Prohibitionist drug policy emerged with the intention to violate and disenfranchise Indigenous and/or racialized peoples through a “civilizing mission” using “pseudoscientific racism and concepts of moral responsibility.” Today's global volatile drug supply chain has largely been crafted through these same prohibitionist frameworks, which have ensured both the existence of major unregulated/illicit drug markets, and that access to regulated substances are dictated by institutions and individuals who profit most from this arrangement, including within settler colonial nation states, such as Canada. These prohibitionist frameworks are upheld by various forms of policing power, legal tools and discretion. The enforcement tools reflected in these frameworks typically include displacement and isolation, either through compelling the evasion of law enforcement or through direct force, and/or the severing from community through incarceration.
British Columbia is one of a majority of jurisdictions in the world that adheres to an overarchingly prohibitionist framework. However, in January 2023, the province briefly implemented a decriminalization framework. BC has been under a formal public health emergency due to the number of drug poisoning deaths since April 2016. The emergency is driven by a toxic, unregulated drug supply and the prohibitionist policy strategies that have shaped in/access to regulated alternatives to the toxic illicit supply, reinforced by an alarmingly lacklustre response to the formal emergency.
Approximately one year into the emergency, the BC New Democratic Party was elected. Under BC NDP governance, between 2017 and January 2024, >13,000 people in BC died from drug poisonings. In this time, very little was done in the province to directly intervene in the toxic supply, and the BC NDP explicitly rejected multiple expert, internal government recommendations to scale up non-prescribed-based access to a regulated drug supply to reduce the amount of deaths occurring. However, the BC NDP did purport to support a “decriminalization framework” as part of an emergency response to the crisis.
This decriminalization framework came with a number of exemptions and stipulations, and included an expansion of discretionary tools and budget for law enforcement organizations, which have been outlined in full elsewhere. However, in October 2023 and in May 2024, respectively, the same government twice attempted to criminalize drug use, as well as police officer suspicion of substance use. The first attempt, which included criminalizing police officer suspicion of recent substance use, was through a legislative bill. This attempt faced immediate community resistance when announced in October 2023, including from Care Not Cops & Crackdown Podcast, the Surrey Union of Drug Users, and Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and was eventually repealed. The second attempt at has been implemented, although it will face a separate legal challenge.
This latter reform was implemented through a request from the BC provincial government to the Canadian federal government to adapt their collaborative decriminalization framework for possession to only apply in private residences. This amendment removed essentially all outdoor applications of decriminalization. The BC NDP government posits that this is a method to criminalize public drug consumption, in what a number of drug user rights groups have labeled “recriminalization,” by limiting their decriminalization framework to private residences and select healthcare settings. Both policy decisions can be seen as biopolitical violence against the public, including through the exclusion from public space, and by reinforcing the governance of collective existence through social codes of morality by waging carceral violence on how, which and whether people should exist.
“Recriminalization” circumvents a major legal challenge
In May 2024, the government of BC made a request to the Canadian federal government to amend the previously agreed upon three-year drug possession decriminalization pilot to effectively criminalize all outdoor drug use.
Within one week, the federal government approved this request. Prior to this amendment, the BC NDP had attempted to pass Bill 34: Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act. However, this legislation was halted through an injunction at the BC Supreme Court based on the potential of the legislation causing “irreparable harm,” and eventually repealed entirely.
Unlike its predecessor Bill 34, recriminalization did not come with completely novel tools for police. For example, the amendment does not include the explicit criminalization for the suspicion of recent illicit substance use through fines or arrest, unlike Bill 34. Recriminalization has been characterized by several drug user rights groups and healthcare workers as a “side-step” or “circumventing” the Supreme Court injunction that blocked Bill 34 prior to its repeal.
Ultimately, 13 BC-based drug user rights organizations submitted a legal appeal against the federal government in order to have recriminalization. A hearing date has not yet been set for this administrative case, and the policy remains active in the meantime.
