BC's decrim experiment: One giant step for governments, one really tiny step for fixing the problem

Credit: No Name 13, Pixabay

The BC government doubtlessly had to work very hard to get the OK from the federal government for a three-year test of illicit drug decriminalization. 

It's a good thing to have fought for, even if the pilot is so hamstrung with exceptions and rules that it can't help but be of minimal impact. We are so lamentably, tragically overdue to move on this problem of poisoned street drugs killing thousands of British Columbians every year that virtually any glimpse of a different future must be welcomed with enthusiasm. 

But just to be clear, the vast majority of people who use illegal drugs will not benefit from this pilot. Nor will it stop the endless tide of deaths.

That's not to say that any move toward decriminalization isn't to be treasured. But we do need to go into this teeny, temporary change in our senseless and destructive drug policies with the understanding that it's a flea on a fly compared to the complex issues that are actually driving BC's illicit-drug miseries.

The pilot will have no impact, for instance, on the disturbing reality of some 2,300 British Columbians dying year after year due to a toxic drug supply, almost all of whom are men. 

What the pilot will do is instruct police not to charge people if they find them carrying small amounts of four specific drugs, none of which can have been cut with any other drug. (Alas, anywhere from 20 per cent to more than half of BC's confiscated illicit drugs in 2022 were found to be cut with benzodiazepines, so there's a rather major stumbling block right there.)

The toxic drug crisis, on the other hand, is about illegal drugs being cut by sellers with all kinds of other stuff because it's cheaper and more readily available, and people dying because virtually nobody knows what they're getting anymore. 

Fixing that big issue is about figuring out how to ensure people know what they are purchasing and how to use a particular drug combo safely if it's that or nothing. It involves a full understanding of how drugs come into our province, and how and why they are altered once here. 

That would require consultations with the importers and the sellers, as would have happened long ago were it any other product. But an opportunity has been missed again, with sellers dismissed in the usual way as "predators" in the government's latest messaging.  

One of the most significant insights we've had into the workings of BC's bustling illicit-drug industry comes from a lone seller featured in a research paper published in the January 2021 BC Medical Journal.

"When asked about selling a bad batch of drugs and people overdosing, he said, 'If it’s a bad batch, I’ll probably still sell it because I don’t want to waste it and lose profit. That’s just the truth and the reality,'" noted the researchers who interviewed the anonymous John Doe.

A small exemption on possession charges will have no effect on the illicit-drug industry. As John Doe points out in the paper, the industry is a masterful example of unfettered capitalism that can quickly turn any disadvantage into opportunity, including the supply-chain disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nor will the pilot do much to move people toward treatment who weren't already well along on the arduous journey of wanting treatment.

Being charged with drug possession is arguably pretty low on the long list of worries for British Columbians trying to access treatment, starting with how impossible it is to find it in the first place for anyone without major resources; the reality of having to wait months for a spot while magically staying "clean"; an absence of other problems like poor mental health; and the ability to put your life on hold with no support for weeks of residential care.

Even John Doe understands that people use drugs for complex reasons that are often rooted in trauma and pain. “It would be hard to treat someone with just their addiction and not treat their mental health," he told researchers. 

Now there's the kind of guy whose insights would be useful if the day ever comes when we get serious about all of this.

I wouldn't even expect that the pilot will stop many people from being charged with possession. The small amount of drugs a person can possess under the pilot - 2.5 grams - and the requirement for those drugs to be pure, are pretty much impossible scenarios in the current drug scene. 

But as Premier David Eby rightly notes, it's vital to do something. 

“When you talk to parents who have lost a kid who thought they were taking party drugs at an event, and end up taking fentanyl and dying, you understand how serious this issue is and how it crosses partisan lines and how we all need to work on solutions,” he told CityNews last week after federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilevre called the Downtown Eastside a hell on earth and said all the usual uninformed stuff about drug use.

And if this pilot turns out to be the way to crack the door open on decriminalization overall, hurrah. Until then, it's just the smallest of stepping stones at the edge of a raging river.

Haters gonna hate - so don't give them the microphone

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption sites and non-poisoned drugs for people "will only lead to their ultimate deaths."

Alas, he's not some random dude, he's a man who could actually end up being Canada's prime minister someday. 

