San Francisco is finally waking from its living nightmare

San Francisco is finally waking from its living nightmare

"[2022 was] the height of San Francisco’s so-called doom-loop, as homelessness, addiction and shoplifting rocketed in the wake of the pandemic. Thousands of businesses abandoned the city, turning parts of downtown into lawless, open-air drug markets in one of the richest cities in the world...

The city’s tent count has dropped to the lowest level since records began in 2019, crime has plunged to a 23-year low and new office leasing has hit its highest level in six years.

Citizen activist groups backed by high-profile billionaires have led an uprising against extremely liberal policy-making, overhauling the city’s political system by reducing far-Left dominance of the school board, the district attorney’s office and the city’s board of supervisors.

New mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat who took office in January and is considered wholly pro-business, now has much more licence to press ahead with an agenda of reform.

At the same time, back-to-office mandates are bringing new life to the business district and Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence (AI) boom is driving a surge of optimism in the tech sector, the lifeblood of the city’s economy.

San Francisco is in recovery. If it returns to full health, residents will hail a seismic victory for common-sense policymaking over the far-Left ideas that bought the city to its knees...

These streets were once filled with sprawling encampments. In back alleys, there are now parked Teslas instead of tents. And there are no glittering dustings of smashed car windscreens, which used to be such a common sight it was dubbed “San Francisco snow”.

The city has long had a problem with homelessness and drug addiction. Problems were super-charged by the arrival of fentanyl and then the pandemic. Downtown districts became ghost towns as major employers shifted to remote working or quit the city altogether.

The loss of foot traffic hammered retailers just as street homelessness surged. Retail theft and drug dealing boomed. Some shops were looted. More businesses left. As recently as January, Walgreens announced a fresh round of 12 store closures.

The post-pandemic tech slump was a further drag on the local economy and jobs, while a slump in office leasing and commercial property values hammered the city’s tax revenues.

It has proved a living nightmare for residents of a city that has more billionaires than any other place in America.

San Francisco’s problems are a case of liberal policies hitting their limit, argues Steve Hilton, a former adviser to David Cameron and now a Republican candidate for governor of California. “It is symptomatic of everything that’s gone wrong in California.”

But now San Francisco is freeing itself from the doom-loop it has been stuck in.

The number of car break-ins last year plunged by 50pc to a 22-year low, according to figures from the San Francisco police department (SFPD). The San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this year that auto glass repair shops had seen such enormous drops in business that they were considering making staff redundant.

The overall number of reported crimes fell by 28pc in 2024 to the lowest level in more than two decades. So far this year, it has dropped by a further 27pc.

The city’s homeless tent count fell to just 222 in March, down from 609 in July 2023 and less than a quarter of the 2020 record of 1,108. Although the number of homeless people in San Francisco hit a record high of 8,323 last year, the number of people who were actually sleeping on the streets fell to a six-year low. Drug overdose deaths fell by 22pc in 2024 to their lowest level since 2019...

Law enforcement has become much more visible and much more active in recent months, he says. He has been ticketed twice in the last few weeks, once for selling merchandise without a permit and once for using drugs in public.

Some of the changes are because of Mayor Lurie, who has introduced a new street team response programme and measures that mean people selling commonly stolen goods without a permit or proof of purchase can get apprehended.

Others are because of Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed, who was also a moderate and initiated UN Plaza’s redevelopment.

But the major seeds of change in San Francisco began in the thick of the pandemic.

In 2021, long-time San Francisco Bay Area resident and former drug decriminalisation advocate Michael Shellenberger published “San Fransicko”, a damning critique of the city’s progressive policies that he said were enabling addiction.

Today, San Francisco, arguably the most liberal city in America, has hardly shifted to the Right. But it has new “rational politics” as Bill Oberndorf, founder of the multibillion-dollar investment firm SPO Partners, has termed it.

In 2020, a group of long-term city residents formed a super-political action committee (Pac) called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco.

“We had problems that had got so out of control that we needed to tackle them in a way that had not been done before,” says Oberndorf, who is the group’s chairman and who was a major Republican donor until 2016, when he registered as independent...

Neighbors is at the heart of a centrist movement led by citizens that has grown steadily in San Francisco and has the backing of many of the city’s richest businessmen...

Citizen activism has led three key changes in San Francisco’s political make-up.

The first came in 2022. Parents in San Francisco had become enraged by the fact that the local board of education’s approach meant that the city was particularly slow to reopen classrooms after the pandemic.

While classrooms were closed, the school board had passed a vote to rename a third of local schools because they were named after figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington who had inhibited social progress or owned slaves. There was a feeling that officials were focusing on the wrong things.

Only one out of seven members of the school board was a moderate. Alongside other groups, Neighbors helped provide funding and strategic support to parents to recall the board members that they could. Now, there are four moderates on the board.

Next, Neighbors spearheaded a campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the district attorney and a radical Left-winger who was elected during what The New Yorker described as “a Joan of Arc phase in American progressivism, when it seemed like the kids – Greta Thunberg, David Hogg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – could save us all”.

Boudin launched programmes to reduce the number of people in jails. When the pandemic hit, he released 40pc of the city’s inmates and wrote an op-ed in the LA Times titled “I’m keeping San Francisco safer by emptying the jail”.

Community groups raised $7.2m to campaign for Boudin to be recalled with nearly $5m coming from Neighbors. The Pac then recruited his replacement, Brooke Jenkins, who took over in 2022 with a promise that “crime is illegal again” and was re-elected in 2024.

Jay Cheng, executive director of Neighbors, says: “Recalls are effectively citizens telling the establishment, ‘We’re firing you.’ That is a citizen revolt against a political establishment.

“A large part of our work has been almost a complete turnover of political leadership in San Francisco.”

Finally, Neighbors lobbied to redraw the City’s Board of Supervisors, which has to approve measures proposed by the mayor. Before, one member of the 11 was a moderate. Now, there are five. 

“There were many things Mayor Breed would have liked to have done but she just couldn’t get movement on the board. It’s far easier to do that now,” says Oberndorf...

“When I was sworn in, we were at a point of reckoning in San Francisco. The culture here was of lawlessness and of over-tolerance. [There was an idea that] criminal behaviour is happening, and we should make excuses for people who do it. And I think people were at breaking point,” says Jenkins.

Even so, citizens who were unhappy with the approach of Boudin felt uncomfortable speaking out, she says.

“I think we had a majority of people in the city that were fed up. Yet they were being silenced by the progressives and being made to feel like to say you want a clean and safe street is racist, is anti-immigrant, is Republican.”

Richard Nixon reflected a similar sentiment in the 1960s, when he appealed to the “silent majority” who rejected the liberal excesses of the decade.

However, radical progressives are now using this argument to silence not just those on the Right but other Democrats, says Jenkins.

