Meme - @frozenagitation: "A person smoking fentanyl on the train is not making you unsafe. Just stop trying to find ways to hate poor people."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Public misuse of fentanyl, a potent medical anesthetic, is irresponsible and unsafe. It's intended only to be administered by trained professionals in a medical setting."
Adam Zivo on X - "🚨 BREAKING 🚨 British Columbia is ending the provision of unwitnessed "safer supply" drugs, citing problems with organized crime diverting prescription opioids to the black market. We did it! We stopped this scam."
Time for activists to complain they are literally killing people
'Serious challenges' caused by opioid prescription diversion, London police chief tells MPs - "There are "serious challenges" brought on by the Safer Opioid Supply (SOS) program that's been operating in London since 2016, the city's police chief told federal politicians during testimony at a committee meeting on Parliament Hill on Tuesday. While there's only been one pharmacy robbery in the city since 2019, women are being pressured to get prescriptions for opioids which are then taken from them by criminals, Thai Truong told members of Parliament during testimony before the standing committee on health... police said a significant portion of drugs seized by police ended up on the streets after being prescribed through the program. At the time, Truong explained that pills prescribed to people in the program were often traded for stronger, more dangerous drugs such as fentanyl."
$4M worth of prescription opioids disappeared from an Ontario pharmacy. No one can say where they went - "Opioid painkillers are supposed to be closely guarded on their journey from manufacturer to patient. They are highly addictive, can cause deadly drug poisonings and have a high street value. So how could almost a quarter million of them disappear? The loss of more than 245,000 hydromorphone tablets, all eight milligrams and sold under the brand-name Dilaudid, was reported to Health Canada in May 2023 by a pharmacy somewhere in Ontario. They would be worth about $4 million if sold on the street. There was no armed robbery and no break and enter. The loss did not occur all at once, but over an unspecified period of time, said a Health Canada spokesperson... Health Canada referred a pharmacist to the professional regulatory college... Officially, the reason for the loss cited in Health Canada data is "Loss unexplained." There's no requirement to report such losses to police... The widespread introduction of time-delay safes in Ontario pharmacies in 2023, following some other provinces, is likely why the amount of controlled drugs stolen in armed robberies and B&Es dropped significantly"
Why do drug dealers add deadly opioids to their drugs? : r/RandomThoughts - "I had a friend in drug enforcement in the Baltimore area. He said that if someone were to OD from a known source, the clientele’s reaction was not “ope, stay away from that guy.” The reaction was “Jimmy died? That must be good shit!” So there’s that."
Josh Dehaas: Japan convinced me Canadians don’t need to accept urban disorder - "I grabbed a coffee and started looking for a park bench to sit and read my book. I soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. Every bench was occupied by one or more drug addicts... It’s not just Calgary that looks like this. Toronto, Edmonton, and Ottawa are equally depressing. But not every big city has these problems. I recently spent two weeks in Japan, including visits to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, where I noticed zero litter — not a cigarette butt, not a coffee cup — and just one person sitting on the curb apparently intoxicated. A police officer had him detained at that very moment. I went on dozens of subway rides without feeling unsafe once. Japan convinced me that Canadians don’t need to accept so much urban disorder. Addicts deserve compassion and treatment, but there are no excuses for letting them destroy our downtowns, to say nothing of themselves. So what’s Japan doing differently? Enforcement of strict laws against drug possession seems to be the solution. Japan has convinced me, despite my strong civil libertarian leanings, that it’s time to end the failed decriminalization experiment and treat possession of hard drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine as crimes again... Harm reduction in some ways makes sense, but we now know that harm reduction in the form of decriminalization of hard drugs causes too many other harms to be worth it. It hasn’t stopped drug deaths, and it’s made our downtowns depressing, dirty, and dangerous. Drug addicts increasingly clog up public hospitals. Drug addicts constantly steal to maintain their habits... Even possession by someone with a long rap sheet of 15 grams of fentanyl, a highly-toxic substance that can kill in miniscule amounts, wasn’t enough to warrant jail time according to one Ontario judge because, “addiction is a public health issue first and foremost,” and there was little need to denounce the behaviour or try to deter others. The result of this approach is not just downtowns that look like scenes from zombie films – it’s also the deaths of addicts. In 2019, Japan’s annual rate of opioid deaths was 2.5 per million