022. Overdose survivors often experience this horror multiple times, leaving many with permanent brain trauma. Daily users, weekend warriors and high-schoolers are all dying. Things are likely to worsen still considering almost all unregulated drugs are now contaminated and at least seven million Canadians (18 per cent of the population) report having used illicit drugs in their lifetime.
Perhaps your reaction to this information is to shrug and say that’s what happens when you choose to do drugs. Or maybe you think these people just need to get it together and get off drugs. Or you might whisper, “Well, they are only junkies after all, and really, the problem is solving itself.” These answers are all appalling considering the scope and consequences of this crisis. What we need is for enough Canadians to have the courage to proclaim that this is unacceptable and that we have to do what it takes to end this carnage.
Although premiers are constitutionally responsible for health care, none seem to really care about those suffering torturous death by poisoned drugs. Some even claim that sexual-assault victims, young people and residential school survivors with substance-use disorders due to pronounced trauma should be subjected to incarceration and involuntary treatment.
Mr. Trudeau has already taken some very important first steps by signing off on a request by the B.C. government to undertake a three-year pilot project to decriminalize some hard drugs and a few small safer-supply pilot programs where a handful of drug users are provided with pharmaceutical alternatives to their poisoned drugs. But we need to move from localized pilot projects to nationwide, expanded and permanent programs.
Maybe the best place for the Prime Minister to start is by helping the public understand a disproportionate number of dead drug users had friends and family who loved them, or had already suffered generational trauma, or were injured tradespeople, or were kids. He could continue by explaining abstinence-based treatment alone will not work when up to 90 per cent of people who access these scarce and often very expensive programs relapse time and time again. He can also get help from Canada’s top cops and respected health officials, who have issued multiple official reports calling for drug decriminalization and widely accessible safer supply programs. This is a lot to ask from one politician. But if he is not up to it, thousands more will die.