Tries to claim decriminalization won't allow for open drug use when it clearly will
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Dr. Eileen de Villa wants you to believe that if Toronto follows British Columbia’s lead and decriminalizes all hard drugs, everything will be fine.
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In a video statement released Tuesday, de Villa said that if hard drugs are decriminalized, people won’t be using drugs in public willy nilly.
“On open public drug use, let me be perfectly clear,” de Villa said. “Lighting up a crack pipe in a playground or injecting drugs on the subway, these are not acceptable and should not be allowed.”
Except under the proposal the city put forward to the federal government, those activities would be allowed. The city was very clear in its proposal, dubbed the Toronto Model, that drug use would only be prohibited in child-care facilities, K-12 schools and airports.
That means police would be powerless to stop someone sitting down at your local community playground and lighting up a crack pipe as children played all around. Officers would have no tools at their disposal to deal with someone who was injecting drugs on the subway.
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The proponents of this plan continually say that drug addiction is a health issue and not a law enforcement issue and people shouldn’t be charged for small amounts of drugs for personal use. According to the city’s own proposal for decriminalization, there were 617 people charged with simple possession in 2021 but in 581 of those instances, possession was not the only charge, it was an add on to other charges such as assault.
That means just 36 people were charged with simple possession as the sole offence in 2021.
This proves the activists, like de Villa, are making a false argument about policing and charges.
Taking away the ability of police to deal with people who are causing public disorder through their open drug use in public places will lead to chaos. This is part of the reason that British Columbia’s Premier David Eby has asked the federal government to recriminalize hard drugs in most instances.
These drugs would still be legal in private dwellings, even shelters and some other locations but be illegal in most public settings. B.C. saw the chaos and disorder caused by the wholesale decriminalization of drugs and they want to walk it back but so far, the Trudeau government has been non-committal.
Trudeau’s addictions minister Ya’ara Saks would only say on Wednesday that she is awaiting information from B.C. before making a decision. Those comments are more open than earlier in the week when she would only say that this was the first year of a three-year pilot project.
At that time, Saks also refused to rule out granting Toronto their exemption.
On Wednesday, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sent Trudeau a letter demanding that he reject Toronto’s proposal “to legalize crack, cocaine, heroin, meth and other hard drugs.”
Trudeau must reject Toronto's application to allow public use of crack, cocaine, heroin, & other hard drugs.
His dangerous policy cannot bring the same chaos, death & destruction to more Canadian cities. pic.twitter.com/hG5h9lsWPq
Poilievre pointed to the massive increase in drug overdose deaths since the Trudeau Liberals took office and began liberalizing Canada’s drug policies and laws. Those stats alone should be all that is needed for Saks to realize the decriminalization in B.C., the kind Toronto wants, is a mess and not worth standing by.
B.C. saw a record 2,546 overdose deaths in 2023, that’s more than Ontario in a province with one third of our population.
That is not a record worth following.
Is there an overdose problem? Absolutely, but decriminalization is not the answer.
The four pillars of drug policy have long been prevention, treatment, enforcement, and harm reduction. The activists who now control our policy from the public health side focus almost exclusively on harm reduction and making drugs easier to get.
That’s not a compassionate answer when we aren’t also acting on the pillars.
Toronto’s policy is deeply flawed, de Villa is trying to mislead the entire city and Toronto’s application for decriminalization should be rejected.
blilley@postmedia.com
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