people. In Canada, the figure was roughly 160 opioid deaths per million in 2021. As a civil libertarian, I think people should decide what they do with their bodies and the state needs a strong justification to interfere. Drugs like alcohol, marijuana, or psilocybin mushrooms don’t tend to lead to significant harms to anyone other than the user, and should therefore be fully legal. But when a person’s actions cause serious harm to other people, as fentanyl and methamphetamine use inevitably does, those actions ought to be criminalized. I take comfort in the fact that Japan manages to uphold a zero-tolerance policy for drugs while maintaining a high score on civil liberties. Treating hard drug possession as a crime would require amendments to the Criminal Code and to provincial enforcement policies, but it would not necessarily cost taxpayers more. Many of those who would be imprisoned would no longer be in the streets causing other crimes. If some addicts are successfully diverted to treatment, that could cost the health care system less long-term. If fewer dealers are on the street, and the consequences of using are scarier, this should eventually lead to fewer addicts sucking up public funds. At the very least, we would get our downtowns back."
But what would all the activists and NGOs do without all the drug addicts?!
Yellow Milk on X - "Rip Kurt Cobain you would of loved fentanyl"
8 years and 14,000 deaths later, B.C.'s drug emergency rages on - "Toxic drugs are now the leading cause of death for people aged 10-59 in B.C., according to the B.C. Coroners Service, accounting for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural disease combined... "One of the reasons people are hiding their consumption and their drug use is because we stigmatize people [and] we villainize them."... with both provincial and federal elections looming, Graham fears "the toxic politics is what's going to be killing people next," as politicians vie to win votes touting what she says are ineffective solutions to the deadly crisis. She said what's needed are regulations for drugs that are similar to those for alcohol."
While drug death rates quintupled in BC from 2015 to 2023, drug deaths have not been risen as much in Quebec and Ontario over the same 11 years, and they don't enable drugs as much. Clearly this proves that harm reduction works and the real problem is "stigma".
Weird how they decriminalized drugs in 2023 but deaths continued to rise. Clearly decriminalization isn't enough, and the government needs to give out free drugs
‘They want to ban your plastic straw but legalize crack’: Seven zingers from Pierre Poilievre’s speech at the Calgary Stampede - "Isn’t it amazing? They’re so liberal on crime when they want to ban everything else. They want to ban your plastic straw but legalize crack in your neighbourhood, as long as you don’t smoke the crack through a plastic straw"
Arrests show dangers of ‘safe’ drug sites: B.C. Conservatives - "Nanaimo RCMP announced Tuesday that they had arrested two people for drug trafficking and possession of a prohibited firearm after responding to a complaint about drug dealing on Cavan Street in the downtown area. They said officers with the detachment’s Nanaimo Special Investigation Targeted Enforcement or SITE unit seized a loaded pistol and suspected methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl and prescription opioid tablets in the Sept. 12 incident. Further investigation led to a search warrant being conducted in a motel room, where large amounts of drugs, weapons and cash were found, said the RCMP, who called it a “significant seizure” that removed “large quantities of illicit and harmful drugs, as well as dangerous weapons, from the streets of Nanaimo.”... People who appear to be under the influence of drugs are lying down and sleeping on stairs and the grass and in city hall’s parking lot, and there’s public defecation in the area, requiring regular cleanups... B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad has said he would shut down all drug-consumption sites and replace them with mental-health and addictions treatment centres if the party wins the Oct. 19 provincial election. Also on Tuesday, the Save Our Streets coalition in B.C. staged a news conference in Vancouver to release results from a survey that it said shows people don’t feel safe in their communities and don’t believe the justice system, governments or the police are doing enough to respond to addiction and mental-health issues. Karen Kuwica, president of Nanaimo’s Newcastle Community Association, who attended the SOS event in Vancouver, said the survey results show people have lost faith in the justice system and feel that it is futile to report crimes. In the Research Co. online survey, 55 per cent of the 1,200 respondents said the level of crime in their community had increased, while 88 per cent said crimes aren’t reported, due largely to a lack of confidence in the justice system. Half of the respondents said they fear for their safety and almost 74 per cent said that crime and violence are affecting the quality of life in their community. Respondents indicated they are willing to support new approaches by police, the justice system and all levels of government to address opioid consumption, retail crime and public safety."