“The problem is that the notion that you must be a racist if you want no crime, really means, to me, as a black woman and as a Latina woman, that you believe that everyone that looks like me must subscribe to criminality, that we are the only people committing crime in this country, and we are not,” she says.

“What I have tried to do is to say safety is something we all want.”

Jenkins took a very different approach to Boudin. Instead of treating the dealing of fentanyl as a misdemeanour, she treats it as a felony. She started asking the courts to keep people charged with serious crimes, such as chronic offenders of retail theft, in custody while their cases were open.

“I came in emphasising a tone of accountability that we were not going to be a city that was tolerant of crime, that we were a city that had to enforce its laws and its rules,” she says.

She also began working much more closely with other law enforcement agencies such as the police, which means they have become better at providing the evidence prosecutors need to present in court.

It is not just the DA’s office that has been changing. The police force has ramped up its use of technology, acquiring licence plate reader cameras, drones and access to live surveillance footage. At the same time, a Supreme Court decision in June 2024 known as Grants Pass opened the door for the mayor to remove tents.

Now, Mayor Lurie has brought forward a more aggressive approach to public health.

San Francisco’s approach to drugs has historically been one of harm reduction – a policy approach focused on safer usage.

Groups hand out clean paraphernalia to smoke fentanyl as a strategy to stop people from injecting it. For one year in 2022, the city operated The Tenderloin Center, which supervised drug usage as part of a series of trial measures to tackle the crisis.

In 2020, the Department of Health issued an ad campaign trying to encourage drug users not to take drugs alone. A billboard with a photograph of people looking like they were having a great time at a party read: “Do it with Friends”.

But Mayor Lurie is changing tack.

In April, he announced that non-profits that rely on grants will no longer be permitted to distribute harm reduction supplies in the city’s public spaces. These supplies can still be distributed inside, but only if the organisations connect users to recovery programmes.

In February, Matt Dorsey, health department supervisor, introduced the “Recovery First Ordinance” which will direct the city to fund abstinence-based treatment.

The shift reflects the fact that drugs are at the core of San Francisco’s homelessness problem.

“By the time you get to the street, if you’re not addicted to drugs, you sure as hell turn to drugs,” says Tom Wolf, at the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions, who is a former addict himself."

 

Weird. We're told that reality has a liberal bias, and all problems could be solved with "empathy" 

What’s wrong with the West?

What’s wrong with the West? | The Spectator

It is 25 years since Theodore Dalrymple published Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. In this now famous set of essays, Dalrymple, who worked as a psychiatrist in British prisons, describes the damage done to the poorest in society by the West’s progressive middle-classes, who encourage criminals to see themselves as victims and cheer on the destruction of the traditions and norms that once guided working-class life. On the other side of the Atlantic – and the other side of the middle-class divide – the writer Rob Henderson came to the same conclusions as Dalrymple. Henderson grew up in foster care in working-class California and, as his best-selling memoir Troubled details, he experienced from the inside the culture Dalrymple observed and documented from without. When, as a student, he first read Dalrymple, it was a revelation. Life at the Bottom is republished this year to celebrate its anniversary with a new forward by Henderson. In the following conversation, they discuss whether anything can be done to change the culture.

ROB HENDERSON: Your book, Life at the Bottom was astounding to me when I first came across it. I was in my first year at Yale and feeling very out of place as someone who had come from poverty, who had grown up in foster care. I must have read 20 or 30 of your essays in a row and then found Life at the Bottom. I read the book within a couple of days and this feeling came over me: finally, someone understood what life is really like for people in the underclass! What you explained was that in many cases, these desperate conditions were self-inflicted and this was the opposite of what we were being taught by the professors. They blamed shadowy political forces for people making poor choices, or concentrated solely on material conditions.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.

Interestingly, doctors who came from abroad to work in Britain had the same realization. They thought we had relatively high-quality healthcare, because they came from places like India or the Philippines, where poor people could not easily obtain good medical attention. And they would think, “Oh, this is marvelous. This is social justice.” But after maybe three months, they began to see that there was something very wrong with the situation. They came to the conclusion that in certain respects, things were better at home. That is to say, they saw a kind of dishonest passivity and spiritlessness in the population. This is something they hadn’t seen at home, even though life was very much harder there and economically very much worse. So they saw what I came to see. British people had begun to accept things without gratitude. They were ungrateful. At worst, they were resentful.

RH: I had a similar experience. I grew up poor in California, it was relative poverty. My mother was a drug addict and we were homeless for a brief period before settling in a slum apartment. As an adult, I visited Malaysia and saw people living in wooden huts with concrete flooring and under rusted corrugated metal. And in many ways they seemed more socially cohesive and in better spirits than the people I grew up around. There was more neighborliness. People would deliver food to each other. The families all knew one another. The children were remarkably well-behaved. This was so different from my own experience where people didn’t know their neighbors or if they did, it would often result in violence or indirect hostility. It’s often very pleasing to hear, regardless of what social class you belong to, that your own predicament is not your fault – that it’s the system or it’s the political forces or it’s the billionaires. Yet when I dug into some of the statistics, our society used to be very different despite the poverty. You’ve written yourself that crime used to be much lower in the past, despite poverty being much worse.

TD: Yes. For instance in 1938, in Britain, there were 8,500 prisoners. There are now 87,500. That’s ten times as many. Of course, the population has slightly less than doubled since then. But that’s not all. For every prisoner, there are now six times as many indictable crimes as there were in 1938. Now, this is a pretty crude way of looking at it, but nevertheless, there has been a startling increase in crime and it’s completely inconceivable that the difference is an increase in inequality or poverty. Poverty is not the cause of crime. The single cause of crime is the decision to commit it. We can’t think of crime without actually examining the reasons people make their decisions. Yet when professional criminologists examine crime they talk about people as if they’re billiard balls, moved around only by external forces.

RH: In the US, the number of men in prisons has quintupled since the 1970s, and what’s interesting is that incarceration has increased across ethnic groups – for white American males and black American males alike. But then when you look at income categories, this rise is almost entirely concentrated in the bottom income quintile for both white males and for black males. In the middle- and upper-middle class, incarceration has not risen at all. To me, this is evidence that culture matters. The poor were even poorer in the 1970s and yet fewer people were making the decision to commit crimes. It’s the culture that’s changed.

TD: And people are often quite aware that they’re making bad decisions. I remember, when I worked in a prison, a convict, a burglar came to see me and said, “Do you think it’s my childhood, doctor, that makes me burgle?” And I said no. And he said, “What is it, then?” And I said, “Well, you’re stupid and lazy and you want things that you’re not prepared to work for.” And instead of being angry, he laughed. He knew perfectly well that when he burgled a house, he was choosing to do precisely that.

