Canada trials decriminalising cocaine, MDMA and other drugs
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
BC can take that exact same money that it's currently spending to lock people up, and instead spend it on public health solutions that have been shown time and time again to improve outcomes and make significant progress towards this issue. From an outcome-based policy perspective, this is an obvious choice.
I have family there and even big time dealers rarely do prison time unless it some bigger criminal conspiracy.
Users? Never. Even when repeated charged.
Drug users were still actively policed with users reporting feeling "harassed" as their drugs were often confiscated, which simply made their life worse and didn't help them at all.
With this change police can no longer confiscate drugs, so the intent is to reduce police pressure on drug users.
As there are still limits to the amount of drugs that can carried, there remains the possibility for severely active policing, harassment and street checks in police actively checking people to see how much drugs they're carrying.
It's like when marijuana was legalized in CA a few year back. You could walk down the street smoking a joint for a couple decades before that.
This does nothing but updates the law to reflect how it was already being enforced. Thus no real change.
As I mentioned, in BC, not long ago a prolific dealer, caught with kgs of meth was convicted to only at-home observation. Basically "pinky promise you won't commit more crimes".
If a huge dealer isn't going to prison, it's pretty clear users aren't even being bothered.
At least in America, even if you decriminalize something, there's something akin to the military industrial complex with healthcare -- they think becauase they felt ENTITLED to work in the medical field, and racked up debt, they should able to cause people to die of depression as they're punished for making healthy decisions.
For example, if I'd woken up yesterday and had a bowl of CBG rich, high THC indica, then did email for two hours, then did two hours of coding, I could do enough knowledge work to earn my housing and food for the week.
Instead I'm running around throwing coffees on credit cards because when I tried to do things "by the book" in my home state of PA, anytime I start to make a healthy decision, someone with a vested interst tries to knock me off kilter.
(Congrats! I'm sitting in a café in my neighborhood nursing wounds from a hate crime, with a can of mace in my backpack, as the entire world seems to lose their minds. Is this the cyberpunk future we envisioned, or are Netflix and weed the new bread and circuses?)
LSD has the opposite problem where it's too easy to go down a refactoring wormhole or just get sucked into the internet because you read something on Medium and needed to know MORE.
I'm all for doing this, and I hope it works, but "time and time again" is a stretch. Where, Portugal and Oregon? Where else? This is still experimental and by no means a "no-brainer".
So anything else would be better, like what we've done in Oregon.
But you're right that we haven't pushed the treatment aspect hard enough. So let's fix that.
But I'm not paying for the old broken system anymore. Pure boondoggle.
When the ballot measure was announced in Oregon, it presented the case for decriminalization in optimistic terms. I think a lot of people, including myself, voted for it believing that it would make things better for everyone, but it didn’t. For most people who aren’t drug users, things got much worse, especially in Portland. The negative externalities of drug use are much more present in the average citizen’s everyday life than they were before decriminalization was enacted.
For some people, decriminalization is still a net positive, because it aligns with their principles and values. I get the impression that you may be in this group. Not everyone shares the view that people should have an unassailable right to take drugs, regardless of the consequences. I would count myself in the latter group. I’m not sure I can agree with your assertion that this system is better than what came before. Perhaps for those who would have been likely to face jail time under the previous system, and maybe that makes the trade off in worse living conditions for the rest of us worthwhile, but I can’t say for sure that if I had to vote for decriminalization over again, knowing what I do now. that I would make the same choice I did the last time.
I voted for decriminalization because the existing expensive system didn't work and was actively harmful in many ways.
You're saying that it kinda worked before, and you're seeing some things that are worse now. I don't disagree. But I think we can fix those things.
I feel that what we had before was a local maximum. We have to take a step down to get to a better place. (Well, we probably didn't _have_ to take a step down, but just taking a first step is politically difficult, let alone getting a complete solution in place.)
But I was under no illusion that this was going to be a magical cure-all right away. I think in some ways things are better already, and in some ways they are worse. But this is just the first step in a long process of fixing this mess.
