Drug Legalization

A Canadian study casts further doubt on a key plank of the harm-reduction agenda.

Supervised consumption sites (SCSs), which offer drug users a place to get high under the observation of staff, have become a popular proposed solution to the North American overdose epidemic. But a recently released Canadian study shows that, contrary to the claims of harm reduction activists, these sites do not save lives. American policymakers should take heed and avoid replicating their northern neighbors’ failed experiments.

The Ontario government has confirmed it is cutting provincial funding for seven supervised drug consumption sites, days after harm reduction advocates said they were notified of the decision.

The province says it will initiate a 90-day wind-down period to give those using the sites time to transition to the government’s abstinence-based model — homelessness and addiction recovery treatment, or HART, hubs.

Last week, CTV News published an article with a headline harm reduction activists across the country pounced on: “Drug overdoses in Toronto up nearly 50 per cent since last January, city data shows.”

The party to blame in their view, of course, is the Ontario government because it closed injection sites within 250 metres of schools and daycares a year ago. But if you look at the data the story was based on, the activists’ I-told-you-so’s are wildly off the mark.

QUEBEC — An elite Montreal-based narco network allegedly exported carfentanil and next-generation synthetic opioids 100 times deadlier than fentanyl to American consumers via the dark web, leading to the arrest of four yesterday, after 13 months of joint surveillance by U.S. federal agencies and Quebec police, and a seizure of more than 600,000 tablets of synthetic drugs in December.

If gaslighting were an Olympic sport, harm-reduction activists would be buried in gold medals.

For many years, they claimed that there are no real downsides to “safer supply” — an experimental initiative that gives addicts free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. When media reports emerged that these drugs were regularly being diverted to the black market, harm reductionists stridently dismissed them as right-wing disinformation.

What’s the point of police arresting people in possession of illegal drugs, asks MLA Elenore Sturko, if the Crown isn’t going to proceed with charges?

Over 35 years as a drug user, Vancouver resident Garth Mullins said he’s had “hundreds and hundreds” of interactions with police, and long believed drug decriminalization was smart policy.

“I was first arrested for drug possession when I was 19, and it changes your life,” said Mullins, who is now in his 50s and was an early backer of Canadian province British Columbia’s decriminalization program that ended on Saturday.

“That time served inside can add up for a lot of people. They do a lifetime jolt in a series of three‑month bits,” he told AFP.

A program in British Columbia to decriminalize drug use and allow users access to public health services rather than be charged by the police with narcotics possession is ending after three years of intense political backlash.

The experimental pilot began in January 2023, after British Columbia, the center of Canada’s opioid crisis, received a legal exemption from the federal authorities that enabled drug users to carry minuscule amounts of cocaine, opioids, methamphetamines and MDMA, also known as Ecstasy.

British Columbia recently mandated that, starting from the end of this month, most “safer supply” drugs must be consumed under medical supervision in an effort to keep them from being diverted to the black market. While this reform is laudable and will help keep dangerous opioids off Canadian streets, it is reprehensible that the province dragged its feet for years here.

Opioids and homelessness hit this Ontario city hard. Then, it threw all it had at the crisis. The Globe returns to see what those efforts achieved

In early November, workers in pickup trucks arrived at Milligan’s Pond, a wooded oasis in Barrie, Ont., an hour north of Toronto. Their orders were clear.

After a double murder nearby left two men from a local homeless encampment dead and another charged with the crime, the city had declared a state of emergency and started clearing its biggest encampments. The last one left was at Milligan’s Pond.

The city issued trespass notices to the men and women living there, and then the workers swept up everything: tents, sleeping bags, shopping carts, propane tanks. But if you looked closely, you could still see the remnants of a homemade memorial to those who have died on Barrie’s streets, many of them from drug overdoses. Locals call it The Rock. Its story is the story of the city’s struggle, written on stone.

Saskatchewan has introduced involuntary drug treatment legislation on the final day of the fall legislature sitting.

If passed, the Compassionate Intervention Act, Bill 48, would allow those with addictions to be committed to treatment without their consent.

Premier Scott Moe said the legislation will allow the province to “put families first” by providing treatment and care to those “unable to seek help on their own because of their severe addiction.”

Canadian addiction experts say that Ontario needs to better regulate “safer supply” prescribing, because unscrupulous doctors have been cashing in by opening “electronic pill mills” — video terminals where addicts can receive enormous opioid prescriptions after only a few minutes of remote consultation.

“Safer supply” refers to the practice of prescribing addicts free recreational drugs — typically hydromorphone, a heroin-strength opioid — with minimal supervision under the assumption that this dissuades use of riskier street substances.

Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, a prominent harm reduction researcher known as the godfather of Toronto’s injection sites, provided testimony in a court hearing early this year that asserted there is “no evidence” that such sites “lead to increased drug selling.”

Bayoumi’s testimony was contained in an affidavit he provided as an expert witness in litigation initiated by an injection site in Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood that argued a new Ontario law prohibiting such sites within 200 meters of schools and daycares violates the Charter rights of drug users.