Why Liberals love the disease theory of addiction, by a Liberal who hates it (Drugs)

Stanton Peele, an addiction expert, from 2014. He doesn't address obvious points about genetic factors and how they might correlate not just with drug use but being underprivileged as well.

Why Liberals love the disease theory of addiction, by a Liberal who hates it

"Because they can’t draw unfavorable inferences about life in poor ghettos or poor rural communities (to which they have little exposure), liberals are drawn to the belief that drugs cause addiction...

A desire to think the best of people, particularly those less fortunate than ourselves, is admirable: We mustn’t blame people for being addicted, goes the well-intentioned thinking, so addiction has to be caused by an irresistible force. A theory that ascribes near-magical malevolent properties to drugs—involving a 12-step-inspired belief in the “powerlessness” of individuals in the face of this scourge, in cahoots with some neuroscientists’ portrayal of addiction as a function of brain chemistry “hijacked” by drugs—thus fills the bill for liberals.

Indeed, we don’t need to blame anybody for being addicted. As Ilse Thompson and I wrote in our recent book, neither shame nor blame contributes to recovery. But that doesn’t mean we should deny the social factors that contribute to addiction, or deny that addicted people can improve their lives through their own thinking and action. The widespread belief of oversensitive liberals in the disease theory, however well-meant, undercuts and demoralizes the very people liberals wish to help...

One of the most influential opponents of legalizing marijuana and other drug policy advances has for many decades been that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. True, the Times has just come out with a major policy statement in favor of legalizing marijuana. But they continue to stigmatize addiction and to test their own prospective employees for marijuana...

Most conservative politicians strongly oppose marijuana legalization. But the Obama administration, of which we might expect better, isno better, and continues to fight legalization in the face of growing awareness of its inevitability. How often, after all, do politicians oppose policies that a majority of Americans favor? That this opposition is steeped in disease theory beliefs comes through in Obama’s drug czars’ attitudes...

See how Times star Benoit Denizet-Lewis combines in one heady mixture the latest neurochemistry mish-mash (this was in 2006, and we still haven’t quite got that promised anti-addiction pill) with the good old 12-step spiritualism that Denizet-Lewis favors. And Times columnists from liberals Nicholas Kristoff and Maureen Dowd to chief conservative David Brooks have also endorsed AA and other disease standard-bearers...

The tendency for liberals to endorse the disease theory of addiction has strong wellsprings. You see, there’s a trap that the privileged and enlightened find very hard to escape: We are frightened to say that people in our country who are disadvantaged economically, socially or, alas, racially, are more likely to become addicted. That would mean that they are different from us in a bad way. Much safer is to play up that drugs are bad, that drugs trap unfortunate people, and that these people have diseases against which they are powerless. 

Back in the media, no one supports the disease meme more than the liberal commentators on MSNBC. Consider the strange pas de deux of Chris Hayes and Carl Hart. Hart is an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University and the author of High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. The book lives up to its claim. In a phrase, Hart says, “Drugs aren’t the problem.”

Hayes loves Hart. But, unfortunately, he can only love one part of Hart’s story. Hart rose out of the Miami ghetto through his interest in science, which Hayes continuously cites.

The second part of Hart’s story is really hard for Hayes and MSNBC to swallow: that drugs—and particularly meth, which Hart researches (he points out that methamphetamine is chemically almost identical to Adderall) are not unusually powerful forces in people’s lives. Nearly all users can quit or cut back. Hart’s experiments prove this, as do many real-life examples. Unfortunately, the ghetto which Hart came from has remained just as dysfunctional since he left, he reports. Hart knew it pre-crack; he knows it after crack. He sees little change.

But if you can’t buy Hart’s version, how to explain the broken homes and communities and ruined lives? There is the rub. Hayes and fellow commentators (including the extremely smart panel on MSNBC’s The Cycle) rely on this narrative: Drugs have overpowered communities, just as they hijack an individual’s brain chemistry. And, yes, sometimes these happen to be deprived communities. Butactually, drugs are so bad—especially heroin, painkillers, meth and crack—that they overpower everybody. “Addiction Does Not Discriminate,” liberal disease theory acolytes typically trumpet.

Except it does.

