Drug Legalization

‘Painkiller’ does an impressive job of telling a dark and gripping story about a tragic chapter of modern American history.

The prescription painkiller OxyContin was released by Purdue Pharma in 1995; the six-part TV series Painkiller, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and directed by Peter Berg, was released by Netflix in 2023. During the intervening 28 years, Purdue’s flagship product brought even greater riches to the company’s already rich president, Richard Sackler; brought relief to a good many patients suffering from severe pain that was otherwise untreatable; and brought tragedy to countless families as legitimate patients became addicts and then death statistics and as perfectly healthy people, many of them very young, began using the drug recreationally and, caught in the grip of its addictive power, ended up in morgues all over America.

I watched this flick. It was good. What amazes me is that while the Sacklers have been publicly shunned not one of them has been jailed.

A new Vancouver-based study suggests that many “safer supply” patients are diverting their taxpayer-funded opioids to the black market and are possibly being dishonest to researchers about defrauding the system . Worse yet, it appears that safer supply may not be as effective at separating addicts from street drugs as advocates claim, even though the entire point of the program, as described by Health Canada , is to provide “a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply”

The House of Commons by a 210-117 vote have endorsed a recommendation to decriminalize possession of heroin, cocaine and all other illegal drugs nationwide, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

The result came with little comment during a flurry of Commons votes on committee reports on Friday.

Junkies and dealers vote too ya know.

Involuntary treatment (IT) for people with severe substance use disorder (addiction) is a hotly debated topic. There is skepticism that political expediency is suddenly driving elected officials to support IT when faced with a general public that has had enough of public disorder. But family caregivers have been advocating for a right to intervene for decades, and until now, their pleas have been ignored.

Two Canadians activists who illegally sold untainted hard drugs in an effort to reduce fatal overdoses have launched a legal challenge to federal drug laws.

Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx, co-founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), were charged in June with drug trafficking-related offences by police in Vancouver.

They had made headlines two years ago for offering pure cocaine, meth and heroin to drug users, saying they wanted to prevent deaths from a supply tainted with other substances.

#vancouverpolice ignore 3 Lifeless bodies while they are arresting someone else nothing unusual in #bcndp #harmreduction utopia #vancouver #BritishColumbia #Canada #ndp #liberal #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/yWJ0wO05ak

— VancityNews1 (@VancityNews1) October 13, 2024

This August, Ontario’s Health Minister, Sylvia Jones, announced that the Ford government would close drug consumption sites within 200 metres of schools and childcare centres. In making the announcement, Jones explained, “Continuing to enable people to use drugs is not a pathway to treatment.”

They have become a potent American metaphor.

Anyone raising children in an American city these days has had to confront the following disconcerting scene: a person unconscious or semiconscious, in filthy clothes, stoned at midday, a nuisance if not a menace. As you lead your child gingerly around an adult prone on the sidewalk, the questions come: Why is that person lying there? Are they okay? Why do they take drugs if they know it could kill them? We tie ourselves in syntactic knots trying to formulate credible answers. We want to emphasize personal responsibility: that person made choices, but you can make different ones. We also don’t want our children to think us hard-hearted: that person is still a human being; somebody loves them. This conversation is even more difficult for the millions of Americans who have addicts in their own families.

Now that more than a month has passed since Ontario’s Conservative government announced the province would be closing 10 of its 17 supervised injection sites, there is some very interesting manoeuvring going on in harm reduction circles.

The injection site that I live across the street from, in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, just east of downtown Toronto, has a particularly pressing conundrum. The province has given South Riverdale and the other nine sites being closed for being within 200 metres of schools and daycares until March 31, 2025, to wind down their operations.

Although British Columbia has been in the spotlight this week for mulling mandatory care, it’s an approach that has also gained traction in New Brunswick, Alberta, and Ontario.

Mandatory care has been used historically in Canada, but was abandoned in recent decades when the idea took hold that the method infringes on personal liberties. Since the 1990s, the approach to addiction in Canada has moved from abstinence-based models to harm reduction–a method aimed at reducing the negative impacts of drug use rather than a focus on eliminating the use itself.

The B.C. government is backtracking on two controversial harm reduction programs that distribute free drug paraphernalia — such as syringes, crack pipes and snorting kits — through vending machines and online home delivery. This new scandal is yet another reminder of how the province, under the leadership of Premier David Eby, has mishandled the overdose crisis and prioritized enablement over recovery.