Canada is truly broken when it comes to our destructive drug policies

Last week, Canadians, especially Ontarians, could be forgiven for a short-lived shiver of optimism after a series of announcements that seemed to indicate that various executives in our government had made a rare, sensible decision on drug policy. This feeling is understandable, but unfortunately it is wrong.

After weeks of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre criticizing the federal government for supporting the city of Toronto’s crazy request to continue British Columbia’s failed (and now reversed) decriminalization experiment, the province of Ontario belatedly announced it would not support such a plan. The federal government in Ottawa reluctantly followed suit, announcing it would also temporarily withdraw. And finally, Toronto itself has admitted that its desire to dive deeper into the crime and chaos of decriminalization is doomed for now, and has devolved into pleas for cooperation on a range of more modest-sounding alternatives.

Those of us who spend far too much time on the Internet have witnessed a cacophony of normally reasonable people applauding these announcements, convinced that common sense has seemingly prevailed. Unfortunately this did not happen.

The dishonest theater of these recent announcements has obscured the fact that all of our current governments, at all levels, are united in maintaining the status quo on drug policies that have failed, continue to fail, and are doomed to further failure. Regardless of the Province of Ontario’s grand pronouncements on “opposition to decriminalization” and Ottawa’s thoughtless backtracking on the issue (a policy that the Trudeau government’s rhetoric clearly still believes in), the reality on the ground is that drugs in Toronto are already in practice decriminalized.

I live in Leslieville, a neighborhood east of downtown Toronto where much of the debate on this topic has come to a head over the past year. For further insight into what has happened in our diverse and gently gentrifying community, I highly recommend reading the collective work of my brave and persistent neighbor Derek Finkle and the incomparable and fearless Adam Zivo.

In short, a shocking murder occurred in our neighborhood last year when a young mother was shot and killed across the street from the supervised injection site at South Riverdale Community Health Center (SRCHC). Those charged with the crime include a group of three alleged drug traffickers and an SRCHC staff member who was accused of aiding at least some of the shooters after the fact.

The outrage surrounding this brutal crime and the investigation by concerned families in our neighborhood has uncovered some shocking facts that underscore the insanity of our current drug policy in Canada and underscore why reasonable people clearly believe that when it comes to drug policy, Canada is broken.

First, the reason three drug dealers were fighting over the area in front of the SRCHC (the busiest intersection in our community) was because it was both the epicenter of drug users in the area and because the police were practicing what they euphemistically called “refined policing” ” in the area immediately adjacent to it. It turned out that the “nuance” was that the police just didn’t go there, so every element of the drug supply chain could literally do whatever they wanted.

Second, if you look beyond the soft-sounding terminology they eagerly used, the actual beliefs and actions driving the activists who held the levers of drug policy at all three levels of government can be boiled down to this: they were pro-drugs and in favor of drug users drugs that continue to slowly destroy themselves and their surroundings with increasingly stronger poison, without consequences and forever.

Third, the passion of activists and their cousins ​​in the public health bureaucracy and the ambiguity of their terms created an environment in which anyone who questioned why we pursued these policies was mercilessly attacked as a heretic, a villain, and a simpleton. Our provincial government, in response to overwhelming community outcry, has launched half-hearted investigations and investigations that are clearly going nowhere, while the facility and its underlying policies remain largely the same as before.

This is the status quo today. So, when we see joy in not taking the same crazy, failed path that is destroying lives and neighborhoods in Vancouver, and instead staying the course we were already on, many of us see no reason to be happy.

A few weeks ago, when Toronto was still longing to follow Vancouver’s path into the abyss, Toronto’s chief “public health expert” Eileen Da Villa tried to calm our fears by saying that decriminalization would not lead to a scenario where people could use with impunity drugs in parks or on the TTC. In some ways, it may be true that the new policy wouldn’t make this possible, but only because that’s already the reality in Toronto under our existing policies.

Anyone who regularly uses the TTC or lives near one of the many run-down public parks can tell stories of people smoking crack on the streetcar (I have personally seen this no less than six times in 2024 alone) or shooting up in the local park, leaving used needles scattered around swings, colorful slides and monkey bars. I belong to a local community discussion group in Leslieville where photos are shared literally every day of exactly what’s going on in our neighborhood itself.

Indeed, the parallel universe in which the decriminalization debate was taking place was very frustrating because it seemed designed to obscure the truth and practical reality on the ground. What a bizarre sight when Health Minister Sylvia Jones declared she would never allow something to happen in Ontario that she currently allows – and has allowed since she has been in office.

This striking dishonesty is a microcosm of much of the public policy debate on this topic, in which public health “experts” use terms like “harm reduction” to describe policies that have been shown to increase harm to both parties. people who use drugs and the communities around them. Likewise, these same so-called “public health experts” are able to describe their adherence to “evidence-based policies” to describe policies for which there is no truly compelling evidence of success, whether academic or practical.

Finally, the debate over whether we should decriminalize drug use obscures the fact that across Ontario and the country, law enforcement already treats these drugs as not worth the time to intervene, regardless of the formal status of existing policies. Even those of us who are apoplectic at the thought of how this “bizarre” descent into death and chaos was allowed to occur do not want drug users to face criminal charges (dealers and suppliers are a different story). Rather, we want sensible policies that deal rationally with these poisons, compassionately treat addicts suffering from their effects, and create a policy environment that prioritizes treatment and recovery so our loved ones can return home drug-free.

Today we have a situation in which drug traffickers operate with impunity, and our class of public health experts has as their primary goal the removal of the “stigma” around the use of a poison that is killing thousands of Canadians in increasing numbers and at an accelerating rate. All this while every elected level of government also cowers in fear of being criticized by the class of “experts” who have advocated and presided over the descent into death and chaos, justifying themselves using the Orwellian lexicon of doublespeak, and then congratulating themselves for that they had the courage to keep it up.

Enough. We need new policies and new elected members at every level of government with the courage to confront the lunatics and activists who have taken over our public health institutions and created this nightmarish environment that is destroying lives and communities from coast to coast.

Do not be deceived by the dishonest theater of our so-called leaders. The status quo of drug policy in Canada has been broken and it is long past time to replace the cowards and villains who allowed it to happen.