That Hayes et al. know many people—probably including themselves—who have taken powerful painkillers and then simply quit when their pain subsided, say post-operatively, means nothing to them. They ignore their own experiences, which tell them that people well-situated economically and socially routinely take drugs safely. (Of course, as both Hart and I note, people with deep personal problems from any walk of life, think Phillip Seymour Hoffman, may form drug and other addictions.)

Thus liberals excuse themselves from addressing the havoc in poor urban and rural communities which turns them into centers for addiction. Instead, they satisfy their instinct for equality by emphasizing that people in upper-middle-class communities—like college campuses, playground resorts like Colorado, and the good old Golden Triangle of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles—also take drugs. “See, marijuana use rates are the same for blacks and whites,” they cry, conveniently ignoring their very different rates ofproblematic drug use.

Look at alcohol: Those in the upper-middle class far more often drink (about 70% of college grads) than those in lower socioeconomic groups (only 35% of those lacking a high school diploma do). But, of those who do drink in both groups, far more of the socially disadvantaged have drinking problems. They also smoke more—despite smoking’s now-exorbitant costs. For example, 12% of college grads smoked in the last month, compared with 34% of those without a high school diploma.

“But look,” liberals protest, “middle-class kids sometimes take heroin!” Then comes the fast shuffle, parenthetically or under the breath: “so middle class people are addicted as much as people in Appalachia, inner cities, and poor white New England neighborhoods.”

But they’re not, you know. Poverty is conclusively linked with a greater risk for addiction, and with the probability of worse consequences for people who become addicted.

I turn to my good colleague at Substance.com, the often prescient Maia Szalavitz. After announcing in her piece, “These ‘New Face of Heroin’ Stories Are Just the Old Face of Racism” that, of course, middle class kids use heroin and painkillers, so everybody’s equal on that score, she sneaks in:

“Addiction rates are higher in poor people—not because they are less moral or have greater access to drugs, but because they are more likely to experience childhood trauma, chronic stress, high school dropout, mental illness and unemployment, all of which raise the odds of getting and staying hooked.”

Wait a second, run that by me again? After we discard the chaff—poor and black people are less moral and have more access to drugs—we come to the crux of addiction: Underprivileged people are more likely to “experience childhood trauma, chronic stress, high school dropout, mental illness and unemployment, all of which raise the odds of getting and staying hooked.”

That’s a rather important fact to bury near the end of the article, don’t you think? Especially considering that Maia worked with Hart on his book. And certain psychological dispositions come along with those deprived situations. I’ll quote Maia again, this time making an important point in another article about the ability to delay gratification:

“Follow-up studies on these preschoolers found that those who were able to wait the 15 minutes (to eat a marshmallow) were significantly less likely to have problems with behavior, drug addiction or obesity by the time they were in high school, compared with kids who gobbled the snack in less than a minute.”...

NBC and MSNBC, as Maia points out, love to feature white middle-class addicts and drug scares in supposedly middle-class communities (which, on closer inspection of the video, are more often deprived areas).

While Maia objects to their claiming heroin use by these people is a new phenomenon, I have a different critique: It’s just so easy to portray middle-class heroin addicts. Their homes are so much more pleasant, and—given their advantages—they usually recover, unlike those in Appalachia, inner-city ghettos and similar communities, whose lives are much more frequently marked by lifelong addiction, poor health, crime, joblessness and despair. As Granfield and Cloud point out, the biggest factor aiding people in recovery from drug addiction with or without treatment is their “social capital”—their life resources...

The disease theory has everything the media demands: star power, drama and a personal moral lesson linked to tragedy. It also suits politicians by endorsing their instinct to try to suppress drug use and their wish to be seen as uncompromising against a public menace. And strange to say, the moral lesson many liberals derive from those who become addicted—since they can’t lay it at the feet of social forces—is the same just-say-no temperance message that they mock when it comes from the likes of a Nancy Reagan." 

Links - 1st July 2026 (1 - Drugs: Canada)

'Be better': VicPD criticizes Island Health interaction with alleged drug trafficker on consumption site doorstep - "  “A service provider is coming out, engaging with this drug trafficker while this drug trafficker is making transactions. It’s unprofessional. I’m extremely disappointed to see that,” said Victoria Police Chief Del Manak on Tuesday. “That is absolutely unacceptable.”  As part of ‘Project 3D’, Victoria undercover officers observed a service provider talking with a man posted up in a lawn chair allegedly trafficking cocaine to a lineup of customers, on the front stoop of an Island Health consumption site on the 900-block of Pandora called The Harbour."

