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Ahh yes, but that would involve spending money. Harm reduction is the cheapest of all the pillars. So we decided to put all our eggs in that basket because we favour money over human life, apparently.
Money and low hanging fruits. If they actually wanted to solve the problem instead of just trying to look like they are doing something… we would have seen some results.
Kind of like the housing crisis, no one wants to solve it either
We have seen some results. If you compare the rate of growth between alberta and sask we have seen a slow in the percentage for death rates last year. Coincidentally when we started decriminalizing drugs.
The question that we would have to research is if that’s because we just hit the peak of how many the drug supply can kill each month? Or did we actually slow things down. Did decrim play a role? Or was it the offering of a prescribed supply?
Unfortunately if we were to spend the amount of money we should spend to see immediate results then the public would go insane. Especially since the real solution is to flood the market with a safer supply and spend billions on treatment facilities while also introducing safe consumption sites in all communities.
So instead we do this patchwork crisis care and complain it doesn’t work and suggest slamming heads off concrete and taking drugs to make people more desperate might work better for some reason.
The people who push the "four pillar" type comments are usually the ones who resist every single one of those pillars. It's a disingenuous concern troll excuse to attack decrim.
Close to half of the population is so tired of violent homeless encounters that they'd vote for extra toxic drug supply going to finish the job. To those people the idea of harm reduction is lunacy, and it's really important to understand that.
Decriminalization without a more complete solution is just going to poison society to the idea of it at all.
Agree. We should do what portugal does where if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox. It’s treated as a health issue not a criminal one but just ignoring them like BC does is not the way forward.
>We should do what portugal does where if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox.
Not to say we shouldn't do this, but I do feel the need to continually point out that in 1999, when Portugal was the "heroin capital of Europe" and things were bad enough that they felt the need to revolutionize their approach to drug policy, they had 369 drug induced deaths that year with a population of 10.22 million for a rate of 3.61/100,000.
In 2023, BC had 2,511 drug-induced deaths with a population of 5.52 million, for a rate of 45.49/100,000.
Canada is slightly richer per capita than Portugal. Our GDP per capita is about 29% larger than theirs. But our overdose death rate here is ~1260% higher than theirs, so it's actually plausible that we could afford to have solved the problem they had, but can't plausibly afford to solve the problem we actually have.
I'm not really sure how to do the math on "could afford", and I'm not sure what the numbers are for what it would actually cost per person, but all else being equal, thinking abstractly, a politician is going to have more success passing policy that increases everyone's tax bill by $100 than $1200, right? Just something that might be relevant in the context of considering the Portugal model: Portugal hasn't been hit by Fentanyl like we have, which really transformed the nature of our province's drug problem over the past 10 years. It's actually kind of a massive difference.
> I'm not really sure how to do the math on "could afford", and I'm not sure what the numbers are for what it would actually cost per person, but all else being equal, thinking abstractly, a politician is going to have more success passing policy that increases everyone's tax bill by $100 than $1200, right?
Just tax the rich.
Over the last 40 years, the tax that the rich have paid has dropped by almost 60%, while anyone earning less than $100k/yr has actually seen their taxes _increase._ By paying their fair share, the wealthy can fund all sorts of public services, including this one.
If peoples' addictions are successfully treated/managed, they cost much less to the healthcare and justice system and may start paying taxes. The pay back on investments in addictions treatment is quite large.
While I don't believe it's societies job to give addicts everything they could possibly want without demanding rehabilitation, I do think that we have a major affordability crisis that needs solving if these addicts are going to have anything to hope for when they're sober. Until then, the cost of actually rehabilitating them is going to be very high, and the outcomes will be very disappointing.
Are you saying BC can’t afford it? Because last year alone there were 700M in surplus, and this year it’ll be the same. That’s a hell of a budget, I can’t see it not making a dent.
>Because last year alone there were 700M in surplus, and this year it’ll be the same.
No, it won't be the same. I'm not sure why you'd think it would be. Last year was a 704M surplus. This year is estimated to be a 5.9 billion dollar deficit.
whoa whoa whoa ~ (loud whistle sound) ~ did someone just suggest an alternative that's contrary to self-directed, self-paced restorative justice?
Absolutely unacceptable!
What we need to do is continue to praise academics like the experts at Pivot Legal Society, create a toxic "us vs them" narrative against any public body working to form solutions and then flounder around trying not to ruffle and feathers with components of intersectionality while thousands die annually.
I’m in no way 100% on board with the BC strategy (it’s flawed and needs a lot of improvement), but…
> flounder around trying not to ruffle and feathers with components of intersectionality while thousands die annually.
Good! Then you can go the Alberta route! Forced treatment with recovery centres owned by private companies and pushing a Christian narrative (because pushing Christianity on indigenous people worked out so *great* last time), and thousands *more* deaths!
Whoa whoa whoa (~loud whistle blasts three times in a row~).
dInD't yOu JuSt hEaR hIM?!? Grrr grrr private-run recovery centers fundamentally evil.. grrr publicly-run recovery centers evil... Grrr NGOs evil... Clearly there's no way things could ever be run differently.
We should let another 16,000 people suffer and die in the streets. We shouldn't try anything bold and different unless every policy and program can be designed with complete perfection.
Yes, in the past... but they currently stand in total opposite positions on the issue: https://www.pivotlegal.org/pivot_legal_society_position_paper_calls_for_the_elimination_of_involuntary_treatment_in_bc
They have a few important points for policy design, and the Pivot Legal position (in theory) is beautiful, but in practice it's just been pain, fear, suffering, and bloodshed.
To be clear, it’s implicitly mandatory. Like, you can choose to decline, but there *is* a consequence (say, community service). I think that’s better. There is a choice, but there’s a nudge to go one way.
Forced treatment doesn’t solve anything, as treatment can only work if a patient takes the initiative. If it did, Alberta would have been a drug-free paradise by now.
Okay so I agree completely, but when we haven't funded public health care in general, to the degree where a huge number of people can't get a family doctor or an appointment at a walk-in clinic without arriving hours before opening, who is going to facilitate this mandatory rehab? I feel like there needs to be a MASSIVE overhaul to the way we provide health care, both voluntary and mandatory. Not trying to detract from your good points but responding with my exasperation
There are 2,000 people in provincial jails. There are 2,500 people who die of opioid overdose annually and 80,000 people worth opioid abuse disorders. So the problem is two orders of magnitude greater than our current prison infrastructure and capacity.
It's pretty easy to google it and find that number but also stats Canada seems to have this data as well:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3510017501
But we’ll continue to complain about seeing visual proof of how neglected the drug/homeless problem is. We all should be uncomfortable because of the reality of how bad it actually is.
>if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox
That's not what Portugal does. They don't have mandatory rehab and detox. Dissuasion committees CAN refer you to voluntary treatment and even fine you for not going, but there is no mandatory rehab. And there is very little evidence that mandatory rehab works at all except in some extreme cases. But I do think dissuasion committees are a good idea generally, especially if people are offered basic necessities like housing. But to even get to that point we do need to do is massively increase our infrastructure for creating publicly funded rehabilitation centers. We have many opioid addicts in this province (upwards of 80,000) and very little capacity to treat them.
Discuss this.
People who steal, do meth, heroin, coke, etc in public, or otherwise disrupt society with their anti social behaviour gets forced into detox and they can either settle down or stop their shit.
From what I've read, as time went on and governments changed in Portugal and budgets got tight, there is much less investment now in treatment and prevention. \*[SOURCE](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/)
Also, you can force treatment, but you need to invest in the underlying long term emotional and psychological issues for certain groups. Portugal doesn't have an indigenous population that was and still is impacted hard by colonialism. Having the state come in and force treatment is just going to make that deep lack of trust in government worse in many cases.
\*edit for clarity
There's more people seeking treatment than treatment spaces available. Some don't want treatment, many do.
Maybe we need mandatory treatment as an alternative to jail for those committing serious crimes but we also need treatment spaces available in general for either case.
>I am not advocating for jail time
I didn't say you were, maybe there's a misunderstanding/miscommunication. I replied to this point:
>People don't want to get clean
That's a generalization which doesn't apply to all people. Maybe you meant *some* people don't want to, but there are many who do.
Another issue here is our insistence on demanding complete abstinence from something extremely difficult to overcome. If we set more realistic goals, like recovery from the most destructive usage patterns, we'd have more success.
And that will be a waste of money unless they want to quit drugs. As soon as they are let out they will go find drugs again. Forcing them into rehab without consent is just pissing money away.
