January 31 marked the one-year anniversary for B.C.’s three-year decriminalization pilot project, where people using up to 2.5 grams of certain illicit drugs would not face seizures, charges, or arrests. But as 2023 saw a five percent increase in death rates, experts are pushing for expanding the prescribed safer supply to help users on their recovery journey.
While B.C.’s overdose death rate increased by five per cent since 2022, provinces that have not implemented decriminalization and harm reduction efforts as much as B.C. have seen an even steeper increase in fatalities, said Courtenay-Alberni MP Gord Johns.
“We have the lowest increase of the four major provinces with the highest death rate in the country,” said Johns. “We need to be going the other direction and if we treat this like a health emergency and we filled those gaps, we would see those numbers drop significantly.”
“[It’s] unequivocally clear and unanimous in that criminalizing people who use substances causes more harm, especially when people are using toxic, unregulated street drugs that are poisoned,” continued Johns, adding that upper levels of government need to move faster. “There's a lack of coordination, a lack of integration to fill those gaps, and a lack of will to see this as the crisis that it is.”