RH: This is one conflict I have with friends on the right. They cite research on behavioral genetics and human differences and say that some people are just genetically endowed with intelligence, impulse control, conscientiousness and low crime preference. They’ll use all this jargon to say some people are equipped to behave well and others less so, therefore we should not hold these people entirely responsible. It’s similar to those on the left who say you can’t truly hold people responsible because they grew up in abject poverty and systemic forces are preventing them from escaping their circumstances.

I think both the left and right ignore the role of expectations. Many human attributes are malleable and responsive to incentives. If there’s a young man who is not particularly bright and you just give up on him – you don’t expect him to develop basic reading and writing skills – then he will actually be at an even further disadvantage.

TD: Yes, we saw this with the Covid lockdowns where there was a dramatic loss of learning but it was concentrated in children in low-income homes. For children who don’t enjoy reading and math and so forth, they require a bit more coercion. If that guidance is absent, then they will fall even further behind. Rather than lowering standards for people who are struggling, the standard should be held firm or even raised. I regard most human characteristics as being on a normal distribution bell curve. But I agree with you, the whole distribution can be shifted in one direction or another using culture. If you create a criminogenic society, then more people will become criminals. I think we’ve shifted culture in the direction of crime. While there may be some genetic difference between people, I don’t think that can possibly explain why, for example, in New Zealand in 1950, there were 200 violent crimes. Fifty years later, there were 70,000. Sure, the population had doubled. But I don’t think an explanation based on genetics works in this case.

RH: It’s like you said before: criminologists want to treat people as billiard balls. They seem to forget the phenomenological experience of being a human. Imagine you are an impulsive person and laws are no longer properly enforced. You know you are less likely to be caught or penalized for committing a crime, then you’re going to be more likely to commit a crime. As you said, the whole distribution shifts because each individual person thinks that way. We saw this with the rise of the “defund the police” movement in the US. Many police departments did have their funding reduced while it also created an atmosphere of hostility toward police. In response, police patrolled less frequently and crime skyrocketed. The genetics of America didn’t suddenly change between 2020 and 2022. We had the same population. It’s just that the sentiment and attitude toward law enforcement had changed.

TD: Actually, it’s dehumanizing when you’re saying that someone isn’t responsible for what he does. To say that is to treat him as if he were an unconscious object, an inanimate object. The problem is that people think that if you make a judgment, if you say, “This is bad,” what you’re saying is “I never want to see you again.” Well, that’s just not true. If people were to reject utterly those who had behaved badly, we would all have to reject everyone we know. Apart from anything else, this is a question of truth. People choose to do things that are wrong and we are all, to some degree, flawed. For example, it simply isn’t true that a heroin addict is hooked by heroin through no fault of his own. In order to become a heroin addict, you have to learn how to find heroin. You have to learn how to overcome an inhibition against injecting it. So it’s not that you’re hooked by heroin. It’s that you chose to take heroin, and disguising that fact from people doesn’t do them any good.

RH: Poorer people are at a disadvantage though because if you are a rich, successful, famous person, you can behave poorly and your life will not spiral in the same way as someone at the bottom of society. If a rock star glorifies drug use and partakes in it himself, he can eventually pay for expensive treatment and then make some music about that journey to recovery and profit even more. Whereas an ordinary person who listens to that music and acts on its message will have a very different experience.

TD: Another trouble is that everyone has an excuse ready to hand to explain away bad behavior – which is that they have poor mental health. I think this idea is extremely destructive because it provides everyone an excuse in advance. If you add up all the prevalences of disorders in the DSM-5, the official United States guidebook for doctors on mental health, it suggests that the average citizen in the western world suffers from 2.5 mental disorders a year.

I was recently on a train, in the quiet coach, and there was a man who was playing terrible rap music very loudly. Nobody said anything to him because I think they were afraid. Eventually I went up to him and said, “Excuse me, could you turn your music off?” He replied, “I’ve just been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and this music calms me down.” Well, I found it quite amusing to think that rap music could calm anyone down. But anyway, I said to him, “I’m sorry you have this diagnosis but nevertheless this is the quiet coach, you should turn off your music.” He said, “You’re trying to wind me up.” I said, “I’m trying to make you turn your music off.” And he did turn it off, actually. I was pretty sure he’d been taking drugs. But then, of course, he was only taking drugs because he had ADHD. I think there was a part of him that wanted to impose himself on other people. We see a lot of that kind of thing. Take graffiti – it’s a kind of inflamed need to make a mark on society. But that’s in part because our society now values only “changing the world” and has devalued humility in doing perfectly ordinary jobs.

RH: I’m inclined to agree. Elites have downgraded a lot of the bourgeois virtues that are attainable by just about everyone: industriousness, punctuality, honesty, law-abidingness. As those virtues have been dismissed or mocked, people place increasing importance on traits that are less malleable and more rigid: things like how physically attractive you are, or how intelligent you are and how charismatic you are. If you’re not brilliant or talented or beautiful, people tend to take a strange form of vengeance on society.

TD: On the bright side, on some level, people do understand these things, it’s just that they never hear it. So, for example, I wouldn’t allow prisoners to swear in front of me. They would say something like, “I’ve got this effing headache.” And I’d say, “I don’t talk to you like that. And you shouldn’t talk to me like that.” What I found was that, far from getting angry, they appreciated it. So all is not quite lost.  But it will require some considerable courage on the part of elites to improve things. That’s what is required.

How fentanyl transformed Victoria’s Pandora Avenue from downtown hub to open-air drug market

How fentanyl transformed Victoria’s Pandora Avenue from downtown hub to open-air drug market - The Globe and Mail

"The church is at a crossroads. In the next couple months, Central Baptist will decide whether to remain where it has stood for 98 years or sell the property and leave Pandora. “Being among people at the margins of society is where churches thrive,” says Mr. Barden. “But the needs of the people here have taxed our expertise, our ability to help.”

Pandora, with its wide, tree-lined boulevards, was once a lush gateway to the downtown from the east. But in the past decade, it has morphed into one of the largest open-air drug markets in Western Canada.

About a third of the storefronts are shuttered. Soup kitchens, charities and mom-and-pop pharmacies fill many of the rest. Half the people on the sidewalk are semi-conscious and bent over – the fentanyl fold, the pose is known. Blankets, cardboard and trash clutter the pavement.

“You see everything here – shootings, murders, overdoses, fires,” says Linda Hughes, who moved into her condo overlooking Pandora’s 900 block in 2010. “It used to be wonderful living here.” Now, she says, misery is the only constant...

We set out to find out what is lost when several blocks of a street effectively disappear from a city landscape, and what can cause so swift a change.

To Conor King, a detective with the Victoria Police Department, what’s happened to Pandora can be summed up in a single word: fentanyl..

