B.C. has ended drug decriminalization, but the problem still remains

Last week’s decision not to renew the federal exemption was simply the final chapter in a retreat that began almost as soon as the project launched. For critics, the episode is being treated as proof that decriminalization itself is a failed idea. That conclusion is far too convenient. The concept was never properly tested, and for that, there is political culpability. Consider what was missing from the outset: No dramatic expansion of accessible treatment on demand, insufficient detox and recovery facilities, a fragmented approach to “safe supply,” chronic shortages of supportive housing, and minimal public education about what decriminalization was meant to accomplish. The David Eby government implemented a policy lever, posing as reform while leaving the underlying machinery untouched. It should surprise no one that the result was a pilot judged not by careful metrics but by daily street scenes. In politics, visibility trumps nuance every time. The central vulnerability is that public opinion is often shaped less by data than by lived experience. When voters see open drug use on buses or outside schools, they do not think about the long-term value of harm-reduction theory. They think about safety and order in the moment. And any government that ignores that reality will pay a price. To be fair, the pilot was not without merits. Police reported fewer arrests for simple possession, reducing the criminalization pipeline that has long trapped vulnerable people. Some service providers noted better engagement with clients who no longer feared charges. Those are meaningful outcomes. But they are incremental and largely invisible. Public disorder, by contrast, is immediate and obvious. The benefits accrued slowly, while the backlash arrived instantly. That imbalance is not unique to British Columbia. Oregon’s broad decriminalization experiment collapsed under similar pressures. Switzerland’s early tolerance zones in the 1980s imploded before the country pivoted to a tightly managed medical model that eventually worked. History is full of reform attempts that failed not because they were wrong, but because they were incomplete. The deeper lesson is about the nature of policy innovation in a democracy. Governments increasingly reach for pilots as a way to test bold ideas without committing to them. But a pilot that lacks the necessary supports is less an experiment than a political moonshot. When it predictably staggers, the entire concept is discredited, even if the design was the real problem. British Columbia treated decriminalization as a self-contained initiative rather than as one component of a much larger health strategy. That was the fatal error. Ending the pilot will not end the crisis it was meant to address. Toxic drugs remain the leading cause of unnatural death in the province. Overdoses continue to claim thousands of lives. Re-criminalization may satisfy a desire for order, but it offers no credible path to fewer funerals. What B.C. needs now is not a retreat to the comfort of old tools, but a more serious version of the reform it attempted. Any future approach must be built on unglamorous pillars of integration, guardrails, scale, and communication. Above all, governments must stop the pretense that complex social problems can be solved with a single policy switch. The province ended a pilot, but has not solved a problem. The province—and the country—should be careful not to confuse the two.