So even when he tweets something stupid and wrong, the media pick it up and send it across the country. And the fact of that pickup gives his foolish musings weight among those who already hate any sensible conversation around drugs.

That particular group of people have controlled the illicit drug conversation for almost 70 years, if we want to start the clock at BC's landmark 1956 study of heroin use that largely concluded that harm reduction made a lot more sense than criminalizing users. At what point do the rest of us get to say hey, shuddup already?

BC's poisoned drug supply has killed 10,000 people in the last seven years. That's almost three times the number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides and fatal prescription drug overdoses combined. 

Meanwhile, years of careful record-keeping at Canada's safer-consumption sites give us all the proof needed to conclude that such sites save lives and connect people to services. Between 2017-20, some 2.2 million people used the sites and nobody died. 

As for whether a safer drug supply would save lives, of course it would. People are not dying by the thousands because they use drugs, they're dying because the drugs they use are poisoned. 

So why should Poilievre get even a millisecond of media attention for his completely ludicrous assertion that safer-consumption sites and a safer drug supply lead only to people's "ultimate deaths"? Why do the media allow him to "reignite the debate around safe supply," as the Global TV story puts it, by giving his tweet public profile as if he was actually saying something of substance?

Granted, the media did find people to refute Poilievre as they covered the "story" of his disparaging tweet. But the damage is done when you give the guy the top third of a story to spout his harmful nonsense.

Once upon a time, I would have imagined that right-minded people would see through Poilievre's tweet in an instant and that it would have as much impact as the guy sounding off behind me in the grocery store lineup about how COVID-19 is a government conspiracy. 

But in this post-Trump era, I know otherwise. Today's idiot statement can easily end up tomorrow's political policy, because now we are "populist" and prone to taking a shine to people who are as ill-prepared as any of us when it comes to effectively running a city, province or country. We like The Everyman, even when he's a dangerous liar from the privileged class playing the long con.

I relish some day in the distant future when Poilievre's words are seen as the hate speech that they really are, and when media reporting in garden-variety fashion on such blatant untruths is viewed as complicit in the spreading of that hate. 

Many more people will die because the tweet of a man given status as a future political leader will dampen political and public enthusiasm even more for taking action on what is surely one of the most outrageous, preventable tragedies of our times. It doesn't get more hateful than that. 

Drugs don't kill people, poisoned drugs do

BC's crisis of poisoned street drugs is hitting men in the prime of their working years the hardest. Three-quarters of the 10,000 deaths in BC from poisoned illicit drugs since 2015 have been men ages 30-59.

As this fact-filled story in The Tyee today highlights, one in five of them was working in the trades or transportation when they died. But while this information matters, it's not where we're going to find solutions for BC's poisoned street drugs. 

There are many reasons for why tradespeople are dying from using drugs, as the piece explains. The manly-man culture of the trades, the chronic pain of injury, crazy shifts, intense working conditions, long stints isolated in work camps, reluctance to reach out for help and risk looking "weak."

But BC is a resource province, and we've had manly men working in pain, isolation and wild working conditions throughout our history. They have used drugs to numb all that - or as a reward at the end of a hard day -  for as long as rough jobs have existed. Those of us who grew up with our eyes open in any BC resource town can attest to that.

Admittedly, such men have probably been dying at a much higher rate than the rest of for all this time; we just didn't think to measure those deaths in relation to the type of work the dead man was doing at the time. But they weren't dying like they're dying now.

So what's different this time? The drugs. They're poisoned. How and why they have ended up poisoned is a story I'm still waiting to read, but it seems pretty obvious that we won't slow this crisis until we figure it out. 

The standard how-why responses for illicit drugs having become so toxic tend to focus on suppliers using cheaper substances to increase profits. Street drugs are being cut with fentanyl, benzodiazipines and other weird and deadly stuff because it allows a much greater profit for the supplier and seller.

But cutting drugs with weird stuff to increase profits is also a time-honoured tradition in BC. The crisis in toxic drug deaths that we're seeing now is very specific to the last 10 years, and strangely specific to BC. 