If fentanyl is a national crisis, B.C. is its epicentre.

Unlike Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – a magnet for transient folks and drug users for more than a century – Pandora’s swift decline has been far more recent. A decade ago, the sidewalks surrounding Central Baptist were full of tourists, residents and office workers who co-existed with a smaller number of unemployed and homeless folks who congregated beneath the trees.

When he was prime minister, Jean Chrétien visited Pandora, touring the Victoria Conservatory of Music shortly after it moved to its grand, new home on the street. It feels impossible to imagine a prime minister visiting the block the way things are now. Until a few months ago, paramedics wouldn’t set foot in the area without a police escort. Drug users – and those who care for them – seem to be the only people there.

Some business leaders and police in Victoria warn that unless the city can get a handle on the decline, the chaos spiraling outward from Pandora risks threatening the entire downtown of the B.C. capital, long considered a crown jewel of Canadian tourist destinations.

Keith Johnson, co-owner of Oh Sugar on Johnson Street, five blocks west of Pandora’s 900 block, believes Victoria has a limited time to save the city. “Ten years ago, the downtown was lovely: vibrant, full of people. It’s become a scary place.”

Mr. Johnson and his wife are considering selling the candy shop they’ve owned for almost nine years, citing the spike in thefts, broken windows, open drug use and dysfunctional behaviour.

“We’re so tired of dealing with it ‐ the constant challenges, the stress.“ If they can’t sell, they may simply walk away when the lease is up next year, he says. ”It’s just not worth it anymore."...

His congregation is divided on the question of whether to stay or go. One side feels morally compelled to remain on Pandora, to rebuild their entire mission around serving the street community, carving out shelter space and serving hot meals, he explains.

The other side say they no longer feel safe coming and going from the church. They don’t want their church to become another service agency...

Everyone at Central Baptist, he says, can agree on one thing: the church cannot continue to exist on Pandora as it is operating now. “A church is meant to be open. But at our church, every door is locked,” says Mr. Barden. “It feels antithetical to who we are supposed to be – like we’re doing the gospel wrong.” 

And yet, it is no longer safe to keep the doors open. Someone recently snuck inside and smoked fentanyl in front of a room filled with toddlers. Last summer, a staff member was sucker-punched in a random attack. Shortly after, a man exposed himself to two children entering the church.

Last fall, in an attempt to rein in the chaos, officials started pulling down the jumble of tents just north of Central Baptist on Pandora and erecting fencing to keep people from camping on the grassy medians.

The city was forced to act after a paramedic was attacked last July. He was trying to help someone having a seizure after smoking drugs. After being punched and kicked in the face, the paramedic stumbled, barely conscious, to a nearby firefighter, who positioned himself above the injured medic, axe in hand, protecting them from a mob of 60 people who encircled them. Victoria police sent out a mayday. Every available officer in the southern half of Vancouver Island responded.

The next day, first responders and firefighters began refusing to attend calls to the street without police protection, forcing city officials to address the sprawling encampment.

B.C.’s quaint coastal capital, which once considered putting up snowflakes in place of Christmas decorations – too “prejudicial,” to one councillor – has long been a bastion of tolerance and progressivism. The city of 96,000 opened North America’s largest safe inhalation site in 2023. For years, many policy makers embraced the idea that people should be allowed to sleep in tents on city property and use drugs in public.

Two years ago, council voted against a proposed ban on drug use in libraries and community centres. Such a ban, said Coun. Susan Kim, would have fundamentally gone against what those facilities are all about.

People with addictions “might need to medicate,” she said. “What if they need to medicate as soon as they’re done using a public computer at the library, applying for a job?” Ms. Kim said. “This just creates barriers to the people we’re trying to serve.”

But as the opioid crisis intensified, homeless encampments in the city became increasingly entrenched, lawless and violent. Public support for some of Victoria‘s most liberal drug policies has been collapsing. A survey conducted by the Victoria Police Department last year listed “open drug use” as the biggest problem facing the city, according to respondents.

City officials and social service agencies told The Globe the fundamental problem is a lack of supportive housing...

The problem isn’t a lack of housing, it’s that the population is “unhouseable,” says Sgt. Jeremy Preston with the Victoria Police Department. “The bar for supportive housing is pretty low – don’t light fires, don’t threaten the building manager – but for many, that’s still too high.”

Gazing down from her condo window overlooking Pandora’s 900 block, Ms. Hughes says once or twice a week she watches bylaw officers forcing people to take down their tents. “It’s like whack-a-mole. The minute officers leave, the tents go right back up.”

Pandora residents, she adds, have dealt with a decade of “noise, drug activity, fighting and threatening anti-social behaviour, not to mention depreciating property values and endless expenses trying to fortify our properties to make them safe.”

Two units in her building spent months on the market before their owners finally delisted them. “We’re trapped here,” says Ms. Hughes. “We can’t sell. We can’t move. We can’t walk our dogs. We can’t walk to the grocery store.”

Street chaos forced the Victoria Conservatory of Music to puts its Pandora entrance, and its grand, oak doors behind black iron gates. It is Western Canada’s largest music school, but seen from its front side, along Pandora, it looks permanently closed.

Last year, ChoirKids, a Conservatory youth program, began performing their annual concert off-site for safety reasons, the group‘s founder, Jack Boomer, told The Globe.

For the last four years, its concert hall – which country legend Emmylou Harris once called a “jewel box” – has been operating at 50 per cent capacity because fire regulations require a full house to have a second exit. It’s not clear when – or if – the front entrance can reopen. Lost revenues so far total $1.5-million, according to CEO Nathan Medd.

Several of the conservatory’s Pandora neighbours have pulled up stakes, including a Subway that had been there for 33 years, a sushi restaurant, a butcher, a 7-Eleven. Opposite the conservatory a billboard outside a strip mall advertises six businesses that no longer exist there...

[One] lives in a tent in a city park, and is convinced that her daughter – who died from a drug overdose almost a decade ago – has been kidnapped and is being tortured. Const. Wishlaw says she wanders residential streets talking animatedly to herself, sometimes screaming or crying – and frequently calls police, begging them to rescue her daughter. 

Victoria police, who are routinely called to supportive housing buildings in the city, are frustrated by what they call the “warehousing” of drug users and profoundly ill people by the B.C. government, and a lack of incentives to push people to try to curb their addictions or treat their mental health issues.

To Const. Wishlaw, the block is what happens when good intentions, smart minds and a lot of money run up against the reality of drug addiction.

“This isn’t a housing issue. It’s a drug issue. And it’s a mental health issue. People need off-ramps: treatment, long-term care. But we don’t offer them any of that.”

The buildings are catered with hot meals twice daily, he adds, noting that residents are allowed to smoke and inject drugs inside their apartments, which B.C. Housing confirmed to The Globe.