If I said we should put alcoholics in jail for possession of a beer, most people would rightly look at me like I were mad. But we live in a world where we do exactly this with drug addicts. And for the last 50 years we've had Al Capone wannabes all over the place... It's just not working. We fixed this before. We can fix it again.
As for the right to take drugs, well, we can get philosophical fast. But practically speaking, people _did_ take drugs and they were easy to get. Their "right" to take drugs wasn't a factor.
So if there's a problem with addicts on the streets, copy a program that's had success. (We used to put them in jail, but there were always addicts on the streets--jail didn't do anything.) If there's a problem with gang crime, remove their motivation and their sources of funding.
Under the War on Drugs, Americans demanded drugs in gigantic quantities. What is the right way to handle this demand?
Also important to note that this has to happen in agreement with both the provincial and federal governments, which is far from guaranteed to succeed in other provinces. See: Alberta.
IMO this is a more detailed article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/opioid-crisis-bc-canada-1.6...
But if you're looking to trial this and you have a province that is asking to be allowed to try it, then using the province as the experiment ground is the obvious choice.
The reason provinces need to agree is because healthcare is under their jurisdiction. Parliament and Health Canada will not impose a drastic shift in drug/addiction management on the provinces without working with their health units.
For instance, only the BC government and the Toronto Health Unit have petitioned thus far.
For one, healthcare is purely the purview of the province. The federal government has no ability to force provinces to treat drug use as a healthcare issue.
Secondly, enforcement of laws in BC is a mix of both provincial and federal and this gives the provincial government leeway. In BC, the RCMP is responsible for both provincial and federal enforcement. One of the earlier marijuana legalization efforts in British Columbia, which was supported by mayors and previous provincial ministers, hinged on enforcement. The plan was effectively to order law enforcement to not enforce marijuana laws. The province itself couldn't strike the law, but they could effectively not comply. Admittedly this is a grey area, which theoretically would require the courts to sort out, but in practice it shows some viability of the approach.
In general, Canada's governments skews heavily towards provinces rather than federal (unlike the USA which has a very big federal government, most Canadian gov employees are provincial). Provinces have had the upper hand since Confederation and have been unwilling to give up much power. As such, I doubt how much approval the province needs from the federal for an action like this.
> See: Alberta.
at least Alberta is only about 11% of Canada.... Ontario and Québec together account for about 60% of Canada... (by population)
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada_by_provin...
So you have 'mainstream' online shrooms shops in Canada. It's great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's easy for everyone to assume that magic mushrooms are almost legal (like cannabis was) even though it's very different. Medicinal cannabis was around for a long time; currently Health Canada only allows ~80 people in the country to use psilocybin for health.
But why didn't they include psilocybin or other psychedelics in this decriminalization? It is because they are defacto decriminalized already due to this policing decision?
(I was trying to stick to flower so I didn't look hard for magic brownies, but honestly I think poundcake tastes better -- now that I don't drink I often want to grab something like a poundcake or pocky that has calories and carbs but not as much as a Hershey bar, when I literally just want something small to settle my stomach and have zero desire for psychoactivity)
Doing psilocybint was a lifechanging experience, in a positive way -- it cured me of a huge chunk of my depression, at the expense I saw every interaction that followed, including two coworkers collaborating to try to get me to step in front of a train.
One stood, and told me it was safe to cross, as the other looked around the corner to make sure a tram was coming. I she reads these: I gave you my salary information and I told you this isn't high school, and then you tried to fake an accidental death.
In parallel with that, a different woman, from a different country, also attending the conferene, told me that some people made it through the fall of the GDR and the Nazis unpunished.
I deeply appreciate interactions like the second, but I will never forgive or forget that when I tried to do what people told me to since childhood, someone tried to kill me, a pattern that needs to end.
(I've only been to Vancouver once, it was a really nice city when I visited but like any similar sized one in the states, you gotta be careful -- it's not Ottawa!!)