B.C. politician pushes bill to force schools to say drugs are bad - "The B.C. Conservatives are calling for measures to keep “radical drug lobbyists” out of schools after a school event that featured info cards on how to do drugs such as cocaine, meth and GHB.  “This isn’t education. It is grooming kids into drug culture,” said B.C. Conservative MLA Steve Kooner in a Tuesday statement endorsing his private member’s bill that, if passed, would compel schools to “explicitly discourage drug use.” The event in question was a Pride festival sanctioned by the Nanaimo-Ladysmith Public Schools District.  After accompanying her 10-year-old to the event, Nanaimo, B.C. mother Ruth Taylor alerted local media to the presence of postcard-sized leaflets that local media described as “drug use information cards.”  A card labelled “meth,” for instance, details the drug’s euphoric effects, its reported ability to increase libido and even includes recommended dosages...  A card for GHB, a common date-rape drug, reads that the substance can “make the user feel more relaxed and more sociable.” It adds, “G can also increase libido.”  The cards were among the literature offered at a booth run by AIDS Vancouver Island, a harm reduction non-profit funded in part by government bodies such as Island Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada.  Taylor told Chek News that she confronted AIDS Vancouver Island about the materials being inappropriate for schoolchildren, but that “they were not receptive to what I was saying” and “the cards stayed for the remainder of the event.”... The DanceSafe cards are far from the first time that a Canadian school event has run into controversy for making materials available to minor that either facilitated drug use or encouraged risky behaviour.  Two years ago, a B.C. high school just north of Nanaimo came under fire after a drug awareness presentation concluded with the session leader distributing “safer snorting” kits.  The kit included plastic straws and cards to cut powdered drugs into lines that could then be snorted. “Have condoms and lube with you. You may want to have sex while high,” read an accompanying booklet.  That same year, a Canadian chapter of Planned Parenthood was barred from presenting in Saskatchewan schools after a sex education programmer distributed graphic cards describing fringe sex acts involving defecation and urine."

Geoff Russ: If involuntary treatment for addicts is a radical solution, so be it - "Every day, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is pushed further to the brink, and the cause of that decline is not a mystery.  Horrible choices made by generation after generation of political leaders have resulted in mass addiction, homelessness, and urban decay.  The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a containment zone, almost akin to District 9, where drug use, human chaos, and death are corralled. The City of Vancouver, British Columbia’s provincial government, and Ottawa have all played a role in managing this horrifying decline of life... many of these unfortunate people are incapable of making coherent decisions or looking after themselves, let alone each other.  Is it an infringement on personal liberty? Perhaps.  However, liberty is a privilege of those able to properly exercise it, and those suffering from severe addiction are not of sound mind, nor do they have the power of true choice.  Leaving them to wander alleyways is to treat them like free-range livestock. It is an abdication of responsibility to help our fellow Canadians.  Allegedly “compassionate” approaches have achieved little else aside from prolonging the unhappy lives of young men and women as their addiction to fentanyl and other drugs slowly melts their minds and bodies, as is the norm in B.C.  There is no justification for it beyond progressive platitudes, which have been exposed by the passage of time and a mounting death toll as nothing more than sweetly worded inhumanity. Excluding policing and senior government spending, Vancouver’s current operations intended to help homeless drug users with mental illness cost a tall $50 million annually.  The cash is burned on “management” at the street level, daily emergency responses, and cleanups. Single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels are filthy, cluttered, and dangerously prone to catching fire. Vancouver Fire Rescue Services responds to an average of one SRO fire per day in the DTES.  Nobody can pretend that these hundreds of millions of dollars have been well spent. All they do is delay the inevitable until a siren wails and another dead Canadian is delivered to the coroner. It will require stern political will, but it is worth it to clean up the DTES and other drug-filled neighbourhoods across Canada.  Wiping clean the open-air drug use and rapidly shifting people into involuntary care is true, tough compassion, both for those suffering from addiction and for the wider public... Giving a clean bed, warm accommodations, and three meals a day to somebody in an enforced drug-free environment is worth the controversy of a Charter challenge, rather than letting them fade away.  Alberta has already shown that prioritizing treatment works, and its approach is gentle. Calling it the “recovery-oriented” system, Alberta has provided on-demand access to medication, therapeutic, supervised living units, and a pathway to long-term recovery for those who want it.  In February, opioid-related deaths had collapsed by nearly 40 percent since 2023. That is progress, no matter how much harm reduction activists may grumble about it, and it is a resounding success for Danielle Smith’s government."

