Addictions Minister evades blame in overdose crisis

Minister of Addictions Ya’ara Saks says that her government's radical decriminalization of illicit drugs policy isn’t to blame for increases in overdose deaths in British Columbia, as funding for drug users and the advocates that enable them continues unabated.

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The federal minister of addictions and mental health Ya’ara Saks said that “it’s inaccurate to claim” that decriminalization of cocaine and opioids is the cause for a 16.5% increase in overdose deaths in British Columbia, as reported by Blacklock's.

At the end of January 2023, the federal government gave the province of British Columbia a “pilot project exemption” under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in a failed attempt to quell the province's drug emergency, first declared in 2016.

Eight years in, the crisis is worsening. Overdose deaths skyrocketed to 3,313 in the first 15 months after the pilot project — up from 2,843 in the previous period. This disturbing spike directly correlates with the disastrous decriminalization efforts.

This follows British Columbia’s addiction minister rejecting the province’s medical officer, Bonnie Henry, and her radical call to expand the “safer” supply program which would allow people to access opioids without prescriptions at compassion clubs and retail stores, according to CBC.

Incredibly, this province received $3.5 million from the feds for five opioid dispensing vending machines — two in Vancouver, one in Victoria, and one each in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

The MySafe machines, which are described as being similar to ATMs, dispense hydromorphone pills (a potent heroin substitute) after scanning users’ palms for identification.

The “community-based compassion clubs” that Henry wants to legitimize include DULF, the Drug User Liberation Front, whose co-founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx were arrested last October and charged with three counts each of possession for drug trafficking.

According to the DULF website, they were operating these Compassion Clubs and Fulfillment Centres as a “groundbreaking initiative and research endeavour dedicated to combating escalating overdose deaths in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.”

The “first of its kind,” “pioneering model operated as a non-profit, low-barrier, and non-medicalized approach to regulating the volatility of the content of the illicit drug market” that “built upon existing overdose prevention strategies by providing supervised consumption services but also offered rigorously tested cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, at cost, to users of these substances.”

According to a 2023 Economist article, the pair hoped that DULF would pave the way, “a criminal enterprise one day, a public-health success the next,” the co-founder said.

The pair ran one of their first drug trafficking operations in the summer of 2021 where they gave away free drugs in a police station parking lot with City of Vancouver councillor Jean Swanson.

The article further noted that DULF was being funded by “the regional health authority,” which is the BC Ministry of Health, “as an overdose-prevention site” and by the “Centre on Substance Use as a research project.” Another entity, the “University of Victoria tests its substances.”

According to public accounts in 2022/2023, the University of Victoria received over $2.7 million for Substance Use and Addictions Programs, another $20 million for grants and scholarships, $7.6 million for same, and just over $7 million in research support funding. This is in addition to tens to hundreds of thousands of other payments, annually.

With taxpayers footing the bill every which way the drug crisis goes – from funding the actual drugs and supplies to funding the strain on resources plaguing communities all across Canada, and then suffering from the residual public safety fallout of all of it – this marks a catastrophic failure in both policy and accountability, as well as a profound lapse in social and fiscal responsibility.

News Analysis Canada Ya'ara Saks Fix Our Cities British Columbia
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