Because a) they contribute to very little of the problems this move is focussed on, b) there are a lot of psychedelics, and any additional drugs included in this policy probably added to the risk of it not being approved, and possibly c) not wanting to run the risk of having some kind of psychedelic incident that the media run with as a scare story, because "Doctor's daughter jumps out of a window on acid" will trump any number of "Petty crime, burglary and muggings are down 40% from last year" stories.
1.) Dealers have learned to take advantage of the personal use amount protection by keeping small amounts on their person and a stash nearby.
2.) Several gangs from larger West Coast cities have moved here to expand their territory. We’ve had a big uptick in shootings in the past few years, and a lot of them have been due to this. There was an inciting incident in which a prominent member was killed at a memorial service, which resulted in a back and forth retaliation war that killed a lot of people.
3.) Related to #1 and #2, these gangs have learned that the homeless community is both an ideal customer and an ideal base of operations. Dealers often set up shop in a tent in the larger encampments, or in an RV nearby. This has made the meth and fentanyl problem amongst that community much worse.
4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low.
When this issue was presented as a ballot measure, it was described as following Portugal’s model. However, our implementation is missing a key ingredient: consequences. Although Portugal did decriminalize drugs, they don’t just give people a pamphlet about where to get help and send them on their way. Instead they have a series of interventions, managed by doctors and social workers, that impose increasing penalties as a person’s addiction becomes more harmful to the community, and they don’t permit drug use in public. Lacking these features, the net effect of Oregon’s decriminalization measure has been a big increase in public drug use and not much else.
This is not a problem for me, as I believe drugs should be legal, and neither users nor dealer should be penalized.
On points 2 and 3, regarding drug gang violence:
This is a problem with the half-way measure of decriminalization as opposed to full legalization. When drugs are fully legal and manufacturing/selling them is legal then there'll be no shootings over drug turf any more than Phizer and Merk shoot each other over the sale of Viagra.
"4.) It’s too early to judge, but so far it’s looking like the rate at which addicts who are offered resources to help them actually accept that help is very low."
What "help" are you talking about?
Grown adults whose lives are absolutely miserable often turn to drugs because it's the one source of pleasure, even ecstasy that they have in their life -- the drugs are so intensely fantastic that they eclipse nearly everything else they've ever experienced, to a degree non-drug users can't even imagine.... and then someone offers to take that away so they can go back to their miserable lives with no hope of escape? Why wouldn't they refuse?
If you'd have legalized dealing you wouldn't have the violence. Drug trafficking and dealing is only violent because they can't use state violence (via the courts) to settle their business disputes.
What makes them equal pharmacologically?
Coke is not equal (I mean it is arguably zero harm if taken rarely, but pretty addictive and serious harm if taken regularly), MDMA and meth are extremely similar substances chemically (MA=meth) and have similar mechanisms of action. Same harm prevention techniques work great with both. The most important difference is MDMA being harder to abuse than meth is, because a number of reasons. Most of MDMA users take it occasionally for good, most of meth users take it regularly for harm. AFAIK. Obviously there are many exceptions.
Doses are incredibly portant when discussing the mechanisms of drugs and comparing them because a compound may interact with new and different proteins when the concentration gets high enough. Recreational doses for methamphetamine and cocaine are all over the place partially due to the fact that you can develop tolerance and increase your dose. This doesn't really happen with MDMA as much, and while you can take repeated doses they will rapidly stop working if taken within a small enough time frame. Methamphetamine and cocaine do not have the same tolerance build up
While cocaine is a triple reuptake inhibitor and does interact with serotonin, I don't think its comparable to MDMA
Causes dopamine efflux out of the uptake transporter*
The better criterion is the typical harm to the user. It's lower in MDMA because it's very difficult to use too much, seems to have a low potential for addiction, and is very rarely lethal. Generally usage patterns for MDMA users are much less harmful than illegal cocaine or meth users.
The studies I'm aware of were done on mice, which have a significantly different metabolism than humans. Not to mention there has been no mention of neurotoxicity from the current MAPS studies.