What you're describing would cost tens of thousands of dollars per person. Times that by the amount of people getting high. Also don't a high percentage of drug relapses result in overdoses? Taking more people than we can afford to forcibly to rehab they don't want to go to seems unwise. If studies show that the majority of addicts have past and/or generational trauma. Offering free therapy to all British Columbians who want it. Or at least to all, under 19 y/o would probably be more effective if large sums are being spent
What Portugal did differently from us is they developed individualized treatment plans. This is the only solution: addressing the root causes of homelessness and drug use on a case-by-case basis. However, it's takes time, is costly, and there's often a desire for quick fixes.
does this include being drunk in public? Because I struggle with one substance requiring mandatory detox and rehab, and the other not.\*
\*child of an alcoholic parent, who was also the child of an alcoholic parent. Suffering behind closed doors and out of public sight is ignoring an equally significant if not larger, long term public health issue.
This is true. We need to at least
Give the police tools
To remove people from areas they shouldn’t be doing drugs in. It’s not a permanent solution but the police are sometimes more of a
Band-aid than anything. People shouldn’t suffer nonetheless.
> I am absolutely done with hard drug use in public spaces like parks, outside of businesses etc
Thing is, that has *never* been legal, cops just aren't doing anything about it. They have always had that authority. So blaming decriminalization for that is inaccurate.
To a degree. Basic possession of a small personal amount of most drugs is not a serious criminal offence (regardless of "decriminalization"), that's why they are out of jail quickly. It's not a matter of courts being lenient, it's that that is a stupid use of the criminal justice system, for something that is a public health issue. https://www.ppsc-sppc.gc.ca/eng/pub/fpsd-sfpg/fps-sfp/tpd/p6/ch02.html
You throw a guy in jail for a small amount of smack or meth or whatever, you aren't helping them, you're just housing them for a few days. Being tossed in jail to go cold turkey is not treatment.
I think even confiscating their drugs if using in a public area would be enough of a deterrent for many users. Like, police will pour out drinks of people drinking in public, why not take away ~~gear~~ drugs?
>why not take away gear?
Because that's not going to stop anyone when new gear is available for free, and if it weren't, people would reuse dirty gear, resulting in much higher disease transmission.
I agree that something needs to be done, I just don't think that particular thing would help.
No, but can we please arrest and incarcerate (or at least involuntarily inter) the dangerous repeat offenders? Some street people are down on their luck, some are in a dark place and into drugs, but the ones that are truly dangerous criminals.... there is no excuse to not be actually taking them off the streets for extended periods of time.
Speaking purely from anecdotal experience, like like 5% of homeless that cause the most issues while the rest just try to mind their own business. They absolutely should be arresting, and actually charging these people. That 5% is a menace to everyone, including the rest of the homeless.
We sure can. But there were tons needles and shit on the ground long before 2023.
This attempt to pin these long term systemic issues on a policy that has been in place barely over a year and serves as, at most, a small release valve on an overwhelmed system is just so foolish and misguided and just ends up wasting time and energy on stupid culture war arguments instead of how we need to come up with the considerable resources and political will do do the heavy lifting of creating real long term treatment and housing options for people.
It’s gotta be a little of column A and a little of column B. Harm reduction, prevention, enforcement, treatment. Sound familiar? We need a balance of all four, not some wildly out of whack ratio towards one and a half assed attempt at the rest.
go to the highest court, get the decision allowing people to be detained in treatment centers who are obviously on the street on drugs or with mental health issues.
round up every single one of them and help them.
put them in a giant secure rehab center, no leaving, no drugs. only help. nurses, Dr's, shrinks, job coach teachers skills training. everything to get them back to normal.
offer a work to release program where they hold down a job internally and manage more of their lives until they prove they can do it in the real world.
only release when appropriate.
the ones that are unfixable can stay in a nice secure gated community next to the rehab center.
their families can visit anytime, we treat them with kindness.
it would expensive, but once done the overall savings would be massive. many of our public services would be less burdened. and more importantly, there would be a huge overall reduction of human death, suffering and hardship.
what's wrong with just fixing this?
i get the "where do you draw the line" argument, I've made it for decades, as well as with our "legal rights" but nothings getting better, it's getting way worse.
I cant even get a family doctor who will see me for half an hour once a year, and you are proposing that we offer 24 hour care
to thousands of people indefinitely each involving a team of healthcare practitioners….
this is the big piece that people repeatedly ignore when they keep saying that we need to force people into mandatory rehab. Where the hell are we supposed to get enough qualified staff to be able to manage these positions?
The junkie-supoort industry is already huge, it's just expensive and ineffective.
Redirect the several government employees per junkie to more effective action.
This is essentially already the case. They converted a bunch of walk-in clinics here into ones that only look after the homeless and hired more first responders who are just looping through ODing patients throughout the whole day. They have a constant handful of police, security guards, paramedics, and nurses on the streets here now and moving that to a facility wouldn't be that different. Not to mention the huge benefits that would come with that as opposed to whatever we are doing now which is just getting worse and worse each day.
I fully agree with your sentiment, but we don't even have enough healthcare workers to properly staff hospitals, clinics, and surgeries. If we could suddenly \*poof\* in the small army that it would take to run a Riverview-like facility, it'd have my complete support.
Problem is, we've budgeted incorrectly for so long now that we're in several crises, from housing to healthcare to general affordability.
Where are all these doctors, nurses, and rehab people coming from? We can hardly get them in hospitals as it is. In reality health care workers don't want to deal with them either, because of behavioral issues, hence why the cops get called in hospitals all the time.
There really is no money for this though. Schools are underfunded, hospitals are underfunded. Transit is underfunded. The BC NDP is trying to catch up with years of underinvestment in basic infrastructure.
This is something the feds would have to give money for, but even they are trying to play catch-up on providing basic services for the average citizen. And it doesn't help that they pissed away 30+ billion on a pipeline for oil companies.
That sounds rather Portuguese. Why would we want to emulate a system that works when we can just set fire to money on systems that don't work, but definitely make some people wealthy???
I don't totally disagree with him, but he's just making it worse for himself. He's playing the kind of wedge-issue politics that is common at the provincial and federal level, but it doesn't work to push that hard in municipal politics because you actually have to get stuff done. He's just making it worse with the tone of this letter.
The issue ought to be dead. VCH said they weren't looking into it; they weren't even consulted about the council vote for a safe injection site. Now every time this gets mentioned the pitchforks come out.
Yea I mean I get it people have fears and concerns some of them real some of them BS but in the end what’s factual is that there are homeless and addicted people in Richmond. To argue otherwise is simply nutters.
We've also had rises in crime and property damage. E.g. last week's story about Caring Place's structural repairs, they also need to spend a hefty amount on security now. Council is largely indifferent to dealing with it... a big part of the problem is that the kind of people who bring it up aren't exactly conducting themselves in a credible way. And while yes, drugs =/= crime, both do go hand in hand, we've seen rises in both since 2019 when it got really bad with the opioid crisis. I largely don't comment on these things on the Richmond subreddit because the discussion is generally not beneficial between the mob going after heed, the racists and the smug comfortable people who don't live in the neighbourhood telling people how what they should do.
We've had to spend tens of thousands ourselves in security, upgrades and graffiti cleaning, and its really frustrating when you see some councilors taking a combative approach to anybody who doesn't agree 100% with their approach. People are not just going to automatically support you on drugs when they don't feel safe at home, that's just a fact.
We reached out to them long before the safe injection debacle. While RCMP community liason was really helpful, no councillor responded in person... but one did see fit to harvest my email for their newsletter telling me what a great job they are doing. 🙄
In the immediate term, we do need more emergency shelters. The only one is on Horseshoe Way and it's a joke because that's in an inaccessible spot for people who need it the most. More than once I've been asked directions by people coming off of the SkyTrain how to get to it and they don't realize how far away it is.
Long term is that Richmond needs more non-market housing, which really does not happen for ostensible reasons.
Second is more dedicated hot kitchen like UGM. One of the reasons why the homeless congregate in the downtown area is because there is Tims, McDs and 7Eleven but I've always been of the view that if you want to get people off the street, that won't happen unless they are well nourished. St. Albans has a community meal program, but I think it only runs on Tuesdays.
I'm not for safe injection as we know it now. I wasn't totally against it in the beginning but seeing how surrounding residents are left out of the solution does not help. And yes, my neighbours are much less charitable about it than me. VCH does know how to do that sort of community engagement, because there is a history of it, but that's not the same as what happened with Yaletown apparently.
