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

On Drug Deaths, Harm Reduction and Addiction Treatment

Of late, CPC leader Pierre Poilievre has been making a lot of noise about drug addiction, deaths resulting from overdoses, and so on. 

So far, much of his rhetoric and "solutions" are basically boiling down to pushing people into treatment.  Which misses the point entirely. One of many problems with "street drugs" is that they are often of unknown composition - or perhaps I should say "unknown until it's too late" composition, with street dealers "cutting" a particular drug with other substances to increase their profits.

Conservatives have long opposed harm reduction strategies such as Safe Consumption Sites, or more recently so-called "Safe Supply" initiatives.  The general mentality seems to be that they see harm reduction as "facilitating" drug users, and therefore removing motivation for them to seek out treatment and recovery. If you look at addiction as "well, they (the addict) chose to take the stuff in the first place", I suppose it's possible to arrive at the conclusion that addiction is purely a matter of poor choices and that continued stigmatization and marginalization should be a message to users to "clean up their act". 

Reality, of course, doesn't work that way at all. There are many paths that lead to addiction, and it's overly optimistic to think that simple bromides like shaming people is going to motivate them to seek treatment (quite the opposite, actually, as the doors to treatment facilities come to be seen as judgments themselves by some).  

Although conservative politicians have long talked about addiction as a dichotomy between harm reduction and treatment, that was never the idea in the first place. Harm reduction strategies exist to reduce the number of dead bodies found on the streets. A dead addict cannot be treated or recover from their addiction. Harm reduction strategies seek to reduce the danger to the addicts until they are ready to seek treatment. It was always intended to be an ecosystem approach.  

Poilievre's rhetoric is a repeat of what we have experienced in Alberta, and while it has perhaps driven addicts a little further underground again, it has returned us to the 1980s "war on drugs" model that simply never worked. Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean it isn't there. 

The only place I agree with Poilievre on is the handling of illicit drug makers and dealers. Especially those who are selling lethal combinations on the street. The focus of enforcement needs to be on catching up with, and punishing them for what they are doing. 

But that cannot happen in the absence of access to safe supply, and safe places to consume. If the treatment ecosystem doesn't have accessible safeguards in place, when enforcement ramps up, all that will happen is the criminal system moves further into the shadows. The addicts will still die, it will just take longer to find their remains. 

An intelligently designed approach that recognizes the addict as a human being worthy of respect but vulnerable to the predations of the streets is essential. Come down on dealers and underground suppliers that feed these toxic concoctions into the streets. But, between here and there, we have to take steps to address the deaths happening because dealers don't give a shit about killing their customers.