In any case, the idea that vyvanse shows that meth can easily be taken with small negative effects is wrong, because Vyvanse isn't meth, and meth is very rarely prescribed because it's worse for your health than other amphetamines, and even when it is prescribed it's typically far safer than steet meth.
> it's chemically different to meth you'd find on the street
Well yeah, but the MDMA on the street isn't really pure MDMA either.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
> I doubt you can do MDMA even once weekly for a year without being much worse off in the end
I know some people who did this while in university (twice at a week at times). I would say it definitely did have some negative effect (mostly depressed mood - leading to actual depression in some cases but not others), but that this didn't persist long past the period of use (a few months), and none of these people still use MDMA with such regularity (a lot of them do still take it occasionally), all of them passed their degrees and have good jobs and normal lives now.
I work in downtown and got to see junkies shooting up in broad daylight, the cops weren't arresting them for possession, they just walked by like everyone else.
These drugs have been unofficially decrimininalized for years in BC. This doesn't change anything.
> The fear of being criminalized has led many people to hide their addiction and use drugs alone.
They have literal camps of homeless near Chinatown/Gastown with pockets everywhere else. They don't seem to be shy about their substance abuse.
Keeping drugs illegal allows selective enforcement, where people are treated differently at the whim of law enforcement.
This will not lead to a quality of life improvement for people in Vancouver.
The better solution is to treat it like alcohol - legalize it but make being a nuisance still be a violation (ie Disorderly Conduct and Public Intoxication). This makes it clear it shouldn't be enforced say in a night club or likely a homeless camp - but still allows police to intervene with people causing problems.
It depends on the cop, the situation, who you are, and the cop's mood.
It's the most vulnerable, powerless, and despised (like poor drug addicts) who are most likely to have some asshole, powertripping cop selectively target -- whether or not the victim is doing anything wrong.
With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days' worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals' own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction. The commission assesses whether the individual is addicted and suggests treatment as needed. Nonaddicted individuals may receive a warning or a fine. However, the commission can decide to suspend enforcement of these penalties for six months if the individual agrees to get help—an information session, motivational interview or brief intervention—targeted to his or her pattern of drug use. If that happens and the person doesn't appear before the commission again during the six-month period, the case is closed.
> in Vancouver
You gotta pick one though. There are actual, objective space constraints that mean not everyone can have a SFH in a city hemmed in by mountains, ocean, and an international border. You might have to settle for an apartment.
That apartments are expensive and not as nice as they should be in ways they could be is another matter entirely, and one I will take your side on every day of the week! But limited supply of land leading to exhorbitant prices can't really be avoided.
There has been lots of evidence that the police very strongly police drug use and regularly confiscate drugs from drug users.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/09/18/Police-Drug-Seizures-DTES...
This is one of the core main changes that will be coming from this legislation. It's real decriminalization and the police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs.
This is likely a practical precursor to enabling doctors to prescribe a safe supply of drugs so that drug users don't have to rely on toxic street drugs that will kill them.
But beyond that, if police are no longer stopping and frisking drug users to confiscate their drugs, then this should limit risky drug use behaviours which should save lives. Right now people use drugs by themselves quickly to avoid the police. If they're no longer afraid of the police it may increase the likelihood that they use safe injection sites and more public drug use sites where they are safer and can be more easily connected with the health system.
Legalization would solve both those problems.
It's not clear to me we want, for example, heroin to be freely available. So it seems like a good least worst option.
This system is amazing, and I can only wonder why it is not implemented everywhere (Switzerland and Portugal are working examples).
I would like to think that this decriminalization change is a necessary precursor to this and that we will be moving swiftly to get Doctors on board around prescribing people the drugs they need to get them off the toxic street drugs.
I mean presumably Doctors would decline to write a prescription for a drug that is illegal to hold.