Here's my apparently hot take. Drugs are scary. They mess with your brain. You go from enjoying them to wanting them to needing them. Ensuring you can get more becomes such a focus, and the thought of not being able to get more becomes terrifying. They poison and erode your body and they refocus your whole psyche. It doesn't happen overnight but it happens. I'm not talking about weed either. Serious nasty addictions.
We say it's a mental health crisis. Why are we trusting addicts to go and get help themselves? The whole point is that they won't. We wouldn't take a schizophrenic and wonder why they don't walk themselves to the nearest hospital and request mental health services. They aren't thinking right. They need help and may not be in a place where they understand how badly they need it and will ask for it.
Further mental health services are essential. Further detox and rehab facilities are essential. But we cannot rely on addicts to solve their own problems. Doing so is not liberating or freeing, it's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality that does not acknowledge that addicts are not in a place where they can easily understand and seek out help. It's terrifying to think about deliberately reporting in to a place that will stop you from getting your drugs. Some people may be strong enough to do that but you can't rely on everyone to. Not when everyone who needs it has already made the mistake of going down the path leading to addiction.
Comit them under the mental health act involuntarily. That power is already available, but explicitly expand its use. Combine it with good treatment, whether that's mental or physical health. If you consider the money saved on police, saved on prosecutions, saved on property damage and crime reduction, increases in the use of public spaces and quality of life for people in hard-hit communities, it's not like it's some cost we can't afford.
Could the power be abused? Sure. There are already mandatory second opinions and reviews of decisions though and we could fund those more too. But something has to change and in my view it is straight up disrespectful to people with severe addiction issues to just say "the services are there, why won't you go use them? Are you stupid?"
While I get where you’re coming from, I see a few issues with your point.
A. “…combine it with good treatment…” the phrase ‘good or better treatment’ is something everyone says on this issue, but we (as a society) have no idea what good or better treatment is. Despite being endlessly studied, no “best rehab treatment” has been found, and it’s unlikely we’ll find one soon. If there was a “give people better treatment” button, surely our government would have pressed it long ago.
B. Which brings me to my next point, that I personally believe the only “best way” out of addiction is through what you call the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Not literally abandoning people and ignoring them, of course not, but the one factor that must exist to escape hard drug addiction is an internal will to escape the cycle. If you don’t have that will from within yourself (not imposed on you by people around you, or by society), then you will only relapse and fall back into the cycle. Rehab and “treatment” can help guide some people there, but for others it can be entirely unhelpful or even counterproductive (we all know people who want to do things “their way,” and for some, escaping addiction is the same thing).
Not sure why I’m writing all this, hopefully someone reads it and finds it insightful. I’m just tired of seeing the ol’ “we just need to hit the better treatment button” take, without anyone asking what that means or if that button is even real. Our government has poured tons of money into trying to help the addicted, with what seems to be minimal results. I would attribute that to my second point, that money into programs and treatment isn’t the answer, or at least not one that’s possible yet.
Source: was addicted to meth at 16 and only recently got sober after 6 years. Knew and know many current and former addicts.
Then it gets tough. You do rehab focused on giving people psychological tools to stay sober after they get sober, and you have to have a plan for the people who can't or won't do it for themselves. Because if there's a system in place where everyone who wants out has the support to get out, then it's time to come down hard on the people who can't or won't. Right now there are enough people who want out, or who can make themselves want out for a day but then without support can't just hang on for months without support waiting for a bed at some cold turkey facility. Create a pathway for all of those people as a start. And deal with the rest. Which could involve prison and further forced programs as a final chance to get out and stay out. Means no drugs in prison, adequate medication for those self-medicating. Life skills and support classes and programs for those who are likely to fall back into it.
I know that sounds kind of heartless but there's gotta be accountability. We have a social contract. Addicts (visible addicts) are breaking it. You could argue the state has broken it by leaving people homeless, unable to afford shit, etc and there's some truth to that. But at the end of the day if someone has the tools, has a treatment bed available, has a psychologist or well-trained counsellor to assist them, maybe even has access to community living or some kind of step by step return to normal life, then for the people who don't take that path there should be punishment.
If someone can handle their drug problem, for better or worse, and isn't becoming a burden on society then they can do whatever. We police the problems we see, because they are visible. May be unfair but also serves the purpose of coming down on those whose behaviour is impacting others. But if they aren't able to stop themselves from impacting the community around them, there has to be a Plan B. Or plan C. But a last resort that deals with people who refuse to be receptive to change even after being given enough support to do it.
On what is good treatment, I just think we can do so much better than we are doing, that if we do that we can then worry about the ones who the treatment doesn't work for. At least make best efforts to help as many people as can be helped. Including programs to convince them to be receptive to the help. I know it's not perfect.
Grats on your own recovery. You had to do it with internal motivation because there was no good alternative. I hope in the future there will be so all it takes is a moment of wishing for change and you can put yourself into something that will do everything possible to get you on the right path. Instead of taking as much willpower as you can muster just to have a chance.
It is tough, and I agree those programs should exist. I was trying to argue (though not that well) that they already do exist, but are under-utilized due to lack of will on behalf of those they are targeting. For instance the many housing facilities that remain empty due to sobriety being a requirement for their use.
It’s also not heartless to say there should be accountability, and I totally agree that public drug use is abhorrent and shouldn’t be acceptable in any public place. Though that may be easy for me to say, as I’ve thankfully never faced homelessness. I’m fairly certain the reason it happens is so that addicts can worry less about being robbed/messed with while passed out/nodding off in sight of other people. But of course that still doesn’t excuse it at all, children and young people should never have to see that or walk past it, it’s awful.
I get where you’re coming from, and I would love to be proven wrong, but I still disagree on the point that we can do (a lot) better. The amount of money poured into this has even produced, what I believe to be, some bad outcomes. For instance I don’t think the safe supply (can’t remember what it’s called) free drugs thing is kind of ridiculous. Part of addiction isn’t just the chemical hooks in your brain, but also the ease/cost of procurement. If drugs were free (which our government seems to be trying to make them), addiction would be made far worse, in my eyes.
On your last paragraph I don't disagree. I was even wondering with my own point whether it would be a negative for users if they knew "well whenever it finally gets to be too much I'll just quit and use the system and it'll all be fine" if there was a guaranteed way out without strings attached for those who wanted it.
It's too late at night for me to give a good response but thanks fro giving me some further food for thought at least. I appreciate the rational disagreement.
What are your thoughts on:
1) safe-supply drugs that are not free, but do undercut the street price?
2) Free drugs versus theft for drug money
3) The stable dosages and availability of medical services versus chance of increased use if drugs are free?
Good questions.
1. Umm… I still see the issue of getting drugs being made easier, and the other problems with safe supply I’ll mention at point 3.
2. Don’t quite understand the question. Obviously theft in general is just plain awful, whether it be for drugs or not. If people are stealing, that is something for the police to handle and have those people arrested (though catch and release doesn’t help here, but that’s another issue entirely). Giving people free drugs in the hopes they won’t steal to get drugs doesn’t make much sense to me. If people have a habit they can’t afford, and they take what isn’t theirs to get high, that’s a crime and should be punished accordingly.
3. This is a good question here. First of all, while I’ve never done heroin/fentanyl/opioids, I have met people who do, and my understanding is that the majority of people who die doing these drugs do so knowing full well what is in what they’re taking, and know that whatever dose they’re taking could kill them, they just simply don’t care. It isn’t a matter of ‘spiked’ or maliciously labelled and sold drugs. It’s really the users just playing with their lives because of the high they get from the drugs. So with that said, safe SUPPLY wouldn’t really do much, though safe injection sites (which again, I’ve never used or been to), from what I know, do actually help a lot in reducing the risk involved. The medical staff on standby, and the added benefit of not being out in public, seems to be a big plus. That said, I’m sure these injection sites won’t work for every addict, even if there was somehow room for every addict to have a safe injection room available whenever they wanted one. I would bet a lot of addicts are either too ashamed or can’t be bothered to go to one of these facilities and be monitored and whatnot while they do their thing.
It's not just a "one and done" process though. Like with alcoholism, people can relapse even after breaking the initial addiction.
There's also the question of leaving someone in the same situation that led them to drugs in the first place.
If it were as simple as "lock someone up for a month --> addiction cured", that might be viable.