Under recriminalization, essentially all public use of illicit substances became criminalized. This significant shift means that BC's narrow “decriminalization” framework now only applies to private residences, shelters, and outpatient addiction, overdose prevention, and/or drug-checking service locations. The new policy specifies that for unhoused people drug use remains decriminalized in extremely limited locations where, “unhoused individuals are legally sheltering (indoor and outdoor locations),” and adhering to all local bylaws. This is in a context of there being very few safe places for unhoused people to legally shelter outdoors, particularly during the day across the province. For example, in 2024, the federal government commissioned a “Housing Advocate” to conduct an observational study. The Advocate's final report echoed calls from community members, including to end forced evictions of encampments. The report also recognized that displacement events across BC showcased government and law enforcement's “failure to uphold their basic rights” and a “larger, systemic failure to uphold the right of all people to adequate housing without discrimination.”
It should be noted that as of 12 December 2024 some components of how recriminalization will be implemented remains unclear, particularly within healthcare settings. However, existing evidence indicates that recriminalization will lead to unhoused people enduring increased harms of being targeted and criminalized by law enforcement for surviving in public space. Moreover, in November 2023, the BC NDP Solicitor General stated, “We recognize that vulnerable and/or unhoused people often do not have many reasonable options for places to consume drugs,” clarifying that the government is aware of who will have to bear the negative consequences of these policies.
The regulation of space through law enforcement power
Drug use and possession policies have been outlined as public relations and political campaign tools for a number of actors since BC's decriminalization framework was first implemented in January 2023. Some healthcare professionals have argued that drug users are being scapegoated and weaponized to distract from the overlapping crises of BC's healthcare and housing sectors, including worker shortages and an 18,000 person waitlist for subsidized housing in Metro Vancouver in 2024. Metro Vancouver is the most populated area of the province, and includes the cities of Vancouver, Surrey and several other adjoining municipalities. In the legislature, the BC NDP Premier argued that the reform to recriminalization was reasonable as it would still protect some people “at home” and when “someone has an overdose, that they can call an ambulance without worrying that there might be criminal consequences for that.” However, it is virtually impossible to call an ambulance on yourself while experiencing a fentanyl-related overdose. Moreover, approximately 70–80 % of drug supply-related deaths occur to people in private residences in BC. Public consumption has likewise been characterized as a protective factor in this emergency context. Moreover, researchers found that in urban spaces, particularly Vancouver, the risk of an overdose remaining non-fatal (vs. fatal) is higher than when compared to more rural and remote communities. In the legal case that has halted Bill 34, the ruling posited that using drugs socially is potentially the least harmful way to consume drugs during the public health emergency.
Policies that regulate public space, including recriminalization, are upheld by law enforcement, and can result in the violent displacement of people who use drugs, people who are unhoused and/or precariously housed. In addition to Bill 34, recriminalization likewise followed the deferral of yet another piece of legislation, Bill 45: Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act. The BC NDP had planned to pass Bill 45, but chose to defer after public outcry from several organizations, including the First Nations Leadership Council, the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC's municipal governments. Bill 45 was set to lower standards of what is considered a ‘shelter’ in order to make it easier for BC municipalities to use forced evictions to shelter structures and encampments. Calls to end the violence of forced evictions in Canada had been made recently by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, who wrote that, “under international human rights law, forced evictions constitute a gross violation of human rights and are prohibited in all circumstances, including in the context of encampments.” Notably, however, forced evictions continue in BC, and even though research shows that public and social consumption tend to be statistically less likely to be fatal practices than using in isolation, unhoused people continue to die at increasingly devastating rates from the toxic supply. The BC Coroner's Service reported a 138% rise in deaths of unhoused people between 2021 and 2022, citing that “more than nine in 10 were determined to have been caused by unregulated drugs.” There is a notable gap between the evidence surrounding this policy direction and the public relations campaigns surrounding it.