Very crude and unhelpful anecdote coming: I recently travelled to a US West Coast city for the first time in 4 years, and the change was stark: homeless in every street corner, drug dealers selling meth and heroin on the street, while tech workers were driving beside in their luxury SUVs. I couldn't help but feel like this city has become Gotham, and that crime was everywhere; and there was nothing anyone could do.
I know it's not just US cities, but the only place in Canada (as a Canadian) I've seen this similar devolution is in Vancouver.
I'd honestly really appreciate being directed to arguments that showcase that decriminalization of drugs and theft provide any positive outcomes beyond less incarceration rates. I really feel for the people on the street who have gotten there, and the residents that live nearby - I would certainly not want to live there or visit again.
(I spent a couple of weeks in Boulder one Winter and my knuckles still ache when I think about it.)
I'd also recommending looking into the UK's previous method of treating opioid addiction, commonly referred to as "The British system." Vice is hardly an unbiased source, but they serve as a good entry point on this topic imo: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw4nnk/how-the-us-stopped-a-...
It's important to note that the systems people hold up as evidence of decriminalization's success are rarely "solely" down to decriminalization. Typically, they involve a broader "substance-abuse-as-public-health-crisis" approach. However, decriminalization is essential for such an approach to work.
Instead what we're seeing is people searching around for new innovative approaches to the problem that haven't be tried yet.
To your point around crime, it is thought that this decriminalization effort may reduce petty theft.
One of the most significant changes being made here in Vancouver is that police can no longer confiscate small amounts of drugs. Up to this point they were doing this very often. Not just drug dealers, but frequently confiscating from regular users.
It is thought that this active policing and confiscation has helped to contribute to a cycle of petty theft, in that the police are effectively robbing drug users and forcing them to spend more of their income on drugs. When a person's drugs they need to feel normal are confiscated, their need for them doesn't go away, and they immediately have a new problem in that need to buy more. Stealing something to sell from a car or store is a very quick way to get that money. Effectively at this point not confiscating drugs is giving drug users more income and reducing pressure to steal to earn more income.
Will people continue to steal for other reasons? Perhaps some. There are also lots of agencies giving free food and there is minimum assistance and (not enough) social housing, so it is argued that the support network is good enough that people shouldn't need to steal to survive.
The next step here as well is that this decriminalization is a path to a safe prescribed supply of drugs, which would further save drug users money.
meth and heroin are quite criminalized over the whole of the US yet this is still happening.
the drugs are just a symptom -- both on a personal level and on a societal level.
Except I really did care, it's just that I forgot what that feels like, because of all the drugs! If you don't offer addicts a chance to get back to real life, they will usually stay addicts. Ideas and threats can't compete with a fantasy world, only reality can.
It's hard to applaud the government for finally turning away from Regan era drug policy thinking and enacting this change because it's taken years and the amount of dead due to inaction so great.
It has been obvious for years that there was a toxic drug crisis on the street, that the drugs were poisoned and that people were overdosing and dying because it was impossible to know what was in the drugs and how much to use without overdosing.
The real solution to this problem will be to replace the toxic street drugs with a safe supply of prescribed drugs so that people know what they're using.
This decriminalization move is a small step toward that future outcome, while in the mean time making it safer for drug users to using in a safe injection site context without fear that they're doing something illegal and having their drugs confiscated by police.
> Adults will be allowed to possess a combined total of 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA.
> While those substances will remain illegal, adults found in possession for personal use will not be arrested, charged or have their drugs seized. Instead, they will be offered information on available health and social services
> In its request to the federal government last year, BC said it asked for the drug laws exemption in order "to remove the shame that often prevents people from reaching out for life-saving help
Decriminalization solves the mass incarceration issue, possibly, but there are other things to think about.
I can't emphasize this enough. If you hate drugs and think they're strictly horrible for society, what's worse is us ignoring the underlying reasons for using drugs to extreme levels.
If anyone hasn't heard of Rat Park, please do yourself and everyone a favor and watch this video / read on it
"How the flawed Rat Park experiment launched the drug war"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-0KfwFCMRM&ab_channel=Freet...
Portugal thinks otherwise.
- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...