On Drug Policy

Alberta in particular continues to ride the “War on Drugs” policy train from the 1980s.  In fact, in many ways the current UCP government has doubled down on it with an approach that basically says “recovery is the only option for addicts” - to the point of actually talking openly about using government coercive power to force people into treatment involuntarily.  

Their argument is largely based on a number of misguided notions about addiction, and how best to address it.  They largely view addiction as a personal moral failing - literally the addict is at fault for “putting the stuff in their body” in the first place, and should be grateful that we provide places for them to “get clean”.  

That is, to be charitable, a horribly naive way of looking at the issue.  I’m not going to spend a ton of time here reviewing the academic literature on addiction - if you want to get a taste of it, wander over to Google Scholar, and type in addiction and I think you’ll get a sense of the scope of the issues. 

However, since the 1980s, the illicit drugs world has changed a lot. Back then the most dangerous substances were things like heroin, or possibly freebasing cocaine.  Overdoses certainly happened, but compared to now they were rare. Today’s drug supply on the street is many orders of magnitude more dangerous, and compounds are being mixed together in ways that most of us can’t even begin to imagine. 

I do agree that addiction is a major problem for policy makers to address.  Where I disagree with policy makers across the board is in the simplistic, one (or maybe two) dimensional approaches to government policy being implemented.  We cannot treat this as a singular monolith issue any longer. 

We need to implement a package of policies to deal with the issues - and it will take significant resources on multiple fronts to do it right. 

A Proposal

What I am going to propose exists at multiple levels, and involves major expansions to a number of social services, as well as a ramping up of policing and enforcement.  

For The Addict

The individual who is an addict is in the throes of an illness.  It is an illness with psychological and physiological components, and is not easily managed.  You cannot simply say to an addict “get clean” and have any real chance of it actually working.  Similarly, even once the addict makes the decision to enter treatment, there is still a need for long term support beyond the actual treatment.  

Here I propose things that are going to make people very uncomfortable, because it will increase visibility, it will make it abundantly clear what is going on in our communities.  

First is a massive expansion of harm reduction facilities - consumption sites, disposal of paraphernalia sites, and so on.  I’m not talking one site per city - that’s a ludicrous joke when we talk about large urban centres like Calgary or Edmonton, and I’m not talking about situating those sites in obscure industrial parks.  Find out where the addicts are, and locate facilities there.  

Second, connect so-called “Safer Supply” or “Prescribed Supply” to those harm reduction sites.  That creates the opportunity to start the process of accessing supports and help. 

Third, you create a tier of supports that provide access to a wide range of the social services - that would be everything from income support and housing to counselling and treatment programs.  

Yes, treatment programs - both in-patient and out-patient - need to be massively expanded, and the accessibility of those programs has to be changed.  We need to find ways - especially in rural settings to make these programs accessible to people who live in smaller centres and may not be in circumstances where it’s practical to enter a residential treatment facility.  

Looking beyond treatment, access to long term counselling supports is essential.  A lot of people who face addiction have other life issues that they need help with, and even once they are “clean”, those issues are still factors in their life.  The government needs to recognize this and find ways to fund access to counsellors as part of the program. 

Programs like income support and AISH also need massive overhauls in this regard.  Those programs are clearly designed to make the people on them constantly afraid that their funding will get removed for any of a dozen reasons. That kind of perpetual anxiety, along with the existential fears of not being able to pay the rent, creates enormous traumas that some will attempt to assuage with narcotics.  Part of this program has to be dealing with the issues of long term poverty.  

There are law enforcement and justice issues also involved here.  We need to retool our legal framework to emphasize helping the addict out of the cycles of violence and crime that are often seen when addiction has overtaken their lives.  There are some positive programs in place like the Drug Courts which channel offenders into treatment programs, but we need to go much, much further with that. 

Will this be easy?  Nope. Will it be cheap?  Also no.  This is a massive expansion of social services programs with the intent of addressing issues that are happening right now.  None of this is free - we’ve tried “free”, and it’s gotten us to where we are today.  Remember, a dead addict is one more addict who will never recover, and that is one more loss that their families will have to bear. 

Dealing With The Street Supply

We have to recognize that the street supply of narcotics has become fundamentally poisonous in the last decade.  This is a major change.  Somewhere along the way, this turned into a “big business” that has decided that it’s perfectly fine to produce a product that kills their customers.  This is where the “tough on crime” thing comes into play.  

Yes, there need to be serious penalties for the people who traffic in these substances and sell them in formulations and quantities that are deadly.  BUT - the street level dealer is small potatoes, and often they are as much in the throes of active addiction as their customers.  Those people need to be channeled into the drug court system, but that needs to be conditional on their willingness to provide law enforcement with information about who they get their supplies from.  For the most part, I consider these types well within the purview of current policing.  

However, drugs are a multinational corporate interest.  While the street level dealers are a problem, they’re really not that significant in the bigger picture.  We all know about the cartels that ship cocaine from South and Central America, and organized crime in other countries that manufacture and smuggle illicit substances all over the world. 

This is where a major investment needs to be made in law enforcement.  We need to spend significant money putting in place an investigative body whose sole job it is to hunt down, and bring to justice the people who organize and control these crime syndicates.  That may have equal parts of traditional law enforcement and espionage involved to make it happen.  These people deserve to be held accountable not only for the manufacture and distribution, but also for the deaths that their products cause.  In other words, the charges should include intentional murder as well. 

One of the things that this will require is for the government to make long term efforts to negotiate treaties that enable the capture and extradition of these people from the countries they hide in.  This is a process that will take decades.  

The point here is enforcement needs to focus on the criminal organizations that produce and distribute the lethal substances.  Hunt them down and take them down where they are.  

Closing Thoughts

I want to emphasize a point (or three) here.  First, in order to deal with illicit drugs effectively, we have to bring it out into the open.  One of the uncomfortable realities of that is in the form of harm reduction sites.  Those need to exist not only for the fact they create opportunities for addicts to survive, but also because they make the scope and scale of the issue uncomfortably visible to the communities.  Yeah, they aren’t always going to be “neat and pretty spaces”, and yes, you are going to see people going into them that make you uncomfortable.  Get over it.  Your nice “white picket fence” life is a thin veneer that sits over top of major societal issues like addiction and homelessness.  Want to deal with it?  Get your politicians to engage with the fundamental issues.  

Shutting down the drug trade is not a “national problem”, it is in fact an international problem.  It is a problem where the governments of the world need to learn to collaborate on a scale never seen before. None of what I am proposing here is easy.  Even less of it is even politically palatable in an era where “populism” means that politicians push out pithy slogans instead of thoughtful policy and vision.