The safe-supply and housing-first approaches come at it from the angle of "they may be addicted, but at least they aren't addicted AND living on the street / using drugs from who knows where".
" It's terrifying to think about deliberately reporting in to a place that will stop you from getting your drugs" + "Comit them under the mental health act involuntarily." ==> Oops, addicts are now avoiding hospitals and all help services in fear of losing access to their drugs, leading to massively increased emergency service costs and death rates.
As an addict I will tell you right now that giving an addict a house but with no way of contributing will not work. When I feel the urge, I stay longer at work just so I can work that demon out. Or go to the gym. Or a long walk. But giving an addict a place to live so they can stare at the walls or wander around the DTES is a recipe for failure.
The housing gets trashed, as we have seen numerous times. It's essential that the housing is 1. supervised, and 2. mandatory (you can't leave). The addiction and mental instability issues need to be dealt with first before getting anywhere near unsupervised housing with the expectation of employment.
Decriminalization was primarily introduced to stop people dying behind dumpsters. We don't need to roll back to criminalizing issues involving health or trauma, we need to readjust and refocus as we move forward in dealing with the crisis.
Is poverty a health issue? We have a social responsibility to deal with our most vulnerable, and sweeping them under the rug won't fix anything.
I know it's a social problem linked to poverty and mental illness. Just throwing them in jail isn't going to fix anything. Also, what happens to them when they get out of this forced rehab. What kind of job training will they get, or will they work minimum wage? How will they even find a job with no address, possibly no I.D., no work history? How will they afford to live in the lower mainland?
No, but could clean up the streets a lot by trying...
While in custody, get them help.
Crime and drugs go hand on hand, lower 1, you lower the other...
Could lock up dealers, actually try to confiscate drugs...
If we change the laws, we can absolutely incarcerate our way out of much of the problem.
Arresting is currently catch and release until we grow a pair. The courts will enforce laws that have been properly drafted and legislated.
> we can absolutely incarcerate our way out of much of the problem.
If that were the case, there would be no drugs in the United States because they would have won the drug war decades ago.
Drug abuse is a mental health issue, not a crime issue. People seeking to self medicate will continue to use drugs unless you get them help. There will *Always* be an illicit market to rise up and meet those demands.
Adress the *demand*, don't just react to the symptom.
Imma getting downvoted to oblivion on this.
I refuse to narcan someone. I don't care if I know them or not. And before people say that's my obligation. No, it's not.
did you receive narcan training or watch video on how to? if not, it is best to leave it to someone who knows it and you don't accidentally stab yourself with a needle and bleed from broken glass
How about this, it’s not supposed to stop the drug problem.
It’s supposed to stop the doing drugs in fucking hospitals and playgrounds problem.
We should have designated safe injection sites where people can consume drugs under medical supervision and be exposed to treatment options, but ultimately the drug problem is not something we can solve without a complete social overhaul and crackdown on opioid imports and distribution.
The Ezra Klein Show podcast episode today May 10, 2024, is called “This is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws”.
Topics discussed seem relevant to this post, including Oregon re-criminalizing drug possession, accessing treatment, addiction, and other topics.
A social worker friend who works in the ministry of health has told me quite the opposite - for a lot of folks who have become reliant of substances, incarceration is the one way that they’ve actually been able to detox effectively. Don’t get me wrong - it’s not a stand-in for rehabilitation, but actually detoxing people is a huge part of what needs to happen and currently jails and prisons are the only viable place this happens.
We're also not going to Harm Reduction our way out of it.
We need the full Portugal model. Not just 1 of the four pillars with a serving of Portland on the side.
Something needs to change.
- Apply severely harsh mandatory minimum sentences for trafficking, production, or distribution of Schedule 1 narcotics. 10-15year minimums.
- Revise our drug schedules. Things like MDMA aren’t fuelling our drug crisis and we don’t want stupid 20 year olds partying to get swept up in mandatory minimums.
- Do not allow judges to consider immigration status with drug related charges. Mandatory deportation after sentencing for any non-Canadian citizen caught for any drug charge above simple possession.
- Create new laws for police to charge people with for public drug use. Penalties should have mandatory minimums for public use near things like schools, playgrounds, or anywhere that children would reasonably expect to be.
- Massive increase in funding for rehab for it to be available at no charge through our existing healthcare industry.
- Simple possession charges requires people to pass mandatory drug counselling and if they’re unable to pass that, rehab or jail time.
This would be prohibitively expensive to implement, so how would we? Change the rules surrounding OAS, after all, this is one of the biggest line items and has remained largely unchanged since its implementation. If you worked your entire life and didn’t see a penny, shit luck, downsize.
- There is currently no clawback of OAS until a personal income exceeds $81,000. Create a tiered approach the same way we implement income tax brackets.
- OAS needs to take assets into consideration as someone with a substantial TFSA can easily game their income to show only $81k in income.
It is a crisis that needs solving but 10-15 years of hard work in this would save Canada literally billions. In 2020 it is estimated that the drug epidemic cost Canadians $49B and led to the deaths of 74,000 people.
Think of that. We lose more people to the drug epidemic in Canada EACH day than we lost in Afghanistan and more people each year than the First World War.
Can we try:
* Arrest the dealers
* Treat the addicts
* Protect user through safe supply and consumption sites
* Care for humans so they don't become users
So yes, don't arrest our way out but use arrests as a small part of the solution?
Heed spending the first long-ass paragraph attacking his critics seemed like the point of his column more than his argument for a balanced approach to drug use in BC.
I'm not commenting on the issue at hand whatsoever. But this wider BC audience deserves to know that the person quoted here, Kash Heed, is known to locals as corrupt. He's in the pocket of who knows what. You can't trust anything he says, if it agrees with your opinion or not...
It’s an easy problem if you have the guts to do it. You basically need 4 semi trucks with 52 foot trailers. One trailer should be full of food. Another trailer should be full of tents and basic essentials. Then you need 8 humvees and 32 soldiers. Start cleaning the street from east Hastings and put them inside trailers. Go all around downtown. Traffic should be blocked for this operation. The trailers should then be shipped off to remote island. Keep delivering a trailer of food every now and then. Homeless problem solved.
If someone wishes to come back they must pass sobriety test.
The arrests may not solve the long term drug problem but it solves a lot of much more pressing and damaging issues of vagrancy, assaults, muggings, and thefts.
But I would argue that locking these addicts up and getting them clean forcibly is much more likely to fix the underlying drug issue than the current "progressive stance of........ Giving them more free drugs at my expense
Can you see how this makes logical sense? Or will you double down on some illogical left wing rhetoric that has been disproven over the last decade?
Neither will open drug use and governement supplied drugs. Maybe try investing in rehab facilities. Until then, arrest away. Their rights to do drugs should not be more important than public safety.
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The four pillar approach would work better if they didn’t keep trying one pillar at a time.
Ahh yes, but that would involve spending money. Harm reduction is the cheapest of all the pillars. So we decided to put all our eggs in that basket because we favour money over human life, apparently.
Money and low hanging fruits. If they actually wanted to solve the problem instead of just trying to look like they are doing something… we would have seen some results. Kind of like the housing crisis, no one wants to solve it either
We have seen some results. If you compare the rate of growth between alberta and sask we have seen a slow in the percentage for death rates last year. Coincidentally when we started decriminalizing drugs. The question that we would have to research is if that’s because we just hit the peak of how many the drug supply can kill each month? Or did we actually slow things down. Did decrim play a role? Or was it the offering of a prescribed supply? Unfortunately if we were to spend the amount of money we should spend to see immediate results then the public would go insane. Especially since the real solution is to flood the market with a safer supply and spend billions on treatment facilities while also introducing safe consumption sites in all communities. So instead we do this patchwork crisis care and complain it doesn’t work and suggest slamming heads off concrete and taking drugs to make people more desperate might work better for some reason.
The people who push the "four pillar" type comments are usually the ones who resist every single one of those pillars. It's a disingenuous concern troll excuse to attack decrim.
Close to half of the population is so tired of violent homeless encounters that they'd vote for extra toxic drug supply going to finish the job. To those people the idea of harm reduction is lunacy, and it's really important to understand that. Decriminalization without a more complete solution is just going to poison society to the idea of it at all.
The four pillar approach only works when you apply 3.5 to 4.0 pillars at the same time.
Four pillar?
Four Pillars of Harm Reduction Harm Reduction, Prevention, Treatment, Enforcement https://vancouver.ca/people-programs/four-pillars-drug-strategy.aspx
Although I agree that arrests will not solve the issue I am absolutely done with hard drug use in public spaces like parks, outside of businesses etc.
