In a bid to mollify U.S. President Donald Trump over his tariff threats, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has vowed to appoint a “fentanyl czar,” designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations, and bolster security along Canada’s 9,000-kilometre border with our southern neighbours.
Not to be outdone, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has called for Canadian troops to be sent to the border and vowed to, when he is prime minister, impose life sentences without parole for 25 years on people who sell more than 40 milligrams of fentanyl.
During last year’s presidential election campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to crack down on fentanyl dealers, secure the U.S. borders south and north, and to execute drug dealers.
The War on Drugs, it seems, is back with a vengeance.
The spotlight-shining on fentanyl, and to a lesser extent other opioids and street drugs like meth, is not surprising. The toxic drug crisis is estimated to be killing tens of thousands of people a year in North America – including around 105,000 in the U.S. and 8,000 in Canada.
But nobody is talking about treatment any more. It’s all about punishment.
Yet, as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, reminded us in December: “The evidence is clear: The so-called War on Drugs has failed, completely and utterly.”
Criminalization and prohibition have failed to reduce drug use and deaths. Nor have they deterred drug-related crime. But countless lives have been destroyed by treating addiction as a crime rather than an illness.
Crackdowns on drug use have been going on, to varying degrees, for more than a century. The U.S. banned the non-prescription sale of opium, heroin, morphine and cocaine in 1914, leading to the creation of a black market.
(Prior to that, ironically, countries insisted on the right to sell drugs openly. The Opium Wars between Britain and China, for example, fought between 1839 and 1842 and again from 1856 to 1860, were actually trade wars, because Britain insisted on selling massive quantities of the drug to China regardless of the social consequences.)
The modern War on Drugs began in earnest on June 17, 1971, when then-U.S. president Richard Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one″ and later announced an “all-out global war on the drug menace” with the creation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
It was no secret that the purpose of the campaign, in the era of burgeoning civil-rights movements, was to target anti-war hippies and Black Americans. And, true to form, the criminalization of drug use has always disproportionately affected racialized communities.
There are 1.9 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails, half of them on drug-related charges. According to the Sentencing Project advocacy group, in state prisons, which account for about 85 per cent of the incarcerated population in the U.S., 45 per cent of all convicted drug offenders are Black (a group that accounts for only 14 per cent of the U.S. population), 28 per cent are white (60 per cent of the population), and 20 per cent are Latino (19 per cent of the population).
Similar disparities exist in Canada, where 33 per cent of federal inmates are Indigenous, while only 5 per cent of the population is First Nations, Inuit or Métis. In this country, too, drug offences are commonplace, accounting for about 40 per cent of convictions.
Canada, more so than the U.S., has made some efforts to address toxic drug deaths using harm-reduction measures rather than criminalization. There are 39 supervised consumption sites across Canada, and there has never been an overdose at these facilities, so they are undoubtedly saving lives. But the chaos that often surrounds the sites has caused quite a backlash. Proponents of harm reduction have not been adequately respectful of their neighbours.
Decriminalization – allowing drug users to possess up to 2.5 grams of illicit substances for their personal use – has not been an unmitigated success either. Rather, it has led to far too much open drug use in public spaces, including sidewalks and parks. But these issues can be dealt with without resorting to mass incarceration, which seems to be the only alternative proposed.
Fentanyl is, without a doubt, destroying too many lives. But interdiction has never worked. We need instead to understand the desperation that drives people to life-threatening drug use, at the nexus of untreated mental illness, addiction and homelessness.
To tackle the toxic drug crisis effectively, we need more therapists, affordable homes and treatment facilities, not more draconian laws, police and prison guards.
It’s not something that lends itself to flashy sloganeering and simplistic solutions but, in the long run, it’s an approach that’s far more humane and less destructive.