The housing agency’s spokesperson, Laura McLeod, said the approach “meets people where they are at — housing first, then support for healthy life choices."...

Even Det. Insp. Conor King, a rock-ribbed supporter of harm reduction measures and safe supply, is having doubts. “Police have adopted very progressive drug policy, but it’s worse than ever, and we’re doing more than ever. How can we be optimistic?”...

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 59 in British Columbia, and account for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents, and natural diseases combined. Last year, 2,253 people died from overdose, up from 334 in 2013, giving the province the fifth highest overdose mortality rates of any North American state or province, at 45.7 deaths per 100,000 residents.

Experts are beginning to understand that overdoses are also causing lasting harm to those who survive them. Fentanyl can slow or stop a person’s breathing during an overdose, starving their brain of oxygen. This can lead to permanent memory loss, impairment, and impulsive behaviour, creating a hidden epidemic of people with often severe brain damage who are struggling to survive in the city’s core...

Julian Daly, CEO of Our Place, a Pandora shelter and support services provider, says it is long past time for B.C. to open the door to long-term, involuntary care: “I make no apology for saying that. That’s what my experience has shown me. There is a small group of people who are so unwell they are not able to make an informed choice about their health care. If they do not get help, they will die.”...

[During Covid] The B.C. government quickly bought three downtown Victoria hotels, moving 334 [homeless] people into them. But in 2021, after the homeless count rose again, another 200 people were moved indoors.

Already, two of the leased hotels have been slated to close permanently due to recent fires, damage and disrepair...

Outside the Shoppers Drug Mart on Douglas Street, the city’s main drag, Const. Wishlaw asked four people smoking fentanyl in a bus shelter to move along. One, who police noted was in need of a fix, complained of being harassed by security at Shoppers.

Const. Wishlaw estimated that within 15 minutes she would try to steal from another downtown business, since the drug store had foiled her theft attempt. Not ten minutes later, she hurried out of a nearby Winners, arms full of stolen shoes, makeup, sweaters and dresses. She almost collided with Const. Wishlaw and his partner, who happened to be walking past with The Globe.

This is the reason that staff at the Douglas Ave. Shoppers Drug Mart will soon be wearing body-cameras – a first in Western Canada. It’s the reason that so many grocers and clothing stores in Victoria’s downtown now employ security guards. And it’s the reason police give for the majority of the 6,000 calls they get every month from Mayfair Shopping Centre, the core-area mall.

A new Leger poll showed that 73 per cent of Victorians think downtown has gotten worse in the last year, far higher than any other Canadian city. The top reasons given for the perceived decline of the core include homelessness (91 per cent) and drug addiction (87 per cent).

Forty-four per cent of respondents said that they or a close friend or family member had been victim of a crime or dangerous experience within the past six months."

Clearly, without "harm reduction", it would be even worse, and the solution is to "trust the 'experts'" and have even more free housing and free drugs, to blame "capitalism" and to defund the police and send in social workers.

The myth of the War on Christmas strikes again!

Links - 22nd December 2025 (2 - Drugs: Canada)

Adam Zivo: B.C.'s lenient drug policies haven't helped opioid crisis - "A new peer-reviewed study has found that British Columbia’s “safer supply” policy was associated with a statistically significant increase in opioid hospitalizations with no reduction in deaths. To make matters worse, it found that the addition of drug possession decriminalization policies was associated with a further increase in hospitalizations. This research vindicates critics of the harm reduction movement, and raises serious concerns about whether the federal Liberals and B.C. NDP acted recklessly by forwarding these untested policies. The study, which was published in JAMA Health Forum last month, says that safer supply alone was associated with a 33 per cent increase in opioid hospitalizations, while the introduction of drug decriminalization was associated with a further spike, leading to a combined 58 per cent increase compared to provincial rates seen in the late 2010s... The researchers determined that “neither the safer opioid supply policy nor the decriminalization of drug possession seemed to alleviate the opioid crisis,” and hypothesized that widespread diversion of safer supply opioids onto the black market, which has been “increasingly documented,” could explain increased hospitalization rates. The researchers cautioned that “diverted opioids could attract new users, including youth,” and that such users “face a higher risk of overdose, even from pharmaceutical-grade opioids,” because they are opioid-naive. However, they added that “the absence of a significant increase in overdose deaths suggest that the availability of pharmaceutical-grade opioids may have mitigated some of the risks associated with (the) unregulated opioid supply, potentially reducing the severity of outcomes.”... according to Dr. Lori Regenstreif, a Hamilton-based addiction physician, there could be a significant delay before safer supply diversion causes a measurable increase in deaths, as individuals who develop addictions to pharmaceutical opioids generally die many years later, often after escalating to stronger substances. She noted that such a delay was observed with the OxyContin crisis, which safer supply bears a striking resemblance to."
The pro drug people are going to be very upset, but they'll continue citing their old studies which proclaim "harm reduction" a great success - based solely on drug user feedback rather than objective and holistic metrics, or just looking at outcomes in the users (as opposed to the wider population)

Aaron Gunn on X - "BREAKING Canada's Liberal Minister of Public Safety completely UNAWARE that his own government decriminalized hard drugs, including fentanyl, crystal meth and crack cocaine in B.C. Also doesn't think someone high on crystal meth poses a "risk to public safety". Incredible."

Sentences for Drug Crimes - Piñera del Olmo - Spanish Lawyers - "The Spanish authorities take into account the risks which a drug poses on public health before imposing a sentence. Therefore, they consider the risks of the drug in question and the severity of the problems caused by its distribution on the black market.  The lawyers in our firm understand that the most severe penalties faced by drug possessors or traffickers are those involving MDMA, LSD, methadone, heroin, speed, and others which pose a high risk to public health. For these drugs, one can expect a prison sentence of between 3 years and 6 years, with an additional fine. Drugs which are considered to be less of a risk to Public Health, our lawyers know to be Marijuana, Rohypnol and other soft drugs. Our lawyers would expect a sentence for the trafficking of these drugs to be between 1 and 3 years, with an additional fine.""
Someone on Facebook claimed that in Spain the government "made all drugs legal and actively gives people comfortable places to do drugs", but decriminalisation of small quantities for private use isn't the same as legalisation