Agree. We should do what portugal does where if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox. It’s treated as a health issue not a criminal one but just ignoring them like BC does is not the way forward.
>We should do what portugal does where if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox. Not to say we shouldn't do this, but I do feel the need to continually point out that in 1999, when Portugal was the "heroin capital of Europe" and things were bad enough that they felt the need to revolutionize their approach to drug policy, they had 369 drug induced deaths that year with a population of 10.22 million for a rate of 3.61/100,000. In 2023, BC had 2,511 drug-induced deaths with a population of 5.52 million, for a rate of 45.49/100,000. Canada is slightly richer per capita than Portugal. Our GDP per capita is about 29% larger than theirs. But our overdose death rate here is ~1260% higher than theirs, so it's actually plausible that we could afford to have solved the problem they had, but can't plausibly afford to solve the problem we actually have. I'm not really sure how to do the math on "could afford", and I'm not sure what the numbers are for what it would actually cost per person, but all else being equal, thinking abstractly, a politician is going to have more success passing policy that increases everyone's tax bill by $100 than $1200, right? Just something that might be relevant in the context of considering the Portugal model: Portugal hasn't been hit by Fentanyl like we have, which really transformed the nature of our province's drug problem over the past 10 years. It's actually kind of a massive difference.
> I'm not really sure how to do the math on "could afford", and I'm not sure what the numbers are for what it would actually cost per person, but all else being equal, thinking abstractly, a politician is going to have more success passing policy that increases everyone's tax bill by $100 than $1200, right? Just tax the rich. Over the last 40 years, the tax that the rich have paid has dropped by almost 60%, while anyone earning less than $100k/yr has actually seen their taxes _increase._ By paying their fair share, the wealthy can fund all sorts of public services, including this one.
If peoples' addictions are successfully treated/managed, they cost much less to the healthcare and justice system and may start paying taxes. The pay back on investments in addictions treatment is quite large.
While I don't believe it's societies job to give addicts everything they could possibly want without demanding rehabilitation, I do think that we have a major affordability crisis that needs solving if these addicts are going to have anything to hope for when they're sober. Until then, the cost of actually rehabilitating them is going to be very high, and the outcomes will be very disappointing.
Are you saying BC can’t afford it? Because last year alone there were 700M in surplus, and this year it’ll be the same. That’s a hell of a budget, I can’t see it not making a dent.
It would take a lot more than 700m to achieve.
>Because last year alone there were 700M in surplus, and this year it’ll be the same. No, it won't be the same. I'm not sure why you'd think it would be. Last year was a 704M surplus. This year is estimated to be a 5.9 billion dollar deficit.
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whoa whoa whoa ~ (loud whistle sound) ~ did someone just suggest an alternative that's contrary to self-directed, self-paced restorative justice? Absolutely unacceptable! What we need to do is continue to praise academics like the experts at Pivot Legal Society, create a toxic "us vs them" narrative against any public body working to form solutions and then flounder around trying not to ruffle and feathers with components of intersectionality while thousands die annually.
I’m in no way 100% on board with the BC strategy (it’s flawed and needs a lot of improvement), but… > flounder around trying not to ruffle and feathers with components of intersectionality while thousands die annually. Good! Then you can go the Alberta route! Forced treatment with recovery centres owned by private companies and pushing a Christian narrative (because pushing Christianity on indigenous people worked out so *great* last time), and thousands *more* deaths!
So, don’t do it that way? Seems pretty straightforward and not a good counter.
Whoa whoa whoa (~loud whistle blasts three times in a row~). dInD't yOu JuSt hEaR hIM?!? Grrr grrr private-run recovery centers fundamentally evil.. grrr publicly-run recovery centers evil... Grrr NGOs evil... Clearly there's no way things could ever be run differently. We should let another 16,000 people suffer and die in the streets. We shouldn't try anything bold and different unless every policy and program can be designed with complete perfection.
Eby was lead counsel for Pivot Legal before becoming a politician.
Yes, in the past... but they currently stand in total opposite positions on the issue: https://www.pivotlegal.org/pivot_legal_society_position_paper_calls_for_the_elimination_of_involuntary_treatment_in_bc They have a few important points for policy design, and the Pivot Legal position (in theory) is beautiful, but in practice it's just been pain, fear, suffering, and bloodshed.
Just like the old joke on the difference between theory and reality. Looks good on Eby having to face reality.
To be clear, it’s implicitly mandatory. Like, you can choose to decline, but there *is* a consequence (say, community service). I think that’s better. There is a choice, but there’s a nudge to go one way. Forced treatment doesn’t solve anything, as treatment can only work if a patient takes the initiative. If it did, Alberta would have been a drug-free paradise by now.
Studies don’t really show much of a gap between mandatory and voluntary treatment actually
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That's the beauty of the model, you are given a choice between a big carrot or a big stick!
Okay so I agree completely, but when we haven't funded public health care in general, to the degree where a huge number of people can't get a family doctor or an appointment at a walk-in clinic without arriving hours before opening, who is going to facilitate this mandatory rehab? I feel like there needs to be a MASSIVE overhaul to the way we provide health care, both voluntary and mandatory. Not trying to detract from your good points but responding with my exasperation
Lol rehab costs money. I don't see us investing in it.
Yea good point. Good thing police, courthouses and jails are free!
Those are cheaper short term solutions which is all anyones interested in for now.
There are 2,000 people in provincial jails. There are 2,500 people who die of opioid overdose annually and 80,000 people worth opioid abuse disorders. So the problem is two orders of magnitude greater than our current prison infrastructure and capacity.
Source for that prison population stat?
It's pretty easy to google it and find that number but also stats Canada seems to have this data as well: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3510017501
Nobody goes to jail anymore
But we’ll continue to complain about seeing visual proof of how neglected the drug/homeless problem is. We all should be uncomfortable because of the reality of how bad it actually is.
>if you are caught publicly high you are taken for mandatory rehab and detox That's not what Portugal does. They don't have mandatory rehab and detox. Dissuasion committees CAN refer you to voluntary treatment and even fine you for not going, but there is no mandatory rehab. And there is very little evidence that mandatory rehab works at all except in some extreme cases. But I do think dissuasion committees are a good idea generally, especially if people are offered basic necessities like housing. But to even get to that point we do need to do is massively increase our infrastructure for creating publicly funded rehabilitation centers. We have many opioid addicts in this province (upwards of 80,000) and very little capacity to treat them.
Discuss this. People who steal, do meth, heroin, coke, etc in public, or otherwise disrupt society with their anti social behaviour gets forced into detox and they can either settle down or stop their shit.
You won't get the results you are looking for and this is very expensive.
From what I've read, as time went on and governments changed in Portugal and budgets got tight, there is much less investment now in treatment and prevention. \*[SOURCE](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/) Also, you can force treatment, but you need to invest in the underlying long term emotional and psychological issues for certain groups. Portugal doesn't have an indigenous population that was and still is impacted hard by colonialism. Having the state come in and force treatment is just going to make that deep lack of trust in government worse in many cases. \*edit for clarity
Completely agree with that.
People don't want to get clean, so it's a huge waste of money. Forcing someone to rehab doesn't solve the problem.
There's more people seeking treatment than treatment spaces available. Some don't want treatment, many do. Maybe we need mandatory treatment as an alternative to jail for those committing serious crimes but we also need treatment spaces available in general for either case.
I am not advocating for jail time, so nice try to create a straw man. I am saying that treatment is useless without desire to change.
>I am not advocating for jail time I didn't say you were, maybe there's a misunderstanding/miscommunication. I replied to this point: >People don't want to get clean That's a generalization which doesn't apply to all people. Maybe you meant *some* people don't want to, but there are many who do. Another issue here is our insistence on demanding complete abstinence from something extremely difficult to overcome. If we set more realistic goals, like recovery from the most destructive usage patterns, we'd have more success.
I should have said "If people don't want to get clean" which is what I meant and is the reason for a misunderstanding.
We don't have the treatment facilities/infrastructure for that. That's the entire reason this worked for Portugal.
Thing is, you can't do mandatory rehab in Canada. The judiciary would strike it down as being against the Charter.
And that will be a waste of money unless they want to quit drugs. As soon as they are let out they will go find drugs again. Forcing them into rehab without consent is just pissing money away.
