Kirk LaPointe: B.C.’s drug crisis gets worse and worse and David Eby still doesn’t get it

The axiom goes: “A politician is like a man who, when he finds himself in hot water, decides he needs to take a bath.”

For B.C. Premier David Eby, the protracted hubris of his drug decriminalization fixation has proven to be a long, sudsy soak—with maybe some Epsom salts, a scented candle, and soothing music emanating from the living room.

Eby came to office with a reputation as a policy-driven, evidence-based, data-focused decision-maker, even if it cost him some points on public cuddliness and earned him a know-it-all tag.

But when his wonkiness mixed with wokeness, the best of intentions went sideways.

The provincial government, earning a three-year federal exemption under the Controlled Substances and Drugs Act, launched into an experiment in January 2023 with what it called a compassionate, health-savvy strategy. It looked the other way with possession of small amounts of illegal drugs (under 2.5 grams) and handed out small amounts of fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine to addicts as a form of treatment and support. It toggled the issue from one of criminality to one of health. The aim was to eliminate rather futile arrests and to use the supply to help steer more addicts into treatment in order to staunch the opioid crisis, with B.C. at its epicentre.

What could possibly go wrong?

We found out when ideology collided with reality: open-air drug markets in Vancouver, Nanaimo, and Prince George; injections and confrontations on public transit; addled pedestrians; encampments of users; and a general escalation of crime and disorder.

Cue the running hot water, the premier immerses himself into it. To quote Mark Twain: “Denial is not a river in Egypt.” But it was where Eby and his team trekked. Every concern, every plea from mayors and police alike, every needle on a playground or user on the street, was dismissed as another anecdote, branded as hysteria, with decriminalization denied as a cause. The number of overdose deaths increased in the first year of this safe-supply campaign. The BC NDP mantra: Not on us.

A mild modification last year, as tempers flared and an election approached, meant banned open use in hospitals, transit, and parks. But it was a half-measure, the least onerous of compromises, and far from contrition or resolution. The accessible supply at the core of the crisis was untouched.

The BC Conservatives successfully piggybacked the problems during the campaign, employing terms like “drug dens” to describe treatment centres that even NDP MLAs would warn me were too terrible to visit. In recent weeks it was one of the party’s MLAs, former Mountie Elenore Sturko, who seemed to break the back of the government and its pretension of a program on the up-and-up. She was leaked a document from the provincial health ministry that indicated—surprise, surprise—that the government knew the drug supply was at times getting into the hands of, organized criminals.

Politically, it was time to pull out the pandemic lexicon and pivot so as to seem resilient. Last week new health minister Josie Osborne took the body check for the team so the game could play on. Henceforth, drugs—or as the province calls them, “prescribed alternatives”—will be supplied only when they’re witnessed by a health professional, rather like the consecrated host wafer. This move, Osborne said with the straightest of faces, “will remove the risk of these medications from ending up in the hands of gangs and organized crime.”

Of course, whatever action she is talking about is really action against itself, a response to its response to suppress a catastrophe of its making that had so far been greeted with a pastiche of evading, repudiating, gaslighting, refuting…anything but acknowledging the plan was theirs and had proven anything but effective.

In keeping with the premier’s policy of stiff-arming, there was no admission of an error, no commitment to investigate how so many public sector drugs had made their way into private sector exploitation—or how many had suffered, even died, with this careless, taxpayer-funded mismanagement of lethal drugs.

In principle, we are wise enough today to know there are treatments for addiction, but we will not properly finance them. We know that there are Charter questions about involuntary treatment, but we will not challenge them. We take pride that British Columbia was one of the early adopters of the four-pillar strategy—harm reduction, treatment, prevention, and enforcement—but we are losing the battle.

A sloppy move like the one the Eby government just walked back, but cannot take ownership of what it foisted and fumbled, is evidence we still have much to learn before we succeed.