Why are fentanyl deaths in Europe a fraction of those seen in North America? - The Globe and Mail - "It’s not just the U.K. that has largely avoided a fentanyl crisis. The countries that make up the European Union have also seen far less impact from the drug compared to North America. The mortality rate due to all drug overdoses in 2023 in the EU is around 25-per-million people aged 15-64, according to the bloc’s annual European Drug Report. By contrast, in the U.S., the age-adjusted mortality rate just for synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl, was nearly nine times higher at about 222-per-million.  “Some people will say, ‘Europe, just wait till you have the fentanyl, and you will have the same problems’,” said Wim van den Brink, an addiction specialist at Amsterdam University Medical Centre. “I don’t think so, because there are many differences between Europe and the U.S... the U.S. lags behind Europe when it comes to arresting and prosecuting most drug offenders. According to the UN, Europe arrests, prosecutes and convicts people for drug-related offences at a much higher rate than that of the Americas. In 2023, for every 100 arrests for drug-trafficking related offences, 55 people were prosecuted, and 25 of those were convicted. Europe, by comparison, prosecuted 61 people per 100 arrests and convicted 34 of them. That same year, when it came to drug possession, the Americas were extremely lenient. Only 9 out of 100 arrested faced prosecution, and only two were convicted.  Data suggests that possession laws in Europe were better enforced, with 29 of the 39 people prosecuted for drug possession being convicted... In 2023, treatment coverage for individuals with drug use disorders was highest in Europe. According to the latest data from the UN, 28 per cent of people with drug use disorders in Europe received treatment. In contrast, only 9 per cent of those with drug use disorders in the Americas received treatment... Where Canada significantly differs from the U.S. is on harm reduction services. Prof. Caulkins said Canada is “light years ahead” when it comes to supervised drug-use sites, where people can use drugs under the supervision of a health care worker. He said no other country went “whole hog” the way Canada did.”
The cope is that in Europe they treat it as a health issue, so you need to give away free drugs as part of safer supply and with no "stigma" (which they don't do in Europe, but who cares if you're pro-drugs?)

Mounties spent millions to clean up drug labs in B.C. - "Since the RCMP raided Canada’s largest-ever clandestine fentanyl lab in Falkland last October, the Mounties have accrued $3.6 million in costs removing deadly chemicals from B.C. drug labs.  And that money comes out of the RCMP’s operational budget, meaning less cash for more investigations at a time when the federal government is asking the Mounties to cut two per cent from their budget over three years."
RCMP stuck with $3.6 million bill for cleanup of B.C. drug labs : r/ilovebc - "Remember. You were told there wasn’t a problem and that it was US rhetoric. 🤣"

Nanaimo mom upset with drug use info cards distributed at school event : r/ilovebc - "Teaching children how to use the date rape drug recreationally while explaining it as oceanic bliss, connection to eternal love and the divine is wrong on so many levels"

Fentanyl in air at Vancouver supportive housing offices - "The presence of second-hand fentanyl smoke is so severe at some British Columbia supportive housing facilities that workers cannot escape “substantial exposure,” even if they stay in their offices and don’t venture into hallways or tenants’ rooms... University of B.C. adjunct Prof. Mark Haden agreed, adding that he believes the problem of tenants smoking fentanyl in supportive housing is a direct symptom of drug prohibition — a more fundamental issue that should be tackled.  “This is a completely predictable outcome of a social policy that we need to fix,” said Haden, who referred to fentanyl in a health care setting as a medicine.  “We wouldn’t have people using fentanyl in their rooms if they could go downstairs to some health facility and talk to a health care worker or a nurse who provided these kind of medicines within the context of a health service.”  He called supervised consumption sites a big step in addressing the issue, but not enough.  “Supervised injection sites don’t provide the medicine,” Haden said. “They provide a space for people to inject illegal drugs. So, what we need to do is to provide the medicines that people take in the context of health facilities.”"
Where's the compassion?! Where's the empathy?! If they can't do their jobs they should resign and let someone else with a heart take over
Big surprise that the answer is more free drugs

Meme - "So if a kid has an allergic reaction the parents have to pay a ridiculous price for an Epi pen. But a junkie who has OD'd for their 15th time gets Narcan for free? What a screwed up world we live in."
Clearly, the solution is free drugs for everyone

Julian Somers: Victoria's Pandora Avenue is a hive of misery. But as its name suggests, there’s hope - "Pandora’s 900 Block is steps from the Ministry of Health headquarters, which I’ve been visiting for my work on addiction and homelessness since the 90s. Last year, I spoke with people living rough, on and around Pandora. Their stories reflect familiar, well-documented themes involving adversity, social isolation, and the experience that public services keep people stuck in a revolving door. A report commissioned by the BC Solicitor General revealed that repeated criminal sentencing and addiction began increasing markedly in BC around 2013. Drug poisoning is now the leading cause of death among youth in BC, two-thirds of whom were current or past clients of the Ministry of Children and Family Development. B.C.’s overall rate of drug-related deaths is about double the Canadian average . Meanwhile, the social consequences of our public policies have metastasized. Stores have closed, tourists stay away, and people are afraid to leave their homes, or move into newly built affordable rentals amidst tent cities on the sidewalks. A desperately needed childcare facility planned to be built at 930 Pandora will struggle to attract clients to the area when completed in 2029. First responders stopped entering the area without a police escort after a paramedic was brutally attacked last year. Homeowners, like those in other B.C. neighbourhoods have seen their quality of life and their home equity decline... Heralding the anticipated benefits of drug decriminalization and “safe supply,” B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer wrote in 2019: “As overdoses become more pervasive both domestically and worldwide, jurisdictions are looking to BC for leadership and guidance. The stage is set for the province to meet this call.” Instead, BC has become a national embarrassment and an international model of what not to do. Our policies prioritize providing publicly-funded drugs to people living in poverty, while demanding that citizens tolerate drug use in an increasing array of settings. Evidence from randomized trials has confirmed that B.C.’s “low barrier” congregate housing has resulted in preventable crime and medical emergencies... Next door to B.C., Alberta is several years into an all-of-government transformation to support recovery. The Alberta Model, which I’ve been honoured to support , includes impressive new resources, like eleven recovery communities and the delivery of addiction treatment in prisons. Rather than keeping people stuck in squalour, Alberta’s approach is guided by a vision of wellness and social reintegration, accompanied by a commitment to transparency. By contrast, B.C.’s Auditor General concluded last year that the province’s massive expansion of drug consumption sites and introduction of “safe supply” were accompanied by “deficiencies in target setting and evaluation.” The absence of credible evaluation meant that, for years, officials could assure the public that our policies were working. Asked last year about widespread diversion of “safe supply,” B.C.’s Minister of Public Safety said the reports were “ simply not true. ” Less than one year later, a leaked Ministry of Health document confirmed that a “significant portion of the opioids being freely prescribed by doctors and pharmacists (were) not being consumed by their intended recipients.” There are no apparent winners in B.C.’s bleak, yet astonishingly costly, approach to addiction, homelessness, and community safety. High-quality sources of guidance are available, including the Stanford-Lancet Commission and a Call to Action for B.C., that, in 2021, recommended scaling up recovery-oriented care in four regions."
Another reason left wingers hate Alberta so much
Too bad recovery-oriented care increases "stigma" so the "solution" is to give even more free drugs out