If involuntary treatment for addicts is a radical solution, so be it. Harm reduction policies are in retreat across Canada, and there are no moderate solutions to the addictions crisis. : r/ilovebc - "Until these zombies start to massively enter the rich neighbourhoods, or start to be regular pests in the well off areas were they to build a "supportive" housing unit beside some politicians home, the laws will never change"

Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "What we’re doing is not working"
"We've tried nothing and we're out of ideas!"
"What do you mean? We're doing almost everything that "advocates" have said to do.
-safe injection sites -tiny homes -shelters -wet facilities -safe supply -social outreach
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of initiatives. Maybe they're not being done perfectly, but the money is there. So Blake the social workers for their poor execution I guess? Our maybe, just maybe, it'll be all of this, combined with something new? I don't know. But it's a pretty true statement that what we're currently doing is not working."
Of course, one cope in the comments is there wasn't enough safe supply and safe injection sites

Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "I think a lot of folks don't understand...involuntary care is the compassionate choice. The cruel choice is rounding up all the undesirables and turning them into landfill. And to be honest, society is not as far away from doing that as some folks think."
"There are only two things that keep people from harming others: morality, and authority. For the past decade people have been pushed that letting people effectively light themselves on fire and burn everyone around them is more moral than effectively imprisoning them for their own good, because involuntary care is very susceptible to abuses even in the modern age. For the past decade people have watched streets and entire neighborhoods decay over the justice and reform systems being completely ineffectual against the homeless and drug crises because they're entirely lacking in follow-through. There are only two things that are keeping people from snapping and badly hurting the addicts: flawed morality and failing authority. Here in Victoria, we've actually had it really easy compared to most other places. There are small towns up island and entire cities in the US falling apart at the seams over their own crises, and people are snapping there. Someone tweaks a little too hard, has a psychotic episode, they attack someone, and someone else puts them down hard. Then the police go after that person even harder to send a message, building up immense amounts of resentment and distrust against them too. The only reason we haven't seen that kind of violence here is because people haven't been pressed hard enough, and I don't want to see that change."

Here’s Why Involuntary Care Won’t Work for Most People : r/britishcolumbia - "I work ambulance. Smaller/mid-size working class town. Called today for a man going into businesses in his wheelchair and pissing on the floor. Police issue. They didn't arrest. They told him to leave the area. Another crew went to him 3 hours later because a good citizen called in what they thought was a suffering old man in a wheelchair. He told the crew to fuck off. We won't take him anyways, he SA's any female medic he sees (pulls his pants down and starts jerking off ) and he's banned from the hospital unless he's unconscious/actively dying. I'm gonna lose my fucking job one day because of this guy, because I don't wanna get pissed on and I try, I try so fucking hard to remain compassionate to this convicted rapist because his life sucks, etc, but to the bystander it just looks like I'm giving subpar care to a senior (dudes like 55, just looks like shit cause his life is shit) because we're sick of this guy. He needs to be incarcerated but no one will do it. And what the average person doesn't know is some version of this guy exists in every town, and a hundred fold in each city. I swear to you all, we need some form of involuntary care. We need mental health supports for these people, but there isn't a path to a normal life for these people either. There's no rehabilitation for some, it's just trying to minimize their suffering, and even the shittiest of them deserve some dignity on the process, even if I'm fucking sick of them. It's a battleground out there."
"Emergency room RN here. As time goes by I start feel that "Harm Reduction" isn't for the addicted person; it's for us, the healthcare workers to help reduce the chances of harm inflicted on us by this population of people when they come into our departments. It feels more and more like a "just give them what they want" situation so they don't go wild on us hurting someone."
"As an RN... totally agree. Some people are truly beyond rehabilitation/remediation and others could actually turn their lives around with proper care but would never choose it while in the thick of addiction. I actually think we are doing these people a massive disservice by pretending they are capable adults, when most of the time they are not. I also feel the obligation to protect others in our society should outweigh the misguided need to "maintain" capacity in the incapacitated. Enough is enough, it's time to call a spade a spade."
"Amen - in education too. We pretend kids are tiny, developed adults and we absolutely are putting too much on them too fast when we need to be parenting and guiding them and not letting them ruin their lives and others' lives."