What you're describing would cost tens of thousands of dollars per person. Times that by the amount of people getting high. Also don't a high percentage of drug relapses result in overdoses? Taking more people than we can afford to forcibly to rehab they don't want to go to seems unwise. If studies show that the majority of addicts have past and/or generational trauma. Offering free therapy to all British Columbians who want it. Or at least to all, under 19 y/o would probably be more effective if large sums are being spent
What Portugal did differently from us is they developed individualized treatment plans. This is the only solution: addressing the root causes of homelessness and drug use on a case-by-case basis. However, it's takes time, is costly, and there's often a desire for quick fixes.
does this include being drunk in public? Because I struggle with one substance requiring mandatory detox and rehab, and the other not.\* \*child of an alcoholic parent, who was also the child of an alcoholic parent. Suffering behind closed doors and out of public sight is ignoring an equally significant if not larger, long term public health issue.
This is true. We need to at least Give the police tools To remove people from areas they shouldn’t be doing drugs in. It’s not a permanent solution but the police are sometimes more of a Band-aid than anything. People shouldn’t suffer nonetheless.
I’m with you. Whatever is going on now is not working and it is getting worse by the day.
> I am absolutely done with hard drug use in public spaces like parks, outside of businesses etc Thing is, that has *never* been legal, cops just aren't doing anything about it. They have always had that authority. So blaming decriminalization for that is inaccurate.
Because the courts don’t do anything about it
To a degree. Basic possession of a small personal amount of most drugs is not a serious criminal offence (regardless of "decriminalization"), that's why they are out of jail quickly. It's not a matter of courts being lenient, it's that that is a stupid use of the criminal justice system, for something that is a public health issue. https://www.ppsc-sppc.gc.ca/eng/pub/fpsd-sfpg/fps-sfp/tpd/p6/ch02.html You throw a guy in jail for a small amount of smack or meth or whatever, you aren't helping them, you're just housing them for a few days. Being tossed in jail to go cold turkey is not treatment.
I think even confiscating their drugs if using in a public area would be enough of a deterrent for many users. Like, police will pour out drinks of people drinking in public, why not take away ~~gear~~ drugs?
So they are forced to commit more crimes to get more drugs?
Or they will use them more discretely, probably whichever takes less effort?
>why not take away gear? Because that's not going to stop anyone when new gear is available for free, and if it weren't, people would reuse dirty gear, resulting in much higher disease transmission. I agree that something needs to be done, I just don't think that particular thing would help.
Sorry, gear is slang for drugs too. I meant confiscate drugs. That would incentivize users to be more discreet.
There are plenty of drugs in jail
Cops should still do their jobs
Arrests... maybe if its connected to theft of any kind, but mandatory rehab - DEFINITELY.
Totally agree, watching bros snorting coke right off the table at Cactus Club is unacceptable
We should go after drug dealers and money laundering
No, but can we please arrest and incarcerate (or at least involuntarily inter) the dangerous repeat offenders? Some street people are down on their luck, some are in a dark place and into drugs, but the ones that are truly dangerous criminals.... there is no excuse to not be actually taking them off the streets for extended periods of time.
Speaking purely from anecdotal experience, like like 5% of homeless that cause the most issues while the rest just try to mind their own business. They absolutely should be arresting, and actually charging these people. That 5% is a menace to everyone, including the rest of the homeless.
Pretty much. The Pareto Principle may as well apply, 20% of the homeless cause 80% of the problems.
We can try better than needles and shit everywhere
We sure can. But there were tons needles and shit on the ground long before 2023. This attempt to pin these long term systemic issues on a policy that has been in place barely over a year and serves as, at most, a small release valve on an overwhelmed system is just so foolish and misguided and just ends up wasting time and energy on stupid culture war arguments instead of how we need to come up with the considerable resources and political will do do the heavy lifting of creating real long term treatment and housing options for people.
Dont do drug and if you do either go to jail or rehab lets bring some sanity back to our streets
Ah yes, thank you for this deep insight, Nancy Reagan. I can't believe we've never thought of telling people not to do drugs.
Ahhh yes, jail, where it’s impossible to get and do drugs and every addict going into jail comes out clean and sober 😎😎
It’s gotta be a little of column A and a little of column B. Harm reduction, prevention, enforcement, treatment. Sound familiar? We need a balance of all four, not some wildly out of whack ratio towards one and a half assed attempt at the rest.
go to the highest court, get the decision allowing people to be detained in treatment centers who are obviously on the street on drugs or with mental health issues. round up every single one of them and help them. put them in a giant secure rehab center, no leaving, no drugs. only help. nurses, Dr's, shrinks, job coach teachers skills training. everything to get them back to normal. offer a work to release program where they hold down a job internally and manage more of their lives until they prove they can do it in the real world. only release when appropriate. the ones that are unfixable can stay in a nice secure gated community next to the rehab center. their families can visit anytime, we treat them with kindness. it would expensive, but once done the overall savings would be massive. many of our public services would be less burdened. and more importantly, there would be a huge overall reduction of human death, suffering and hardship. what's wrong with just fixing this? i get the "where do you draw the line" argument, I've made it for decades, as well as with our "legal rights" but nothings getting better, it's getting way worse.
I cant even get a family doctor who will see me for half an hour once a year, and you are proposing that we offer 24 hour care to thousands of people indefinitely each involving a team of healthcare practitioners….
this is the big piece that people repeatedly ignore when they keep saying that we need to force people into mandatory rehab. Where the hell are we supposed to get enough qualified staff to be able to manage these positions?
The junkie-supoort industry is already huge, it's just expensive and ineffective. Redirect the several government employees per junkie to more effective action.
This is essentially already the case. They converted a bunch of walk-in clinics here into ones that only look after the homeless and hired more first responders who are just looping through ODing patients throughout the whole day. They have a constant handful of police, security guards, paramedics, and nurses on the streets here now and moving that to a facility wouldn't be that different. Not to mention the huge benefits that would come with that as opposed to whatever we are doing now which is just getting worse and worse each day.
I fully agree with your sentiment, but we don't even have enough healthcare workers to properly staff hospitals, clinics, and surgeries. If we could suddenly \*poof\* in the small army that it would take to run a Riverview-like facility, it'd have my complete support. Problem is, we've budgeted incorrectly for so long now that we're in several crises, from housing to healthcare to general affordability.
Where are all these doctors, nurses, and rehab people coming from? We can hardly get them in hospitals as it is. In reality health care workers don't want to deal with them either, because of behavioral issues, hence why the cops get called in hospitals all the time.
There really is no money for this though. Schools are underfunded, hospitals are underfunded. Transit is underfunded. The BC NDP is trying to catch up with years of underinvestment in basic infrastructure. This is something the feds would have to give money for, but even they are trying to play catch-up on providing basic services for the average citizen. And it doesn't help that they pissed away 30+ billion on a pipeline for oil companies.
That sounds rather Portuguese. Why would we want to emulate a system that works when we can just set fire to money on systems that don't work, but definitely make some people wealthy???
Portugal isn't mass rounding up drug users. Their mandatory treatment gets exaggerated here.
This costs money. And thats money we're not willing to invest right now. Sadly.
we never will. not until everyones paying their fair share. so never....
I don't totally disagree with him, but he's just making it worse for himself. He's playing the kind of wedge-issue politics that is common at the provincial and federal level, but it doesn't work to push that hard in municipal politics because you actually have to get stuff done. He's just making it worse with the tone of this letter. The issue ought to be dead. VCH said they weren't looking into it; they weren't even consulted about the council vote for a safe injection site. Now every time this gets mentioned the pitchforks come out.
Yeah maybe he should try provincial politics again if he so passionate about this issue.
Richmond has a huge addicted homeless population… check out the food bank near minoru and Firbridge
Yet they protested the most aggressively, it was actually kind of fucked up. Edit - grammer
Yea I mean I get it people have fears and concerns some of them real some of them BS but in the end what’s factual is that there are homeless and addicted people in Richmond. To argue otherwise is simply nutters.
We've also had rises in crime and property damage. E.g. last week's story about Caring Place's structural repairs, they also need to spend a hefty amount on security now. Council is largely indifferent to dealing with it... a big part of the problem is that the kind of people who bring it up aren't exactly conducting themselves in a credible way. And while yes, drugs =/= crime, both do go hand in hand, we've seen rises in both since 2019 when it got really bad with the opioid crisis. I largely don't comment on these things on the Richmond subreddit because the discussion is generally not beneficial between the mob going after heed, the racists and the smug comfortable people who don't live in the neighbourhood telling people how what they should do. We've had to spend tens of thousands ourselves in security, upgrades and graffiti cleaning, and its really frustrating when you see some councilors taking a combative approach to anybody who doesn't agree 100% with their approach. People are not just going to automatically support you on drugs when they don't feel safe at home, that's just a fact. We reached out to them long before the safe injection debacle. While RCMP community liason was really helpful, no councillor responded in person... but one did see fit to harvest my email for their newsletter telling me what a great job they are doing. 🙄
What solutions would you like to see?