Steve Kooner MLA on X - "SHOCKING: NDP MLA Stephanie Higginson says she won’t support the Drug Use Prevention Education in Schools Act because she finds “explicitly discouraging drug use” to be “deeply concerning”. I find it deeply concerning that this government can’t put their radical ideology aside for a single second to protect BC school kids from life-destroying drugs."
Heather Maahs MLA on X - "In other news NDP don’t like drug prevention programs in school. Apparently it stigmatizes drug use. I really thought Steve’s bill was a no brainer. Wait….🧐"

Alleged drug deals from chair outside Victoria consumption site ‘unacceptable,’ police chief says : r/ilovebc - "This was the first obfuscation of policy engaged in by the activists in this arena when InSite first opened.  Essentially those activists claimed that the VPD being present on-or-around the block was a violation of the "privacy" of InSite's clients and that it was an example of the most evil action ever -- stigmatization.  They won.  And eventually that same principle was extended to include the entire DTES, which was how we ended up with the 2007 VPD policy to end seizures of all illicit substances within a prescribed weight in that defined locale.  Basically, the societal guardrails put in place alongside the original amendment exception to our Federal and Provincial laws surrounding illicit substances that allowed InSite to open were challenged and removed one-by-one within the first couple years of that SIS opening -- mostly under the banner of "destigmatization" despite that concept originally having a very narrow definition of an addict's experience while interacting with specific government and social institutions."

Nanaimo, where complaining about feces in drug zones is all you can do - "Nanaimo, B.C.’s downtown drug experiment has failed to stabilize its overdose rate. It has managed, however, to line the city’s oldest streets with feces, garbage, hit-and-runs, doorway fires and damaged property — a situation so bad that city council, just last week, considered fortifying its parking lot with a 1.8-metre fence.  City council ultimately rejected that $412,000 proposal — which might be for the best, considering how everyone else in the area wouldn’t be entitled to its protection. But the fact it was even pondered to begin with is an indictment of “harm reduction” in the little city — and a warning to everyone else who wants to try it.    A good chunk of Nanaimo’s homeless services are concentrated downtown. Since December 2022, the city’s lone safe injection site is located to the immediate east of city hall. Prior to that, it was in a building across the street, where it caused escalating issues of “entrenched homelessness, open-air drug use, and street-level trafficking,” according to a report to council. A two-minute drive to the southeast of city hall is another cluster of homeless services known as the Hub, which opened in January. Between the two is the city’s Nob Hill Park, which harbours disorder and is known as a place to avoid by locals, who, in turn, want the homeless services moved. Resident Jean Fox, who lives steps from the park, told the council’s finance committee on Wednesday that her 82-year-old husband’s woodworking tools were stolen from their house as they slept; officers later recovered the tools from carts outside the Hub. As for the park, well, Fox can’t take her granddaughters there anymore because of all the drug users who sit there during the day.   “There’s human feces in the park,” she said. “They pull their pants down in front of our window that looks into the park and relieve themselves. They walk around with their pants hanging down and their bums hanging out.”  Anthony Gratl, currently renovating his rental house in the area — where he raised his son several years ago with no problems — reported that he “was attacked last week when I asked somebody to move off of my property.” Now, meth smokers congregate in the area, waiting for the pharmacy to open. “The situation is well out of control.”  Leslie Girard, another father in the area, has had to deal with garbage, physical and verbal abuse and even human feces at his fence since the Hub facility was opened in January. He reported that overnight shelter users even held a dog fight on one occasion.  The residents’ observations are backed by city statistics, which show that the RCMP has received just over 500 calls for service in the area surrounding the Hub from January to June. But even these are of limited use: the root cause of this widespread chaos — open-air drug use — is virtually off-limits for police. RCMP Constable Adam Taylor explained to the finance committee that the force is held back by federal rules that allow the possession of up to 2.5 grams of illegal drugs, which prevent them from making arrests. (Federal decriminalization efforts have caused similar front-line problems in Sarnia, Ont., to the great frustration of locals)... Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog asked: “Is it fair to say … (that) it is practically speaking impossible for the police to arrest folks in a meaningful way for drug use in a public place?”  The officer’s reply? “Yes.”  The centre, as with many others of its type, does help people. It houses the homeless overnight, and, anecdotally, the city reports that it’s connected some individuals with addiction treatment. But, to accomplish all this, it’s transformed the surrounding area into a free-range homeless zone rooted to a few indoor service providers.   As for whether any of this is improving overdose statistics long-term, it’s not optimistic: Nanaimo’s rate tripled from 500 in 2016 to 1,500 in 2024, according to provincial data. It’s true that 2024 was better than 2023, which saw 2,500 deaths, but plenty more progress needs to be made before the city can declare victory.  Similar stories of urban devastation crop up across the country. In Sarnia, in Hamilton, Ont. and in Kitchener, Ont., homeless encampments have become court-entrenched features, with judges ruling that insufficient shelter space renders camp-clearing a Charter violation — with no thought for the general public, of course. In Vancouver, the scene is so bad that Crown prosecutors, whose offices are located in the midst of the maelstrom, are begging to move.  In Nanaimo, authorities are now considering moving the Hub in light of resident feedback, but the city’s social planning manager wasn’t optimistic that a new location could be found. Of course, simply closing the thing isn’t an option — it never is.  That’s Canada, 2025: instead of arresting the people whose crime and chaos destroy community for everyone else, or at least isolating them in facilities for people who can’t take care of themselves (which the homeless and addicted can’t), we shrug. Whether their problems surface before city councils or courts, the well-being of everyday, society-contributing, city residents remains a low priority."
The residents who complain are disgusting human beings who lack "empathy". They need to erect more "we support our homeless neighbors" signs and learn how to be kind. The only solution is to give out more free drugs

The drug-addict zombies are coming for your neighbourhood - "Over the past year I’ve almost killed addicts several times. Not that I wanted to. But when you’re driving along the street and they randomly walk out in front of your car, it’s a little tricky not to become an accidental killer.  Trips to the library aren’t exactly like when I was a child. Our library is downtown across from an old Greyhound station. It’s not as if a bus station is entirely salubrious, but when they replaced it with the “Consumption and Treatment Services Site” things got a lot more zombie-movie-like.  Recent trips to the library have included such highlights as watching one man defecate beside our car even as, a few feet away, a group of people huddled in a group and injected drugs. Then there was the time I entered the library only to find a couple spreading out their things in the library foyer, including drug paraphernalia and large bottles of booze. If you went by what it is mostly used for, you might think the library toilet in the basement — right next to the children’s section — is meant to be a homeless person’s French-shower location and possibly a place to shoot up (if the sounds in the stalls are anything to go by)... All of this has happened while the so-called “harm reduction” programs have expanded. And even though the “housing first” advocates did build a new community of tiny homes for the homeless just a couple of years ago, somehow, for some inexplicable reason, the problem has only gotten worse."
When left wingers want to censor and oppress those they disagree with, they claim that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. But they want to give drug addicts free reign to terrorise normal people and if you disagree, you are a bad person, because only drug addicts have rights, but not normal people