This won't stop left wingers' histrionics about how being against "safe injection sites" means you are literally murdering people
Amy Hamm: David Eby can't escape his many 'harm reduction' failures - "British Columbia’s provincial election is roughly a month away, and our New Democratic premier, David Eby, is campaigning like a rat fleeing the sinking ship of his own party’s failed policies. Eby’s latest — and most hypocritical — about-face is his suspiciously timed announcement that he intends to implement involuntary treatment for persons with brain injuries or mental health disorders, along with a concurrent substance use disorder (drug addiction). He had no scruples about the province’s approach to managing the filth, chaos and misery of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), which hosts Canada’s largest concentrated population of homeless and often mentally ill addicts. As premier, he threw money, support services, money, needles, crack pipes, anti-stigma campaigns and more money at the problem — until now, in the 11th hour of his provincial reign. It’s not the first time he has demonstrated a willingness to abandon his principles, however. Eby toyed with involuntary care once before, but didn’t follow through. It was when he was campaigning for party leadership in 2022. This reversal landed him in a position that was so far removed from his history of advocacy, including as the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA), that the organization called Eby out for political avarice: “The BCCLA condemns BC Attorney General David Eby for throwing human rights, civil liberties, and evidence under the bus… This attempt to score political points for his leadership campaign is misleading, immoral, and reckless.” Savage. Much of his work and advocacy to this point has been about “harm reduction” and enabling vulnerable addicts to stay exactly as they are, mired in self-destruction and despair. But he was doing it — as all harm reductionists claim — to “save lives.” One could have easily mistaken Eby for a True Believer. And as a believer, he demonstrated callous disregard for the rest of us, left to deal with the fallout of his disastrous policies. Any honest person who spends a single minute in Vancouver’s DTES can see that harm reduction has utterly failed. It didn’t matter to Eby that our streets were increasingly violent, or that shoplifting was pervasive, that women’s bodies were being trafficked and sold (addicts must pay for their habits), that shops in the DTES can’t have indoor tables and chairs — because addicts use them as personal drug spaces — or even that thousands of citizens were dying of opioid overdoses each year. Recently, a 13-year-old girl died of a suspected overdose in a homeless tent encampment in his province, leaving behind a bereft family that had begged provincial health authorities to treat her. They gave her “harm reduction” instead. All along, Eby was a crusader for this cause. Until suddenly he wasn’t. This is not Eby’s first policy flip-flop. Previously, he reversed his drug “decriminalization” pilot project after public outcry reached a fever pitch. (As it happens, the public at large is not groovy with addicts using fentanyl on the playgrounds where we take our children.) And then this month, he claimed he would scrap B.C.’s provincial carbon tax — an improbable move from a party that refers to their current election rival, and the man who first promised to kill the same carbon tax, as a “climate change denier.” Also under Eby’s watch, B.C. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, with the apparent intent to help the NDP with hold onto power for another term, rescinded her public health order that saw nurses and doctors fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccines. Power, not principle. That is Eby’s motto. There was a time when we could say that our premier was misguided and wrong, but principled. That time is over. The problem is not that Eby intends to legislate a broadened involuntary treatment landscape. Yes, there are arguments to be made about the infringement on our Charter rights when we hold and treat people against their will — a practice applied daily to mentally ill citizens under the B.C. Mental Health Act (and even, already, to persons with concurrent disorders and with the intent to get them sober, though the physicians doing this would likely never admit to it). We already have a Mental Health Review Board and strong protections for patients who wish to challenge their involuntary treatment under the law. The problem is that Eby switched sides in a culture war where the warring teams hold diametrically opposed values, and wherein one side — the “harm reductionists” — have largely abandoned evidence in favour of ideology. In doing so, many have become fervent believers (or at least pretend to be) that their cause is the moral choice, the compassionate choice and the only path forward. They thumb their noses at addiction treatment, involuntary or otherwise, as an “oppressive” and “stigmatizing” intervention that doesn’t deserve more funding. They refuse to look their failure in the eye and change course. Eby must admit that he is now playing for the opposite team for one of three reasons: it was a wanton choice, devoid of thought or care; he genuinely changed his mind on the credibility of “harm reduction”; or, most likely, that he is desperately hanging on to power — and that he is a man who will sacrifice his principles to do so. Would you trust a man like that? I know my answer."
