Drug Legalization

“I never thought this would happen to Reese, but you have to get it through to people that it can happen to anyone.” Grief and sadness envelops Wendy Chisholm as we talk in her snow-dusted suburban house in the hills above Vancouver. She is telling me about her “lovely, easy-going, thoughtful” teenage daughter, whose face beams out from a photo on the fridge in the kitchen. She takes me upstairs to show me the sports-mad girl’s room. It is filled with trophies, pictures of Reese in her soccer kit and with a black belt from taekwondo, her name picked out in yellow thread.

A Vancouver store that previously lost its license for selling psychedelics has had its license restored, despite an ongoing police investigation into the business.

Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary had its license re-instated by two Green Party councillors during a special meeting held on March 5.

The shop’s business license was suspended in May 2023 for “gross misconduct” for selling illegal substances. However, the stores continued to operate and were the target of a police raid in November 2023.

When Traci Letts finally found the perfect shoes for her son Mike – a pair of white Nike trainers with a splash of green – the store didn’t have the right size. So she went to another.

“They had to be just right,” she said. “He always wanted to dress well.” The high-top shoes completed an outfit Letts had carefully selected: a grey tracksuit with a white T-shirt; they would be the final set of clothes he would wear. “I knew he’d want to be sent off that way.”

Thousands of opiate pills obtained by prescription through a “safe supply” harm reduction program have been seized by police in Prince George, B.C., after they were found to have been diverted to organized crime groups reselling them across Canada, the RCMP said.

“Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs,” said Corp. Jennifer Cooper of the RCMP’s Prince George detachment.

Oregon lawmakers have moved to reintroduce criminal penalties for the possession of hard drugs, in effect ending the state’s groundbreaking three-year decriminalization experiment.

In 2020, nearly 60% of voters moved to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs with the passage of Measure 110, but the new law had grown increasingly controversial as the state grappled with the fentanyl crisis and growing public drug use.

Last month, harm reduction researchers published a “landmark” study claiming that Canada’s controversial “safer supply” experiment is saving lives.

But when I analyzed the underlying data with a team of addiction physicians, we discovered that there was actually no evidence that safer supply works and that the researchers had cherry picked their data and inflated positive results.

British Columbia’s rampant drug deaths have more than once thrust public health officials into uncharted territory. It became the first province to decriminalize small quantities of hard drugs for personal use in 2022, about two decades after Vancouver opened the first supervised injection site in North America. But as overdoses increase in some British Columbia towns, there is disagreement in one city about how to address it.

Alberta is expected to break another annual record for toxic drug crisis deaths, with nearly 1,700 recorded in the first 10 months of last year.

The provincial government has been reporting these deaths since 2016. The latest figures it has released are from last October. According to those numbers, there had been 1,692 fatalities in the province from drug poisonings in the first 10 months of 2023, the majority linked to opioids.

Living in downtown London, Ont., right next to a mission for people who are poor and homeless, Stephanie De La Celle’s children often see people using illegal drugs. Playing in the park, riding their bikes or just going to the store for ice cream, they come across men and women openly smoking or injecting. That bothers Ms. De La Celle, 41, who has five-year-old twins, an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old under her roof.

“They shouldn’t be exposed to that at their age,” she says.