Public health emergency as a “sanctioned massacre”
Similar to the historical refusal of state actors across North America to legislate, fund and scale up access to sterile needle distribution (NEP), and subsequently safe consumption services (SCS), in the face of significant death and illness prior to the declaration of a formal public emergency, BC's emergency response can be characterized as a “sanctioned massacre. McLean describes US-based state resistance to SCS/NEP interventions as “patchy and precarious,” leaving drug users to die “without sincere attempts at intervention.” Analogous to SCS/NEPs, the decriminalization of possession in BC can “be understood as both a mobilization of and resistance to existent strains” of biopower and state violence” within Mclean’s framing.
Decriminalization and recriminalization policy frameworks are ultimately forms of regulation and social control over people and their interactions with public space. Therefore, the decriminalization of drug possession is a form of (de)regulation of the public. Communities impacted negatively by either form of public/social regulation, and that demand genuine decriminalization, are likely to hold differing objectives when compared to institutions and individuals benefitting from the current, interconnected relations of power and drug policy frameworks—the latter of whom will systematically seek to shape this new regulation in their continued favour. For example, both policy frameworks in BC have been framed as benefiting the budgets and contributing to the expansion of law enforcement bodies, either through ‘mission creep’ into the venue of healthcare or by increased enforcement work related to displacement. Seen through the lens of a sanctioned massacre, the continuing crisis and prioritization of law enforcement in drug law are not ‘unintended consequences,’ but rather a strategic direction that mirrors who the BC government is actively considering disposable, and who is deserving of life.
Police out of decrim
This article offers some experiential-based caution regarding drug policy reforms based on the recent shifts that occurred in BC. First, if the goal of the policy shift is to reduce preventable deaths and other harms, it may be key to clearly distinguish which organizations, private and public, benefit from the criminalization of drug use before integrating their inclusion into guiding the model. For example, BC's model not only heavily featured police representation, it was ultimately shaped by these police representatives, which has made it susceptible to police weaponizing the framework post-implementation via their weighted influence. Second is that in many jurisdictions, any reform to drug possession and use laws will be occurring within longstanding prohibitionist-based frameworks, and will face varying levels of systemic resistance – at the very least through power and societal policy inertia, and possibly through more explicit forms of pro-prohibitionist politics. In regards to the latter, the BC NDP have chosen to rollback their decriminalization framework, rather than stand behind it, which is likely shaped electoral strategy, while not reducing the harms of criminalization. Other jurisdictions may consider planning for this type of resistance to ensure reforms are provided adequate time to create, then measure and present indicators of benefits to the public. This is of particular importance when considering the amount of public resources that can be poured into shifting away from deeply embedded policies related to drug consumption and production.
The policy terrain under BC's three-year decriminalization framework pilot continues to rapidly shift. The framework has undergone significant and swift transformations, despite being in place for two years. We characterize the current decriminalization framework as a tool of social control of people and regulation of the public's interactions accessing public space. It can likewise be framed as biopower in operation, where stakeholders hold contesting objectives of implementation. Overall, decriminalization can be situated within the BC provincial government's overall response to the crisis, which has been “patchy and precarious,” and has permitted the deaths of over 16,000 people since being declared in 2016.
Decriminalization could be a life affirming policy if it were shaped to undo status quo approaches to drug law. Currently, an average of six people die every day directly from the poisoned drug supply in BC, and many more people endure other forms of preventable harm and violence.
This article was originally published by the International Journal of Drug Policy. It has been edited and adapted for readability. See the original for a full list of references.
Other readings on BC's model
Georgia Straight: BC's upcoming illicit drug exemption is not decrim
BC Civil Liberties Association: Exemption ≠ Decriminalization
BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres: Statement on decrim model
VANDU: The “Vancouver Model” of Decriminalization Will Set a Dangerous Precedent for Drug Users Across Canada
International Journal of Drug Policy: Decriminalization or police mission creep? Critical appraisal of law enforcement involvement in British Columbia, Canada's decriminalization framework