Dear Diary: Inside the thoughts of Canadian drug decriminalization

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This week marked a decisive reversal in Canada’s grand experiment in drug decriminalization. Less than two years after greenlighting a B.C. pilot project to decriminalize personal use amounts of illicit drugs, the Trudeau government acceded to an “urgent” request by the B.C. NDP government to dial it back. The reason was a near-immediate spike in illicit drug use and related disorder occurring in parks, playgrounds and even hospitals.

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B.C. is still planning to stay the course on decriminalization, but police will once again be able to arrest people who smoke crack or shoot heroin in public spaces (and refuse polite entreaties to do it somewhere else).

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In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of Canadian drug decriminalization.

Monday

Let nobody say that I didn’t have good intentions. It is during times of crisis that we must show the most boldness, and the utmost creativity. It is thus that when B.C. found itself mired in an unending spiral of addiction that we were forced to examine the very foundations of our approach thus far.

For decades, a policy of containment and generalized opposition to drug use has failed to decisively purge drugs from public usage. So why not reverse the problem? Welcome the drugs. Remove our existing legal and societal sanctions against narcotics, and make them an accepted part of our parks, playgrounds and maternity hospitals.

Nobody is more surprised than me that this has not appeared to work.

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Tuesday

If an existing approach to a problem cannot achieve 100 per cent success, it is basic arithmetic that one must then try the precise opposite approach. Should an initial round of chemotherapy be ineffective in taming the growth of a cancerous tumour, it follows that any reasonable oncologist should then prescribe the opposite of chemotherapy. If seatbelt laws fail to secure universal road safety, then the obvious next course of action is to ban seatbelts. If gun control has been ineffective at purging one’s society of gun crime, would it not be advisable to instead try arming absolutely every man, woman and child?

I am not suggesting I have all the answers. I am merely outlining the most effective pathway towards a solution. We have tried a policy of no drugs anywhere and now we have tried a policy of drugs everywhere all the time. Half measures would only have wasted our time.

Wednesday

While this is not a time to assign blame, I must express my disappointment at those who failed to grasp the holistic intentions of our strategy. Decriminalization was intended to destigmatize drug use and thus allow addicts to access the medical care they need most.

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At no point in this healing journey did we encourage British Columbians to treat the policy as a green light to turn splash parks into open air fentanyl markets or to use their provincially supplied meth pipes as a means to brazenly disregard no smoking regulations at B.C. health facilities.

If someone had ever thought to ask me, “Does decriminalization mean that I can smoke crack on the bus?” — I would have replied “yes,” but I would have also said that it was “potentially advisable to consider more community-focused alternatives within an overall framework of destigmatized drug-positive behaviour.” That nobody appears to have properly interpreted this very simple instruction is not my fault.

Thursday

This morning I was considering our taxation system when it occurred to me, “Why does everyone pay taxes when they don’t like it?” Without exception, I am yet to encounter anyone who enjoys surrendering portions of their income to the government or paying a premium on retail purchases.

It is, in short, a massive and largely successful system of compelling unwilling behaviour from the citizenry. Even if people don’t *like* paying taxes and seek at every opportunity to avoid it, the government uses sanctions and other consequences in order to encourage the behaviour.

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Tax evasion exists — and a large and expensive bureaucracy is required to ensure to identify and punish its occurrence — but the program is an overall success; Canadians pay taxes because it is illegal to do otherwise.

Anyways; just an interesting observation. I’m sure it has no bearing on drug policy whatsoever.

Friday

What is the future for drug decriminalization? I hope the recent difficulties do not cause B.C. to lose sight of the progress that has been made.

It was short months ago that people felt shame at using drugs in public places. It is within recent memory that a British Columbian would hesitate to use injection drugs on public transport — even if that meant they could potentially be put into a lethal personal situation as a result of this regressive social stigma.

We can say with pride that those days are over, and that recent changes, in fact, speak to a situation of too much success: Never have drugs been less stigmatized, and never has its users been more confident in themselves and their lifestyle. I pity the pessimist who can’t see this as at least a partial victory in curbing addiction and overdose.

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