The consequences of giving addicted youth medical autonomy - "Brianna MacDonald was only 13 years old when she was found dead of a suspected overdose in a B.C. homeless encampment last month. Her grieving parents say that the province refused their repeated pleas to force her into treatment, providing her instead with free needles and pamphlets on how to use drugs “safely,” and are now calling for reform. This tragedy was the inevitable crescendo of the B.C. NDP’s laissez-faire drug policies, under which enablement has consistently been prioritized over rehabilitation... According to Brianna’s mother, Sarah MacDonald, her daughter struggled with severe mental-health issues and, turning to drugs to cope, began smoking marijuana at just 10 years old, before escalating to ecstasy two years later. Despite her young age, she allegedly received free harm-reduction paraphernalia from Fraser Health, one of the province’s five health authorities. After being hospitalized for a suspected overdose in February, Brianna was transferred to a child psychiatric ward at Surrey Memorial Hospital where, according to her mother, she stuck pencils through her own hand. Though her parents begged the hospital to keep her institutionalized and administer addiction treatment, they were told that Brianna had the right to make her own medical decisions, despite her mental instability, young age and history of drug use. She was thus discharged, but her violent behaviour at home troubled her parents, who, out of concern for her siblings, were forced to place her in a youth centre in Abbotsford. She subsequently ran away and ended up in a local homeless encampment, where her mother would visit her (they texted or spoke every day). But then, in the middle of the night of Aug. 23, she overdosed again and, despite the best efforts of emergency responders, did not survive... Children “are not able to buy alcohol, they are not able to buy marijuana at the marijuana store, they can’t buy cigarettes, but they can have access to crack pipes and kits to be able to do safe injection? It’s just wrong,” her step-father, Lance Charles, told CTV News. The B.C. Conservatives have since pledged to implement involuntary treatment for addicts of all ages who “pose a risk to themselves and others,” should they be elected next month. The announcement builds upon the demands of a growing chorus of B.C. mayors who have endorsed involuntary treatment following an increase in horrifying stranger attacks. Harm-reduction activists, many of whom are active drug users and see access to illicit substances as a human right, have generally opposed such reforms... In the lead-up to next month’s provincial election, Eby’s government has rescinded many unpopular harm-reduction experiments it previously supported — such as drug paraphernalia distributed through vending machines and home delivery... Some parents — most notably Greg Sword, whose 14-year-old daughter died of drug-related causes after getting addicted to diverted safer supply opioids — have tried to raise awareness of this issue, only to be ignored."
According to the left, "the science" tells us that minors can make their own medical decisions (they can't decide to date older people, though, even if they're 25 years old) and that "harm reduction" is the way to go, so only "science deniers" will be against minors taking drugs, supported by the state
Clearly, all this is the parents' fault, and they were abusive. They are responsible because they're the adults, and were too toxic for their daughter, and the "trauma" they caused her led to her death
Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Back in 1894 the British Government did an inquiry into cannabis use in India, and concluded that "moderate use practically produces no ill effects"."