Senator to call for advertising ban for beer, wine and liquor, amid push for alcohol warning labels - "Senator Patrick Brazeau, who has publicly battled substance abuse issues, believes alcoholic drinks should face many of the same restrictions as tobacco and marijuana, so this Fall he is planning to introduce a bill in the Senate to prohibit the promotion of alcohol. “The intent is simply to ban the advertising and promotion of alcohol in Canada writ large, like we have done with tobacco products”... Brazeau continues to try and push bill S-254 through parliament, which would force warning labels on the packaging of beer, wine and liquor... In 2022, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction released new guidelines saying no amount of alcohol consumption is safe, and in 2023 the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research released a report recommending the mandating of alcohol warning labels."
Cracking down on traditionally legal drugs while liberalizing traditionally harder ones. How odd

Derek Finkle: Pro-drug injection site activists were dangerously wrong on closures - "“A lot more people are going to die.” This was the dire prediction oft-repeated back in March by a busload of lawyers who supported a legal challenge filed by an injection site in Toronto that claimed recent Ontario legislation forcing the closure of sites within 200 metres of schools and daycare facilities violates the Charter rights of drug users. The two expert witnesses for that site, in the Kensington neighbourhood of Toronto, are employed by the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions , a hospital-run research centre. MAP had played a key role in the establishment of the city’s first injection sites in 2017. Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi and Dr. Dan Werb both submitted evidence that overdose deaths in Toronto would increase sharply if half of the city’s ten injection sites closed at the end of March because of the legislation. Fred Fischer, a lawyer representing Toronto’s Board of Health, one of the intervenor groups in the case, also told Justice John Callaghan of the Ontario Superior Court that reducing harm reduction services in Toronto during the ongoing opioid crisis would have severe consequences — more people will overdose and die . A lawyer for another intervenor, a harm reduction coalition, put an even finer point on it. He said that one of the Toronto injection sites not affected by the legislation was anticipating such an immediate and overwhelming increase in overdose deaths in April, after the closures, that the site was in the process of hiring grief counsellors for its staff. More than two months have passed since then, and now that we’re in June, you might be wondering: How many more people ended up dying because of the closure of these sites? According to data that’s compiled by Toronto Paramedic Services and Toronto Public Health, the answer, so far, is none. In fact, the number of overdoses in Toronto for the month of April, the first month after the sites had closed, dropped notably. Toronto had 13 fatal overdose calls in April, one less than in March, when the now-closed injection sites were still open. Thirteen is less than half the number of fatal overdoses across the city in April of last year, and significantly below the monthly average for all of 2024 (19). Thirteen fatal overdoses are far lower than the average monthly number during the period of Covid-19 emergency between April 2020 and May 2023 (25). The last time 13 was the norm for monthly fatal overdoses was prior to the pandemic. The number of calls for non-fatal overdoses in April was 161. This may sound like a lot but it’s the lowest monthly total so far this year in Toronto. And 161 non-fatal overdoses are 55 per cent less than the 359 that occurred in April of 2024. Remarkably, in the third week of April, there were zero fatal overdose calls, something that hasn’t happened in Toronto in months. Of course, this data has barely been reported on, but I can assure that had overdoses gone up in April, even slightly, outlets such as the Toronto Star and other habitual defenders of injection sites would have run we-told-you-so pieces by now... The chief emphasized that his frontline officers in Sandy Hill “consistently report that their workload is heavily influenced and consumed by drug-related crimes, mental health crises and social disorder.” The impact of the site on the surrounding community, wrote Stubbs, “cannot be overlooked.” He added that his police force was “especially troubled by the unintended but serious consequences, such as the closure of nearby childcare facilities due to safety concerns, a situation that is without precedence in our city.”... There are clear signs across the country that the disproportional focus on harm reduction from the Trudeau era is being reconsidered. So is the argument posited by some activists that the only solution to drug encampments is more housing . In a recent Globe and Mail feature about the open-air drug market on Victoria, B.C.’s Pandora Avenue, a local housing non-profit said that many of the street’s inhabitants turned down supportive units it had opened for them. A sergeant with the local force called the population “unhousable.” “This isn’t a housing issue,” said another Victoria officer. “It’s a drug issue. And it’s a mental health issue. People need off-ramps: treatment, long-term care. But we don’t offer them any of that.” And just in case you don’t think police have the expertise to speak about such matters, Julian Daly, the CEO of a homeless shelter in Victoria called Our Place, advocates for involuntary care, which he says is long overdue: “There is a very small group of people on Pandora Avenue who will frankly need some sort of institutional care for the rest of their lives. They will not be able to go back into mainstream society and be safe and healthy.” This week, under Dr. Daniel Vigo, B.C.’s chief scientific advisor for psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders, the province is opening  18 beds at a new mental health facility in Metro Vancouver dedicated to long-term involuntary care. Vigo says these beds will go to patients who are “stuck in high-security hospital units indeterminately” because of a lack of other options. Marjorie Michel, the health minister, had a lukewarm response to the news, saying that forcing fentanyl addicts into treatment isn’t the answer because clear supporting evidence doesn’t exist yet. What the minister’s position doesn’t acknowledge, however, is that a growing number of street fentanyl users suffer from irreversible brain damage so severe they are unable to adequately care for themselves. They may never be able to. Pointing to a lack of evidence about involuntary treatment for those without debilitating brain injuries while ignoring evidence about the hundreds, if not thousands, of those who will never recover from the neurological trauma opioids have caused, is short-sighted to say the least.  Vigo is right to pursue more treatment options for those who want it while at the same time doing what’s compassionate for those who can’t care for themselves."
Left wingers are still repeating this line. Evidence doesn't matter. Trust the Left Wing 'Experts'

People that live near safe supply and safe injection sites, how is it? - "I don’t live near one, but I did go to Ryerson and had to pass it almost every day because I had many classes in the building it was attached to, and I can say that myself and every single one of my female friends who had classes in the building were either harassed or assaulted by users outside of it. It did genuinely make life unsafe for students at the university.  One or two junkies on the sidewalk, you can cross the street and walk around if they seem aggressive or threatening. A large group of them all in front of the door you need to use to get to class, you can’t."

Links - 13th December 2025 (2 - Drugs)

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

Suspected drug-smuggling tunnel found in Tijuana is so long authorities don't have enough oxygen to reach other end

‘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