DeepDive: Opposition to supervised consumption sites is growing—but the mainstream media hasn’t seemed to notice - "For decades, supervised consumption sites (sometimes called “safe injection sites”) were heralded as a life-saving innovation by Canadian public health officials and supported by most municipal, provincial, and federal governments.  A famous Supreme Court decision in 2011, coupled with the Trudeau government’s relaxed policy for creating new sites, contributed to an elite consensus that consumption sites—and the harm reduction philosophy underpinning them—were an unambiguous public health good for individuals and communities.  As this DeepDive shows, that consensus is eroding—albeit slowly, and in some institutions more than others. There has been a growing pushback against supervised consumption and harm reduction policies from provincial governments, academics, physicians, journalists, and community organizations. Yet this resistance has not penetrated most elite institutions.  My analysis shows how the federal government, courts, and news reports from mainstream media outlets remain strongly supportive of supervised consumption sites, despite growing concerns about the efficacy of this approach to drug addiction. As provincial governments find creative ways to move away from harm reduction, they will face an uphill public relations battle... supervised consumption sites went to the court—and won. After victories in lower courts, in 2011 a unanimous Supreme Court held that the federal government’s decision not to grant Insite an exemption violated the Charter right to “life, liberty and security of the person.”...  As supervised consumption sites became normalized, a parallel policy development occurred: “safer supply.” This policy involves prescribing free drugs—opioids, stimulants, or benzodiazepines—to drug users “as a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply to people who are at high risk of overdose.”...   Safer supply has been heavily criticized. Journalist Adam Zivo has regularly documented how these drugs have been diverted to the black market in British Columbia and Ontario, with police, addictions experts, academics, and physicians claiming safer supply has exacerbated the opioid crisis, particularly among youth. Even the Globe and Mail has published op-eds criticizing safer supply (though its lead health columnist has called safer supply diversion “trivial”).  The parallel developments of safer supply, B.C.’s failed experiment with decriminalizing drug use in public spaces, and the normalization of supervised consumption sites have led to push back from provincial governments...   In Ontario, Superior Court Justice John Callaghan granted an injunction in March preventing the government from banning sites within 200 metres of a school or daycare. Justice Callaghan held that consumption sites “provide both lifesaving and health benefits” and that permitting the sites to remain open “will have a substantial public benefit of preventing serious health risks and deaths.”... First, even in the face of provincial opposition, the federal government continues to promote a highly sanitized and “clinical” narrative on supervised consumption sites. Drug users are referred to as “clients,” while the sites themselves provide “a safe, clean space for people to bring their own drugs to use in the presence of trained staff.” As the evidence for harm reduction is increasingly contested, Canada’s federal government remains undeterred.  Second, supervised consumption proponents continue to have a firm ally in the courts. Fourteen years after the Supreme Court of Canada found that Vancouver’s supervised consumption site had “no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives,” an Ontario court declared that consumption sites provide such “lifesaving and health benefits” and that government cannot even prevent them from operating near daycares or schools. In recent years, provincial superior courts have issued injunctions or declared rights violations when governments have tried to evict people from encampments, prevent public drug use, ban panhandling, and even remove bike lanes. It is no surprise that consumption sites were next on the list.  Third, mainstream media reporting on Ontario’s judicial injunction was far more likely to cite supporters than opponents of supervised consumption sites, leading readers to believe that the only opposition to such sites comes from conservative provincial governments...   Finally, recent events show that politicians opposed to supervised consumption sites can find clever ways around adverse judicial decisions."