Pierre Poilievre on X - "Radical activist spews racist tirade against a Chinese man trying to protect kids from a drug injection site the NDP & Liberal governments are forcing into Richmond. Help me fight against the NDP/Liberals pushing drugs on the Chinese community:"
Forced addictions treatment will cause more harm than good, ethics expert warns N.B. - "It's "highly likely" New Brunswick's plan to force some people with severe addiction into involuntary treatment will cause more harm than good, according to an ethics expert. Timothy Christie, the regional director of ethics services for the Horizon Health Network, says he conducted an ethics analysis of the proposed Compassionate Intervention Act and found "huge problems" related to Charter violations and evidence-based medicine, he said. He also believes he has identified a better approach — investing more in the social determinants of health; the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age, such as education and employment... "Taking people's rights away is a harm," he said. "By being forced into treatment, you're taking my liberty away. And forcing treatment on me is violating my security of the person." Other critics have argued the bill is unconstitutional because Section 9 of the Charter stipulates everyone has "the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.""
You're only allowed to promote drug use and the left wing agenda. Time to pretend that the successful European model doesn't involve stigma and discouraging drug use and is only about decriminalisation
B.C. rolls back drug decriminalization after public backlash - "In January 2023, the western province decriminalized possession for personal use of less than 2.5 grams of cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA, and opioids like fentanyl. It was an attempt to treat drug use as a public health issue and keep users from falling into the criminal justice system. But health care workers, police, regional political leaders and members of the public have pushed back against open drug use in places like bus shelters, parks and hospitals. Oregon reversed a similar experiment with drug decriminalization following a public backlash. Eby’s government tried to ban drug use in a wide range of public places last year through provincial legislation, but the move was challenged and frozen in provincial court. This time, the premier is going further, asking the federal government — which has ultimate jurisdiction over criminal law in Canada — to dramatically scale back BC’s exemption in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act... Drugs would still be decriminalized in private residences, places where people are legally sheltering, overdose prevention sites and drug-checking locations. The province said it’s working with police on guidance not to arrest or charge those who merely possess drugs without threatening public safety, their own safety, or causing a disturbance. The proliferation of fentanyl — a synthetic drug 50 times stronger than heroin — has caused a horrifying public health crisis across North America and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Tiny quantities can cause overdoses and death because the drug is so potent."
Alex Hill on X - "The story of cocaine should be a cautionary tale to those hyping up the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Cocaine seemed like a miracle cure to "neurasthenia" epidemic. Researchers were themselves users turned evangelists. Lots of parallels with psychedelic advocacy today."
Richard Hanania on X - "But my understanding is that it turned out that cocaine is actually awesome for most people and we only ban it to protect the worst people from themselves, like with most drugs?"
This Heroin-Using Professor Wants to Change How We Think About Drugs - The New York Times - "Dr. Hart argued that most of what you think you know about drugs and drug abuse is wrong: that addiction is not a brain disease; that most of the 50 million Americans who use an illegal drug in a given year have overwhelmingly positive experiences; that our policies have been warped by a focus only on the bad outcomes; and that the results have been devastating for African-American families like his own. Much of the blame, he said, falls on his own profession. “We in the field are overstating the harmful effects of drugs,” he said. “We have miseducated the public, and that is wholly un-American and wrong.”... At Columbia, he began conducting experiments with drug addicts, recruiting them through ads in the Village Voice. With grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Hart and his colleagues administered millions of dollars’ worth of crack, methamphetamine, cannabis and other drugs in laboratory settings. He expected his subjects to be like the people he heard about at conferences on drug abuse, or the crazed zombies in movies about addicts, he said: “Somebody who was essentially a slave to the drug. And that person I had never seen in all of my research.” Instead, he said, subjects were diligent in reporting on time for the experiments, and when offered alternatives to drugs — a dollar in one experiment, $5 in another — they made rational choices, rather than compulsively feeding their addictions. “But that’s the mythology in the field,” he said. “Then I started to pay attention to our data, and you start to see that people are actually happy, and they are responsible. They show up for these demanding schedules.”... After receiving regular research grants totaling more than $6 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Hart found himself cut off after 2009. “Because I’m asking questions that do not focus on pathology, it’s harder to get funding,” he said."
Weird. Liberals like to claim that government funding does not result in ideological bias in science


