Decrim

How We Decriminalized Drugs in British Columbia

De: Kennedy Stewart

Narrado por: Kennedy Stewart

A timely, insider account of an important and controversial step in British Columbia’s strategic effort to respond to the overdose crisis.

British Columbia is in the middle of an opioid crisis. Since the province of British Columbia declared a public health emergency in 2016 more than 9,400 people have died of drug poisoning in BC–an average of six people a day–with nearly 1,500 apparent opioid-related deaths in the first eight months of 2022.

In Decrim, Kennedy Stewart, mayor of Vancouver from 2018 to 2022, recounts historic progress in addressing this crisis. January 31, 2023 is the beginning three-year trial period for decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs in British Columbia, a ground-breaking change in Canada’s approach to drug use.

Kennedy Stewart has written Decrim to tell the story of how this remarkable policy change came about and the enormous challenges faced by those who fought for it–including its contribution to him losing his bid for mayoral re-election. In Decrim, Stewart lays out how ending the “war on drugs” and recognizing the overdose crisis as the public health issue it is will help reduce stigma related to substance use, increase access to health services, and decrease harms related to criminalization in British Columbia.

©2023 Kennedy Stewart (P)2023 Kennedy Stewart

More memoir than a thoroughgoing book on decrim

This title by former Vancouver mayor Stewart is more a memoir about his time as an NDP Member of Parliament for Burnaby–Douglas and his struggles as an Independent party mayor than really a thoroughgoing discussion on the three year pilot program of decriminalization of hard drugs that started on January 31, 2023. It's mostly a very high-level perspective centering on the corridors of power with just a small street-level sketch given in the last chapter of Susan Havelock, Stewart's sister-in-law, who was an addict and seems to have died of an accidental fentanyl overdose. Stewart's tenure as mayor occurred during the Sars-Cov2 pandemic and there's a good bit of discussions on a myriad of other issues confronting Van such as Kinder Morgan's twining of its Trans Mountain pipeline, affordability and housing policy, relations with First Nations, urban development and the provision of services to low-income and otherwise disadvantaged Vancouverites. Granted, there's a whole complex of issues that touch upon harm reduction and the attempts to move away from the Drug Wars of the twentieth century with its militarized policing, draconian rot-in-jail sentencing, and the institutionalization of the mentally ill. And Vancouver has historically been at the forefront of a lot of these efforts such as humane treatment of addicts and the mentally ill, community policing, low-income housing, and clean-needles and Stewart goes through a lot of that history.

The "decrim" referred to in the title is a reference to Stewart's attempts to secure an exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) from Health Canada so that law enforcement needn't prosecute addicts for their possession of small supply of drugs for their own personal use. The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) was already looking the other way on this so this exemption was more a formalization of something that was already de facto true. I found that there is a cartoonish feel to the book with its black-and-white morality play in which Stewart casts himself as the reluctant hero who sought to avoid the decriminalization fight in order to work on some of these other earlier-mentioned portfolios and has to do battle against the VPD which is painted with a broad brush as a "colonialist institution." He seem to have an ax to grind with the VPD since they campaigned against him in his 2022 re-election bid. Stewart also has unflattering things to say about former BC premier John Horigan who also simultaneously submitted a provincial-level CDSA 56(1) exemption along with his (Stewarts') own, Vancouver municipal-level application, in order -- so he claims -- to supersede his own and to indefinitely delay any serious attempt at drug decriminalization. His rival and NPA party opposition leader Ken Sim is maligned as an ideologue with no real policy ideas of his own. Prime minister Trudeau is mostly caricatured as just part of the old guard. Stewart simply dismisses any and all attempts to undermine his decrim efforts as "far-right extremism" such as the home owners resisting attempts to put drug treatment or mental health centers in their neighborhoods as wealthy, privileged NIMBYs protecting their perceived entitlements instead of simply property owners protecting their justified rights to maintain their neighborhood look and feel. I didn't detect much in the way of an effort to understand and sympathize with and offer good faith counter-arguments to these sensible objections to the whole decrim drive. Politicians against decrim are mostly spineless obstructionists who don't want to "waste political capital on something that’s not going to happen" instead of being on the right side of history as only Stewart will one day be regarded to have been. Yawn!

Decrim is presented by Stewart as pretty much an end in itself with no serious attempt to offer the other complementary services to harm reduction as explained in former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen's Four Pillars approach (prevention, treatment, and enforcement). There's a small concession that treatment beds are often not readily available when the addict is willing to clean up; nothing more. There's a lot of mentions of safe supply but where exactly this is suppose to come from is unmentioned (Insite maybe...I'm not sure). In real life there was a hullabaloo and stink raised about the vending machines selling crack pipes in hospitals and Fraser Health's "shoot-up kits" available for order and home delivery on their website. But Stewart doesn't mention the public outcry over these more egregious aspects of decrim. Sure, a lot of addicts can now avoid having their small amounts of crack rocks, heroin, or meth seized and not have to immediately and urgently score a new hit against this civil forfeiture (which Stewart mentions repeatedly) but there's also the issue of drugged up zombies shooting-up around public parks and schools that the police now have no jurisdiction to arrest (which he doesn't). None of these issues dealing with the messy reality of decrim is brought up by Stewart. There was since the implementation of the decrim policy an ever-rising number of drug overdoses but that seems to have peeked and even looks to be on a decided decline now. Whether this is due to the city's harm reduction and safe supply efforts is uncertain. Portland had attempted something similar but had to walk it back. But as this history would put Stewart's own decrim initiative in an unflattering light it's something you'll just have to research on your own from other more critical sources. I'm not an opponent of decrim and will await the data to see how effective this approach is but it's too bad that this book lacks the subtlety and nuance that a more layered portrayal and admission of shortcomings could have provided.