DeepDive: Opposition to supervised consumption sites is growing—but the mainstream media hasn’t seemed to notice : r/ilovebc - "What we are doing hasn’t made communities safer, hasn’t decreased homelessness and hasn’t decreased crime."
"That's not the goal of these places. They reduce OD deaths and the spread of HIV and other diseases. Thats it.  It comes at the cost of making the area it's in completely uninhabitable by regular people or businesses.  When homeless addicts get hiv or OD it costs us a lot, but so does ruining downtown for everyone. All im saying is it's more complicated than giving free needles just to be nice."
It's hard to see a reduction in deaths in the data too

Julian Somers: The Charter should protect the public, not just drug users - "When two operators of Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) were found guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking last month, no one should have been surprised.  Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum were charged in October 2023 after running a storefront “compassion club” in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for a little more than a year. During that time, the pair bought illicit drugs — heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine — off the dark web, had them tested at a University of Victoria lab to ensure purity, and sold the drugs to the club’s 43 members for cost. Their stated goal was to prevent deaths attributed to drug poisoning.  Although the B.C. government-funded club was granted an exemption from Vancouver Coastal Health for the testing, packaging and supervised consumption of drugs, Health Canada had denied an exemption for the purchase of the drugs off the dark web “because of the associated public health and safety risks.” Furthermore, Nyx and Kalicum were warned that they would be in violation of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) if they did purchase the drugs off the dark web. DULF opened regardless, and operated until police eventually intervened and Nyx and Kalicum were charged — days before the club was to close under order by B.C.’s Health Ministry.  Now that the pair have been found guilty, their defence has moved into the realm of human rights with a Constitutional challenge. Is Canada’s Charter relevant to their case? From a psychological standpoint, yes. But in the opposite way to what DULF’s lawyers are arguing... B.C. is the only jurisdiction on Earth that has not only decriminalized the public use of illicit drugs but also dispensed pharmaceuticals to people who live in poverty with untreated addictions and promoted illegal drug user co-ops. Those policies were advised against by many authorities and have predictably yielded profound harms. The B.C. government tried unsuccessfully to curtail its decriminalization experiment after a little more than a year, and in July of this year the federal government quietly announced it was discontinuing support for its “safe supply” initiative. But while they were in place, both policies compromised the security rights of citizens and drove addiction, poisonings, public intoxication, business closures, theft and violent crime.  More Canadians have died from drugs in the past 10 years (January 2016 to March 2025) than were sacrificed in the Second World War. A Statistics Canada report found that 63.4 per cent of B.C. overdoses between 2014 and 2016 involved individuals who were unemployed. According to the B.C. Coroner’s Service, drug poisoning was the leading cause of death among the province’s youth between 2019 and 2023; two-thirds of those kids had been recipients of government care. Yet no B.C. policies prioritize helping marginalized drug users to regain employment or ensure that high-risk youth are supported through the transition to adulthood. Other jurisdictions prevent and treat addictions by supporting basic rights that have well-established influences on addiction, including healthy housing, support gaining employment, and achieving social integration. And it is the absence of attention to those rights that violates both the letter and intent of Canada’s Charter...  it would set a dangerous precedent to affirm that illegal drug trafficking is justifiable when governments drive citizens to addiction. For example, a recent drug-related murder in B.C. was described by police as a “targeted and brazen shooting in a high-traffic area” with “complete disregard for public safety.” If violating the law to engage in trafficking is a reasonable response to unreasonable drug policies, would courts similarly exonerate citizens who illegally carried concealed firearms to protect themselves from drug-fuelled violence?"