The United States has its own drug crisis going on with opioid overdoses, now killing more than 1,500 Americans every week. But an overdose is not the same as poisoned drugs. The people who are dying in BC aren't dying because they used more drugs than were safe, they're dying because the drug supply is toxic.

This is an important distinction. You can't set about fixing a problem until you fully understand it, and it's important for us to let go of this wrong idea that people are dying just because they used drugs (a belief that lets us fall back on moralizing and dismiss this crisis as something that "good people" don't have to worry about). 

Were you ever a kid who gulped down street drugs without a second thought? Because I was. Happily, I grew up in the 1970s, when the drugs that a kid could access mostly weren't going to do anything worse than send you into a gas station bathroom to barf your guts out, or get you in trouble with your parents. 

Had I been a teen in today's world, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead. 

The Tyee's story notes that the employers of tradespeople have a lot to answer to, from inhumane shifts and their own culture of denying anything is wrong in their industry. But understanding why tradespeople need drugs to hang in at their jobs, while important, will not solve the toxic drug crisis. That won't be solved until we no longer have a poisoned drug supply.

The judgment we feel about the use of any drug other than alcohol so quickly sends us off into pointless and meaningless conversations about why people use drugs. (We use drugs because they make us feel better.) But addressing this toxic-drug crisis has to focus on the poisoned drugs, not the users. 

Imagine for a moment that more and more infant formula coming into Canada was turning out to be poisoned, and babies were dying. 

We would not address that with a public awareness campaign about breastfeeding, would we? We would not call it a solution to distribute pharmaceuticals to new moms so they could inject their babies and stall off the effects of the poison long enough to get to the hospital. We'd just dig in to figure out why the formula was poisoned, and how we could ensure a safe supply.

Where are the big drug importers in this conversation, and what could they tell us about how those imports, or their own practices, have changed? Where are the policy makers who can put aside political qualms and posturing to act bravely in the name of saving lives? 

We are stuck, and so many people are dying. This is so wrong. 

Blog site, awaken!

I'm emerging from almost five years of largely ignoring this 15-year-old blog of mine with a plan to get back to more writing. Here's a photo of me and my partner on a bit of a crazy horseback trek this past summer, just to put me back in the minds of those who once read me.

I like writing about things that catch my attention with some element of weirdness, wrongness, out of syncness, or some other quality that can be broadly summed up as "Things that make you go, 'Hmm.'" 

I am not a funny writer, so don't expect that. I did write one piece 10 years ago when we were living and working in Honduras that I continue to find quite amusing, but that's pretty much it. I am also not a muser about things in the 'hood, people I know, foods I like/hate, or all that softish lifestyle stuff. 

(An exception might be some unexpected opportunity to share eye makeup tips for aging women, because that is a long-standing interest of mine and I have exactly one friend who I can talk to about that. I wish I could write about my low-histamine diet as a wonder cure for my allergies, too, but I've already seen just how glazed people's eyes get when I try bring that subject up.)

I expect to be writing a lot about sex work and that we're way past time to decriminalize it in Canada. That issue is my No. 1 hobby horse. 

To that end, here are a couple of pieces I wrote recently for the blog of a long-time friend who runs an escort agency here in Victoria, BC. These take a look at two men with significant disabilities who hire sex workers when their fixed incomes allow for a bit of a treat. Find Frankie's story here, and Vinnie's story here. 

Other hobby horses include climate change, the very obvious decay in BC's ability to support all the citizens who need help, and various hypocrisies that emerge in the headlines from time to time and drive a right-thinking person mad. 

I do a little amateur video work on occasion because I find it an intriguing story-telling medium; to that end, I grabbed some charts from the BC Centre for Disease Control report on the impact of BC's poison drug supply and made up this little two-minute video, astounding for what it reveals about just how profoundly we are failing on this issue. 

So sometimes I'll mix some of that issue in here, because the fact that 10,000 British Columbians have died since 2015 from taking poisoned drugs is pretty freaking astounding. I'm still waiting to read The Story that answers how the hell we got to this point and why we can't seem to fix it, so maybe I'll just go see what I can find out.

This is not my first rodeo with a blog, and I go into my site's revival with low expectations of  readers, who will be scarce and likely still strangely obsessed with a long-ago post I did saying I didn't like David Suzuki much, which has inexplicably been read by more than 22,000 people. 

