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Stats show, policies pushed by public health advocates aren’t working.
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Published Jul 15, 2023 • Last updated 4 hours ago • 3 minute read
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A shooting outside a “safe” injection site. Think about that for a moment.
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We have established a place to allow drug addicts to use their poison — we even use this same place to distribute “safer supply” opioids, pharmaceutical grade drugs to replace the street ones. Yet, we can’t keep the neighbourhood around this site safe from shootings, assaults, robberies, break-and-enters or just the drugs and drug paraphernalia that show up on streets and in parks.
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“It’s incredulous,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said in an interview Friday. I had just asked him about the shooting death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat outside of the safe injection site at Queen St. E. and Carlaw Ave., located inside the South Riverside Community Health Clinic. He’s clearly frustrated that a place called safe for drug addicts has made the area around it less safe for the community. He’s also frustrated at the direction drug policy overall has taken in Canada. “Giving people more drugs hasn’t worked,” Poilievre said. “I understand the theory. The theory is that if we give people powerful heroin grade opioids that are supposedly free of contaminants that they won’t die of overdoses.”
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That’s been the theory behind safe injection sites and now behind so-called safer supply programs. The numbers from British Columbia, ground zero for these experiments, show that more people are dying not less. The latest figures from the British Columbia Coroners Service show that over the last decade, overdose deaths in B.C. have gone up steadily in all but one year, 2019. Between January and the end of May, the province experienced 1,018 overdose deaths, a rate of 45.2 deaths per 100,000 population, which is higher than last year’s record 44.4 deaths per 100,000 population. “The reality is what happens is that these drugs get resold so that the addicts can buy more powerful fentanyl,” Poilievre pointed out.
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This is a practice that has been well documented by doctors, by media outlets such as National Post and Global News but denied by the Trudeau government. “The people who tell us to follow the evidence are not following it themselves. Vancouver is ground zero for this policy and Vancouver is one of the worst places in North America for drug overdoses,” Poilievre said.
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These policies rarely get questioned though and they need to be questioned. We are putting people’s lives at risk and pouring money into a system that we were promised would save lives. Instead, overdoses have gone up and we are told to fund and accept more of the same.
City officials in Toronto have applied to the federal government for an exemption from federal drug laws similar to what went into effect in B.C. at the end of January. All hard drugs — including cocaine, heroin and even fentanyl — would be decriminalized for personal use.
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It’s not a position Ontario Premier Doug Ford supports. In an interview with Global News Radio in Toronto, Ford said he doesn’t want the feds to grant the exemption. “I will do everything I can to fight this,” Ford said, adding he thinks it would be “an absolute disaster for the city.”
Public health advocates might say politicians should stay out of such issues, but politicians are the people we elect, not the public health officials. For more than a decade we have followed the public health advice on drug policy at the federal, provincial and municipal levels and things have only gotten worse, not better. Perhaps as Poilievre pointed out, the theory may sound good, but that doesn’t mean it works.
blilley@postmedia.com
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