Derek Finkle: Injection site workers now admit drug dealing was rampant - "The province of Ontario did something last month it has never done before — it defunded a supervised injection site because the chaos and disorder it was causing had reached unacceptable levels for the surrounding neighbours. The injection site is in Parkdale, a neighbourhood on the west side of Toronto... The minister’s spokesperson cited a 53 per cent increase in break and enters within approximately one mile of the Parkdale injection site over the course of the year to date and a 36 per cent increase in assaults since 2018, when the injection site opened. Had the minister cut funding to an injection site even a year or two ago, activists would have promptly staged die-in protests in front of the provincial legislature, carrying signs accusing the government of the mass murder of drug users. That didn’t happen this time — for two reasons. First, nine injection sites in Ontario, four of which were in Toronto, were closed in March due to provincial legislation prohibiting sites from operating within 200 metres of schools and daycare facilities, and not only did overdose rates not skyrocket as activists had predicted, they actually went down... The second reason protests about the Parkdale site closure were muted had to do with another injection site, one I happen to live across the street from in east Toronto, which, up until its closure in March, operated in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre. South Riverdale made national headlines in the summer of 2023 when a mother of two young children, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed by drug dealers outside of the site who exchanged gun fire after a physical altercation. The murder trial for Damian Hudson, the drug dealer who, according to the agreed statement of facts, has conceded to having fired the bullet that killed Huebner-Makurat, got under way in late October. The first two witnesses, both employees at the South Riverdale injection site, quickly exposed many of the lies my neighbourhood was told about what was going on around our site prior to the shooting. The day of the shooting, the vice president of the South Riverdale health centre, Shannon Wiens, who has since become its CEO, submitted a six-page incident report to the province. In that report, Wiens succinctly described the circumstances that led to the tragedy: “Three individuals got in a fight and it erupted in gunfire.” Nowhere in Wiens’s report are these men referred to as drug dealers; just “individuals.”... South Riverdale (and aligned activists) adopted a cagey crisis-management strategy that declined to acknowledge its injection site had anything to do with drug dealers it allowed to operate with impunity on its perimeter, even after one of its harm-reduction staffers, Khalila Mohammed, was arrested for aiding and abetting one of the drug dealers who’d attacked Hudson in his escape from the scene... When Tara Riley told her story in the National Post about what it was like to work at South Riverdale’s injection site for years, the centre’s CEO at the time, Jason Altenberg, took exception to Riley writing about how drug dealers often wormed their way into the injection site and sold illegal drugs to clients from inside the site... South Riverdale harm reduction employee Samuel MacLeod testified... that it was quite common for the site’s clients to buy drugs, usually fentanyl, inside the site. As for drug dealing around the site, MacLeod said it was rampant. One of MacLeod’s colleagues, Derek Venman, testified he saw “a lot of drug dealing” in the courtyard next to the injection site. Hudson had been known to staff for at least a year prior to the shooting. The jury heard Venman say that Ahmed Ibrahim, the drug dealer Mohammed had assisted in his getaway... was selling drugs right outside South Riverdale daily in the weeks leading up to the killing. Ibrahim was such a common fixture, Venman testified, that no one thought twice about him walking inside the health centre to get water when he was thirsty or use the washroom. Wiens, in the incident report, responded to a question asking what she would recommend “to prevent a reoccurrence” with eight words: “Reduction of guns and gangs in the city.” What if Wiens and her management team hadn’t created a culture that resulted in armed drug dealers being warmly embraced for years right outside of her injection site? In 2016, before the site opened, South Riverdale warranted to the Toronto Board of Health and its neighbours that it would adhere to a “zero-tolerance drug dealing policy.” The site’s negligent abandonment of this promise came into focus... when staff gathered for a debrief after the shooting, management’s primary concern was not “guns and gangs” but how this fatal shooting was going to impact their injection site. Not only did MacLeod agree that South Riverdale management said it “wanted to control the narrative in a way that protected the safe injection site,” he testified that management was applying pressure on him when the director of the site, Sarah Greig, inserted herself in his interview with police forty-five minutes after the shooting... I submitted an access to information request to obtain all reports and communications related to that renewal application approval. After receiving nothing for months, I filed a complaint with the federal information commissioner... The information commissioner ordered the federal health minister to provide a complete response within 60 business days... Health Canada continues to flout the order...  I was contacted by legal counsel for the information commissioner’s office, who advised that they are taking Health Canada to court.  Given the way in which the revelations about what was really going on in and around our injection site, which existed within 150 metres of two elementary schools and six daycare facilities, are now coming fast and furious at the Hudson trial, Health Canada’s unlawful denial of public information about a controversial health policy it has promoted in a shroud of secrecy for years is both deeply concerning and a slap in the face of democracy."