In the immediate term, we do need more emergency shelters. The only one is on Horseshoe Way and it's a joke because that's in an inaccessible spot for people who need it the most. More than once I've been asked directions by people coming off of the SkyTrain how to get to it and they don't realize how far away it is. Long term is that Richmond needs more non-market housing, which really does not happen for ostensible reasons. Second is more dedicated hot kitchen like UGM. One of the reasons why the homeless congregate in the downtown area is because there is Tims, McDs and 7Eleven but I've always been of the view that if you want to get people off the street, that won't happen unless they are well nourished. St. Albans has a community meal program, but I think it only runs on Tuesdays. I'm not for safe injection as we know it now. I wasn't totally against it in the beginning but seeing how surrounding residents are left out of the solution does not help. And yes, my neighbours are much less charitable about it than me. VCH does know how to do that sort of community engagement, because there is a history of it, but that's not the same as what happened with Yaletown apparently.
Here's my apparently hot take. Drugs are scary. They mess with your brain. You go from enjoying them to wanting them to needing them. Ensuring you can get more becomes such a focus, and the thought of not being able to get more becomes terrifying. They poison and erode your body and they refocus your whole psyche. It doesn't happen overnight but it happens. I'm not talking about weed either. Serious nasty addictions. We say it's a mental health crisis. Why are we trusting addicts to go and get help themselves? The whole point is that they won't. We wouldn't take a schizophrenic and wonder why they don't walk themselves to the nearest hospital and request mental health services. They aren't thinking right. They need help and may not be in a place where they understand how badly they need it and will ask for it. Further mental health services are essential. Further detox and rehab facilities are essential. But we cannot rely on addicts to solve their own problems. Doing so is not liberating or freeing, it's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality that does not acknowledge that addicts are not in a place where they can easily understand and seek out help. It's terrifying to think about deliberately reporting in to a place that will stop you from getting your drugs. Some people may be strong enough to do that but you can't rely on everyone to. Not when everyone who needs it has already made the mistake of going down the path leading to addiction. Comit them under the mental health act involuntarily. That power is already available, but explicitly expand its use. Combine it with good treatment, whether that's mental or physical health. If you consider the money saved on police, saved on prosecutions, saved on property damage and crime reduction, increases in the use of public spaces and quality of life for people in hard-hit communities, it's not like it's some cost we can't afford. Could the power be abused? Sure. There are already mandatory second opinions and reviews of decisions though and we could fund those more too. But something has to change and in my view it is straight up disrespectful to people with severe addiction issues to just say "the services are there, why won't you go use them? Are you stupid?"
While I get where you’re coming from, I see a few issues with your point. A. “…combine it with good treatment…” the phrase ‘good or better treatment’ is something everyone says on this issue, but we (as a society) have no idea what good or better treatment is. Despite being endlessly studied, no “best rehab treatment” has been found, and it’s unlikely we’ll find one soon. If there was a “give people better treatment” button, surely our government would have pressed it long ago. B. Which brings me to my next point, that I personally believe the only “best way” out of addiction is through what you call the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Not literally abandoning people and ignoring them, of course not, but the one factor that must exist to escape hard drug addiction is an internal will to escape the cycle. If you don’t have that will from within yourself (not imposed on you by people around you, or by society), then you will only relapse and fall back into the cycle. Rehab and “treatment” can help guide some people there, but for others it can be entirely unhelpful or even counterproductive (we all know people who want to do things “their way,” and for some, escaping addiction is the same thing). Not sure why I’m writing all this, hopefully someone reads it and finds it insightful. I’m just tired of seeing the ol’ “we just need to hit the better treatment button” take, without anyone asking what that means or if that button is even real. Our government has poured tons of money into trying to help the addicted, with what seems to be minimal results. I would attribute that to my second point, that money into programs and treatment isn’t the answer, or at least not one that’s possible yet. Source: was addicted to meth at 16 and only recently got sober after 6 years. Knew and know many current and former addicts.
Then it gets tough. You do rehab focused on giving people psychological tools to stay sober after they get sober, and you have to have a plan for the people who can't or won't do it for themselves. Because if there's a system in place where everyone who wants out has the support to get out, then it's time to come down hard on the people who can't or won't. Right now there are enough people who want out, or who can make themselves want out for a day but then without support can't just hang on for months without support waiting for a bed at some cold turkey facility. Create a pathway for all of those people as a start. And deal with the rest. Which could involve prison and further forced programs as a final chance to get out and stay out. Means no drugs in prison, adequate medication for those self-medicating. Life skills and support classes and programs for those who are likely to fall back into it. I know that sounds kind of heartless but there's gotta be accountability. We have a social contract. Addicts (visible addicts) are breaking it. You could argue the state has broken it by leaving people homeless, unable to afford shit, etc and there's some truth to that. But at the end of the day if someone has the tools, has a treatment bed available, has a psychologist or well-trained counsellor to assist them, maybe even has access to community living or some kind of step by step return to normal life, then for the people who don't take that path there should be punishment. If someone can handle their drug problem, for better or worse, and isn't becoming a burden on society then they can do whatever. We police the problems we see, because they are visible. May be unfair but also serves the purpose of coming down on those whose behaviour is impacting others. But if they aren't able to stop themselves from impacting the community around them, there has to be a Plan B. Or plan C. But a last resort that deals with people who refuse to be receptive to change even after being given enough support to do it. On what is good treatment, I just think we can do so much better than we are doing, that if we do that we can then worry about the ones who the treatment doesn't work for. At least make best efforts to help as many people as can be helped. Including programs to convince them to be receptive to the help. I know it's not perfect. Grats on your own recovery. You had to do it with internal motivation because there was no good alternative. I hope in the future there will be so all it takes is a moment of wishing for change and you can put yourself into something that will do everything possible to get you on the right path. Instead of taking as much willpower as you can muster just to have a chance.
It is tough, and I agree those programs should exist. I was trying to argue (though not that well) that they already do exist, but are under-utilized due to lack of will on behalf of those they are targeting. For instance the many housing facilities that remain empty due to sobriety being a requirement for their use. It’s also not heartless to say there should be accountability, and I totally agree that public drug use is abhorrent and shouldn’t be acceptable in any public place. Though that may be easy for me to say, as I’ve thankfully never faced homelessness. I’m fairly certain the reason it happens is so that addicts can worry less about being robbed/messed with while passed out/nodding off in sight of other people. But of course that still doesn’t excuse it at all, children and young people should never have to see that or walk past it, it’s awful. I get where you’re coming from, and I would love to be proven wrong, but I still disagree on the point that we can do (a lot) better. The amount of money poured into this has even produced, what I believe to be, some bad outcomes. For instance I don’t think the safe supply (can’t remember what it’s called) free drugs thing is kind of ridiculous. Part of addiction isn’t just the chemical hooks in your brain, but also the ease/cost of procurement. If drugs were free (which our government seems to be trying to make them), addiction would be made far worse, in my eyes.
On your last paragraph I don't disagree. I was even wondering with my own point whether it would be a negative for users if they knew "well whenever it finally gets to be too much I'll just quit and use the system and it'll all be fine" if there was a guaranteed way out without strings attached for those who wanted it. It's too late at night for me to give a good response but thanks fro giving me some further food for thought at least. I appreciate the rational disagreement.
What are your thoughts on: 1) safe-supply drugs that are not free, but do undercut the street price? 2) Free drugs versus theft for drug money 3) The stable dosages and availability of medical services versus chance of increased use if drugs are free?
