Michael Higgins: Too many died for B.C.'s disastrous drug decriminalization experiment

David Eby admits drug decriminalization in his province was “wrong” but the B.C. premier just can’t bring himself to outright kill the deadly social experiment.

For years, British Columbia has been plagued by rising drug deaths and Eby’s answer was to get the federal government in 2023 to agree to a three-year trial in which people using small amounts of drugs would not be prosecuted.

It was a flawed experiment from the start, not helping drug users and being positively dangerous to the public.

Public parks quickly became drug dens littered with needles and other drug paraphernalia.

Nine months into the experiment, B.C.’s NDP government was forced to ask the federal government to amend the original agreement so it could ban possession of illegal drugs at playgrounds, spray pools, wading pools and skate parks.

“Everyone, especially children, should feel safe in their communities,” said Minister Ya’ara Saks, federal minister of mental health and addictions in a statement at the time.

But things only got worse, with the health system particularly overwhelmed. A leaked memo revealed that nurses in one district in B.C. were told not to confiscate patients’ drugs or weapons. Drug dealers were openly operating in hospitals. “It’s insanity,” was one nurse’s view on what was happening in the province.

Vancouver Police Deputy Chief Fiona Wilson told a House of Commons health committee that police were often powerless.

“So if you have someone who is with their family at the beach, and there’s a person next to them smoking crack cocaine, it’s not a police matter,” she said.

In April 2024, three Metro Vancouver city councillors issued a joint press release saying, “Legalizing deadly drugs has killed users, hurt neighbourhoods, and damaged B.C. communities.”

The increasing outcry caused the B.C. government to backtrack again. In May 2024, the federal government agreed to a B.C. request to ban drug use in all public spaces.

What all this decriminalization and recriminalization showed was that the Eby government rolled out a social experiment recklessly, without thought for the public at large and without sufficient consideration of the consequences.

Even supporters of decriminalization were appalled by the B.C. government’s actions.

“The way in which the B.C. government rolled out its drug decriminalization pilot project in 2023, only to hastily retract most of its own plan less than two years later, has resulted in widespread confusion among people about what their legal rights and limits are,” said the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Meanwhile, B.C.’s shocking number of deaths from drug use has continued to rise, although there has been a small decline of late.

In 2014, there were 370 unregulated drug deaths in the province. Nine years later, in 2024, that figure was 2,315, an increase of more than 500 per cent. However, that number was down from 2023, the first year of decriminalization, when the figure was a record 2,589.

Equally shocking is the volume of overdose/poisoning calls dealt with by the B.C. Emergency Health Services. A similar pattern emerges where record numbers were recorded in 2023 and saw a slight decline in 2024.

In Vancouver, for instance, there were 10,526 such calls in 2023.

Sadly, the number of young people dying through drug overdoses is also increasing in B.C., with drug poisoning being the leading cause of unnatural death for people under 19. Between 2019-2023, 126 young people died from drug poisoning — almost double the number of deaths in the previous five years.

The answer to this failed experiment is to stop it in its tracks, but Eby seems reluctant even as he continually acknowledges it has gone very much awry.

It “didn’t have the results we wanted to see, just the opposite,” Eby said in October 2024. “It resulted in some real problems.”

A year later, he said, “I was wrong on drug decriminalization and the effect that it would have. I wasn’t alone, but it wasn’t the right policy.”

This week, Eby said, “But let me be clear, we are not going back to the old policy of decriminalized, public drug use in British Columbia.

“It didn’t work. And we ended that. So we’re in close conversations with the federal government.”

Unfortunately, Eby did not reveal his future plans.

If Eby does stop this failed social experiment it will vindicate many of the people who opposed it from the start, such as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

“Liberal elites and the chattering class smeared me for wanting to ban hard drugs. Now they say they were wrong — again. Sad that so many had to die for the latest Liberal experiment,” Poilievre said on X after Eby’s announcement this week.

“Conservatives will always fight to bring our loved ones home drug-free — with treatment, recovery, and hope.”

Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist and an expert on addiction and mental illness, has been another outspoken opponent of the decriminalization policy.

After Eby’s announcement that decriminalization was wrong, Somers posted on X, “No kidding. Exactly as we detailed in our peer reviewed analysis published prior to BC’s catastrophic experiment. B.C. addiction policy is a cesspool of ideology, conflicts of interest, abuses of power, and censorship.”

Characteristically, the Eby government last year opposed a new private member’s bill, the Drug Use Prevention Education in Schools Act, which aimed to promote mandatory antidrug messaging in schools.

Conservative MLA Scott McInnes, who supported the bill, said in the House, “We seem to be at an ideological divide here in this House when it comes to toxic drug use. As we hear members in government talking about how stigma is bad, we’ve seen deaths from toxic drug use go absolutely through the roof.”

Eby is so wedded to his disastrous drugs ideology that he may be unable to chart a new and different course for B.C., in which case, the province, the public and the people in urgent need of help will continue to suffer.

National Post