As for those who leave comments on my posts, they will mostly be spambots inserting links advertising Mumbai escorts and treks in Nepal. 

Occasionally a real person will post a genuine comment, and some of them will say something really trollish and horrible. But I've been out there as a writer in the public eye since 1982 and have skin of a rhino after all the terrible things said to me over the years. (OK, I admit that I'm still stung by the random dude who saw me doing a newspaper promo on TV way back when while I was at the Victoria Times Colonist and called up to tell me I looked like "a blowsy biker chick.")

There's something to be said for just having a place where your thoughts can be thrown out into the world - a place that I can rely on as well to help me rediscover some past insight I remember having rather than realize that I put it on Facebook instead and it's now lost to time.

 And so, dear blog, I bring you back to life. Let's go see where a closer look might lead us. 

Opioid crisis: Those who manufactured it should pay their share

I like a good analogy for figuring out complex problems with moral overtones. I got to thinking about which one might work for understanding the opioid crisis after I saw the comments from my Facebook post today linking to the BC government’s announcement of a class action law suit against the opioid manufacturing industry.

How’s this: Reimagining the issue as if it were the use of pesticides.

Like the opioid manufacturing industry, the pesticide industry is both a help and a harm. It makes no sense to just demand the elimination of pesticides, or to expect that people who really want pesticides aren't going to find their way to them whatever you do. Besides, if there’s money to be made selling pesticides to desperate farmers, there are going to be companies selling it.

But at the same time, you can’t just leave the industry without responsibility for the harms it causes. Corporations don’t innately have morals (you HAVE seen “The Corporation,” right?). Unregulated, unfettered industry will always go for the biggest profit. It’s what they’re born to do.

OK, let’s picture Farming Community Z (FCZ), which for all kinds of reasons is struggling to keep things going. They’ve had drought, floods, bad soil and not enough food on the table for a long time, and all of a sudden a plague of aphids has hit. Pesticides aren’t the long-term answer, but they sure look good in the short term.

Sad days in FCZ, but the sorrows and struggles going on there in fact affect many other neighbouring farming communities. The impact of pesticides is felt far beyond the farms where it’s being used. Making things considerably worse, the people in FCZ are dying like crazy, because they are the ones living right in the midst of all that pesticide, and the grief from those who loved them, helped them, or tried fruitlessly to get them to quit using pesticides is reaching unbearable proportion.

Who’s to blame? It’s complicated. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a lot of time looking for who to blame, because there are an awful lot of factors years in the making that have laid the groundwork for what’s going on in FCZ. Maybe laying blame could be an exercise for another day, when people aren’t dying.

So…if you were a bright and progressive society like Canada, what would you do?

First, you’d acknowledge that whatever you’re doing now really isn’t working. The evidence is pretty much insurmountable at this point. So maybe you would take one of those political walks in the snow to reflect on all those reports, royal commissions, analyses, studies, and research done on pesticide use over the years, and wonder how it is you’ve still never acted on their remarkably consistent recommendations.

You’d get to work pulling apart all the pieces of the puzzle and you’d identify that:

•  The people of FCZ need help that starts all the way back to fixing that damaged soil, and accepting that some are never going to be able to manage without pesticides; 
• Every level of government and all kinds of people are being harmed, drained of money, and otherwise suffering because of the situation in FCZ, regardless of whether they live there; 
• Pesticides have been around for a really long time, but something has clearly changed in their availability and lethal quality for this level of harm to be occurring; 
• The only notable exception amid misery in all directions is the pesticide industry, which is profiting from the crisis; 
• It’s way past time to follow the money. 

Analogies aside, here’s the one absolute truth of the opioid crisis: The pharmaceutical industry is profiting mightily from it. Everyone else is being harmed, but that industry is making money.

There is a direct line from opiate-induced misery to the pharmaceutical companies that make those drugs, and the clever bastards are pocketing even more now that we’ve been convinced that the solution to the damage caused by their increased opiate sales is to arm the population with anti-overdose drugs, which they also sell.

I think the government’s class action suit against the industry is brilliant. If we all must suffer, then certainly the corporations making these drugs ought to suffer along with us. They make their money from sorrow. The least they can do is pay their share.