Jeremy Kalicum, one of the operators of the Drug User Liberation Front, outside a courthouse in B.C., in November, 2025.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
The death toll from toxic street drugs in British Columbia and much of the rest of the country is both astonishing and horrifying. But even in the context of a public health emergency, a judge’s ruling striking down the federal law of possession for the purpose of trafficking in hopes of reducing the death toll is misbegotten – the latest example of judges dressing up political decisions as legal or constitutional ones.
The case before Justice Catherine Murray of the B.C. Supreme Court focused on two people who bought street drugs such as methamphetamines, cocaine and heroin from the dark web, tested them for fentanyl and other impurities at university labs and sold them at cost to drug users.
In essence, Justice Murray found that drug users have a constitutional right, under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to be exempted from federal possession and trafficking laws in B.C., so they may receive a “safer supply.”
It’s worth elaborating on what Justice Murray is asking Ottawa to do. People who use drugs must be permitted a source of drugs not overseen by the medical profession. Such is their need to avoid withdrawal, they need near-instant access, and medical supervision doesn’t work for them. They cannot be denied what she frames as a non-medicalized supplier.
B.C. Supreme Court rules drug law unconstitutional
This is an extreme ruling, by any measure. To Justice Murray, it is justified by the extreme times in which drug users find themselves – 2,585 deaths in British Columbia in 2025, or seven a day. She has given Ottawa six months to make legislative reforms, which would necessarily apply across Canada. For what, exactly? Is she demanding Ottawa also allow exemptions for people who promise to test drugs purchased from organized crime? If the federal government proves unwilling to accept the cartels’ involvement, should it instead create a public-private partnership of some kind that would provide pharmaceutical-quality drugs to so-called compassion clubs for distribution? Would the simplest answer be to decriminalize possession? Make methamphetamines available without regulation?
It’s not hard to see that each of these solutions would also bring serious problems. And that is what happens when judges take it upon themselves, as Justice Murray did, to make policy decisions better left to government – though to be fair, governments and health regulators have not done a good job on the drugs crisis. For instance, the widespread distribution of hydromorphone, a safer alternative to street drugs, led to large-scale diversion, with the cash used to buy even more fentanyl. It was a well-intentioned disaster.
In reaching her conclusions, Justice Murray held a mini-inquiry of the street drug-using environment, assessed facts and came to certain judgments. It is challenging terrain, and some of her factual assessments are shaky. For instance, more than half of users who purchased the drugs went on to divert them to others. Did they use any resulting cash to buy other drugs, perhaps because they sought the fentanyl high? To what extent did this program simply add to the street drug supply? The judge’s answer, that any diversion may have actually enhanced public safety, seems speculative at best.
And what of the fact that drug-testing kits, which allow anyone to test drugs within five minutes, are widely available for free? Justice Murray accepted the view that drug users don’t like showing up at medical-related institutions (not even the downtown pharmacies where the kits are placed conveniently on the counter) because of “stigma,” which she says federal law has helped create. Yet thousands of these kits are in circulation each year in Vancouver.
We’ve seen other rulings in which various groups accuse government of putting their lives at risk. In Toronto last year, a judge effectively declared a constitutional right to bike lanes – a right mercifully tossed aside by an appeal court. Three years ago, the then Chief Justice of the B.C. Supreme Court, Christopher Hinkson, blocked B.C.’s law keeping drug users away from playgrounds and child-care spaces, during a period when normally illegal use was exempted from federal drug laws; his thought was that using drugs in public could save lives. These are extreme rulings that turn judges into policy-makers, and ignore legislators’ role in addressing social problems. (More on that later in the week.)
Fentanyl and other impurities have made street drugs more potent and deadly. But inventing a constitutional right to the non-medicalized provision of dangerous drugs has its own dire risks.