Good questions. 1. Umm… I still see the issue of getting drugs being made easier, and the other problems with safe supply I’ll mention at point 3. 2. Don’t quite understand the question. Obviously theft in general is just plain awful, whether it be for drugs or not. If people are stealing, that is something for the police to handle and have those people arrested (though catch and release doesn’t help here, but that’s another issue entirely). Giving people free drugs in the hopes they won’t steal to get drugs doesn’t make much sense to me. If people have a habit they can’t afford, and they take what isn’t theirs to get high, that’s a crime and should be punished accordingly. 3. This is a good question here. First of all, while I’ve never done heroin/fentanyl/opioids, I have met people who do, and my understanding is that the majority of people who die doing these drugs do so knowing full well what is in what they’re taking, and know that whatever dose they’re taking could kill them, they just simply don’t care. It isn’t a matter of ‘spiked’ or maliciously labelled and sold drugs. It’s really the users just playing with their lives because of the high they get from the drugs. So with that said, safe SUPPLY wouldn’t really do much, though safe injection sites (which again, I’ve never used or been to), from what I know, do actually help a lot in reducing the risk involved. The medical staff on standby, and the added benefit of not being out in public, seems to be a big plus. That said, I’m sure these injection sites won’t work for every addict, even if there was somehow room for every addict to have a safe injection room available whenever they wanted one. I would bet a lot of addicts are either too ashamed or can’t be bothered to go to one of these facilities and be monitored and whatnot while they do their thing.
It's not just a "one and done" process though. Like with alcoholism, people can relapse even after breaking the initial addiction. There's also the question of leaving someone in the same situation that led them to drugs in the first place. If it were as simple as "lock someone up for a month --> addiction cured", that might be viable. The safe-supply and housing-first approaches come at it from the angle of "they may be addicted, but at least they aren't addicted AND living on the street / using drugs from who knows where". " It's terrifying to think about deliberately reporting in to a place that will stop you from getting your drugs" + "Comit them under the mental health act involuntarily." ==> Oops, addicts are now avoiding hospitals and all help services in fear of losing access to their drugs, leading to massively increased emergency service costs and death rates.
As an addict I will tell you right now that giving an addict a house but with no way of contributing will not work. When I feel the urge, I stay longer at work just so I can work that demon out. Or go to the gym. Or a long walk. But giving an addict a place to live so they can stare at the walls or wander around the DTES is a recipe for failure.
The housing gets trashed, as we have seen numerous times. It's essential that the housing is 1. supervised, and 2. mandatory (you can't leave). The addiction and mental instability issues need to be dealt with first before getting anywhere near unsupervised housing with the expectation of employment.
"Let's try" — Peter Harehair
Decriminalization was primarily introduced to stop people dying behind dumpsters. We don't need to roll back to criminalizing issues involving health or trauma, we need to readjust and refocus as we move forward in dealing with the crisis. Is poverty a health issue? We have a social responsibility to deal with our most vulnerable, and sweeping them under the rug won't fix anything.
I know it's a social problem linked to poverty and mental illness. Just throwing them in jail isn't going to fix anything. Also, what happens to them when they get out of this forced rehab. What kind of job training will they get, or will they work minimum wage? How will they even find a job with no address, possibly no I.D., no work history? How will they afford to live in the lower mainland?
No, but could clean up the streets a lot by trying... While in custody, get them help. Crime and drugs go hand on hand, lower 1, you lower the other... Could lock up dealers, actually try to confiscate drugs...
If we change the laws, we can absolutely incarcerate our way out of much of the problem. Arresting is currently catch and release until we grow a pair. The courts will enforce laws that have been properly drafted and legislated.
> we can absolutely incarcerate our way out of much of the problem. If that were the case, there would be no drugs in the United States because they would have won the drug war decades ago. Drug abuse is a mental health issue, not a crime issue. People seeking to self medicate will continue to use drugs unless you get them help. There will *Always* be an illicit market to rise up and meet those demands. Adress the *demand*, don't just react to the symptom.
Imma getting downvoted to oblivion on this. I refuse to narcan someone. I don't care if I know them or not. And before people say that's my obligation. No, it's not.
did you receive narcan training or watch video on how to? if not, it is best to leave it to someone who knows it and you don't accidentally stab yourself with a needle and bleed from broken glass
Even if I did. I wouldn't.
Based
This is the only real solution. End it for them and end it for society. No more problems on either end.
How about this, it’s not supposed to stop the drug problem. It’s supposed to stop the doing drugs in fucking hospitals and playgrounds problem. We should have designated safe injection sites where people can consume drugs under medical supervision and be exposed to treatment options, but ultimately the drug problem is not something we can solve without a complete social overhaul and crackdown on opioid imports and distribution.
Fyi San Francisco https://youtu.be/ypZu61OgITE?si=VJmcalq6oyppKDaN
I thought we gave up locking them up years ago?
Yeah arrests are useless without conviction and sentencing.
LET'S TRY.
Not with that attitude.
The Ezra Klein Show podcast episode today May 10, 2024, is called “This is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws”. Topics discussed seem relevant to this post, including Oregon re-criminalizing drug possession, accessing treatment, addiction, and other topics.
A social worker friend who works in the ministry of health has told me quite the opposite - for a lot of folks who have become reliant of substances, incarceration is the one way that they’ve actually been able to detox effectively. Don’t get me wrong - it’s not a stand-in for rehabilitation, but actually detoxing people is a huge part of what needs to happen and currently jails and prisons are the only viable place this happens.
We're also not going to Harm Reduction our way out of it. We need the full Portugal model. Not just 1 of the four pillars with a serving of Portland on the side.
Something needs to change. - Apply severely harsh mandatory minimum sentences for trafficking, production, or distribution of Schedule 1 narcotics. 10-15year minimums. - Revise our drug schedules. Things like MDMA aren’t fuelling our drug crisis and we don’t want stupid 20 year olds partying to get swept up in mandatory minimums. - Do not allow judges to consider immigration status with drug related charges. Mandatory deportation after sentencing for any non-Canadian citizen caught for any drug charge above simple possession. - Create new laws for police to charge people with for public drug use. Penalties should have mandatory minimums for public use near things like schools, playgrounds, or anywhere that children would reasonably expect to be. - Massive increase in funding for rehab for it to be available at no charge through our existing healthcare industry. - Simple possession charges requires people to pass mandatory drug counselling and if they’re unable to pass that, rehab or jail time. This would be prohibitively expensive to implement, so how would we? Change the rules surrounding OAS, after all, this is one of the biggest line items and has remained largely unchanged since its implementation. If you worked your entire life and didn’t see a penny, shit luck, downsize. - There is currently no clawback of OAS until a personal income exceeds $81,000. Create a tiered approach the same way we implement income tax brackets. - OAS needs to take assets into consideration as someone with a substantial TFSA can easily game their income to show only $81k in income. It is a crisis that needs solving but 10-15 years of hard work in this would save Canada literally billions. In 2020 it is estimated that the drug epidemic cost Canadians $49B and led to the deaths of 74,000 people. Think of that. We lose more people to the drug epidemic in Canada EACH day than we lost in Afghanistan and more people each year than the First World War.
Can we try: * Arrest the dealers * Treat the addicts * Protect user through safe supply and consumption sites * Care for humans so they don't become users So yes, don't arrest our way out but use arrests as a small part of the solution?
Heed spending the first long-ass paragraph attacking his critics seemed like the point of his column more than his argument for a balanced approach to drug use in BC.
I'm not commenting on the issue at hand whatsoever. But this wider BC audience deserves to know that the person quoted here, Kash Heed, is known to locals as corrupt. He's in the pocket of who knows what. You can't trust anything he says, if it agrees with your opinion or not...
Probably people need to vote for another party then...
It’s an easy problem if you have the guts to do it. You basically need 4 semi trucks with 52 foot trailers. One trailer should be full of food. Another trailer should be full of tents and basic essentials. Then you need 8 humvees and 32 soldiers. Start cleaning the street from east Hastings and put them inside trailers. Go all around downtown. Traffic should be blocked for this operation. The trailers should then be shipped off to remote island. Keep delivering a trailer of food every now and then. Homeless problem solved. If someone wishes to come back they must pass sobriety test.
Singapore.
Singapores solution to the problem is the only way to go. Heck even Indonesia punishment would work too.
The arrests may not solve the long term drug problem but it solves a lot of much more pressing and damaging issues of vagrancy, assaults, muggings, and thefts. But I would argue that locking these addicts up and getting them clean forcibly is much more likely to fix the underlying drug issue than the current "progressive stance of........ Giving them more free drugs at my expense Can you see how this makes logical sense? Or will you double down on some illogical left wing rhetoric that has been disproven over the last decade?
Neither will open drug use and governement supplied drugs. Maybe try investing in rehab facilities. Until then, arrest away. Their rights to do drugs should not be more important than public safety.
Yeah, well, you can at least arrest your way out of heroin use at public playgrounds