How decriminalisation made Vancouver the fentanyl capital of the world - "Manufactured in numerous illicit labs in Canada’s wilderness, fentanyl is now so common in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that you can literally pick it up off the street. Vancouver once topped the charts of the world’s “most desirable places to live”. Its reputation is that of a city which provides the perfect balance – a metropolis “perched on the edge of nature” combining “outdoor recreation and a great cultural diversity”, as one local website puts it.  But a landmark experiment to decriminalise the possession of certain drugs in public – including fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, and ecstasy – has allowed an opioid crisis to take hold that surpasses even the epidemic in the United States... The death rate in Vancouver itself now stands at 56 per 100,000 people – nearly three times the national average. And in the Downtown Eastside, the rate is nearly 30 times higher than the rest of the country. For comparison, England and Wales have a drug-related mortality rate of 8.4 per 100,000 people. In Scotland – the worst in Europe – it stands at 19.8. The only G7 country with anything close to a comparable rate is the United States, at 32.6 per 100,000 people.  With the city gripped in an opioid epidemic nearly twice as fatal as America’s, the Downtown Eastside is becoming a key battleground for the province’s decriminalisation debate...   In the first year of British Columbia’s decriminalisation rollout, public drug use exploded – with reports of people injecting heroin on family beaches and smoking crack in maternity wards.  Fiona Wilson, the deputy chief constable of the Vancouver Police Department, says the experiment has tied the hands of police across the city, leaving the wider community at risk. Despite having seized over 1,000 kilos of fentanyl from dealers in 2023 alone, officers are powerless to intervene when they see it used on the streets.  “Decriminalisation has been a massive challenge for the police because it’s taken away our ability to arrest someone. We don't have any grounds to approach a person who is publicly using illicit drugs in the absence of any other criminality,” she says.  “If someone is sitting at a coffee shop and wants to snort a line of cocaine, we don’t have any authority to intervene in that situation. This presents a real problem because families don't necessarily want to sit next to somebody in a restaurant who's shooting up fentanyl.”  On the other side of the debate, left-wing advocates for liberalisation have sought to frame the debate around privilege and class...   “Decriminalisation is not about drugs anymore, it’s about power and control. Drugs have been killing people for decades, now it’s toxic politics.” Elenore Sturko, the shadow minister for mental health and addictions, says decriminalisation has been a “dangerous and disastrous” policy failure.  “The entire policy was politically motivated. Clearly, the government didn't do the work on decriminalisation. In fact, they ignored the advice of the police. Now, we end up where we are today – not only failing to reduce death and overdoses, but actually causing increased harm.”...   Not only are safer supply drugs being diverted to active users, there are also reports of these powerful opioids falling into the hands of children. Ms Sturko explains that highly addictive drugs are freely going out into every corner of the community, allowing new users to develop opioid use disorders.  “Parents in Vancouver are telling me stories of their children using high quantities of dillies [hydromorphone] because they thought the opioid was ‘safe’ under the government’s label of ‘safer supply’,” she says. “It’s horrifying. It makes me angry because we're talking about the lives of our children who may start experimenting with an opioid that won’t kill them, but it eventually leads them to use fentanyl which will kill them.  “It’s a potential pathway of serious addiction. These safer supply drugs are subsidising the fentanyl market.”... Ms Graham goes as far as to claim that the police are against a regulated drugs market and because it threatens their jobs.  “We need to solve the toxic drugs crisis by providing the substances,” she insists. Andrew, a paramedic in the Downtown Eastside, has responded to hundreds – if not thousands – of overdose calls during his time as a first responder. In his view, the government is “subsidising and enabling” the fentanyl crisis by throwing money at it instead of solving it... Ms Graham, who witnesses the carnage of the Downtown Eastside on a daily basis, says hope is the one thing she can’t afford to lose sight of.  “I’ve lost a school bus full of people to opioids. But there is a way forward, and it’s increased harm reduction,” she insists.  “This isn’t a political debate, it’s a human rights debate.”"
Clearly, capitalism is the reason why drug deaths are so bad in Vancouver, and it would be even worse without Harm Reduction, so we need to give out even more free drugs and free crack pipes. The statistics show that Vancouver is the home of Capitalism in Canada, so they need a Communist revolution to save lives
The activist is right that toxic politics are killing people - but not in the way that she means

Gold: NDP tries to rig consumption site consultations — again - "affected residents, property owners, and businesses were given less than three business days’ notice to drop everything if they wanted to have a say. That is, if they were even told... An employee at an automotive shop in the area wondered, “Shouldn’t everyone at least have gotten flyers in their mailboxes?” The next surprise in the email was that “seating at the session may be limited, and is available on a first-come, first-served basis.”... It’s the latest dirty trick by Wab Kinew’s government to manufacture consensus for his election promise to allow hard-core drug addicts to get high in a “safe” government-owned building. He knows that people with jobs, kids, and businesses to run can’t easily — if at all — drop everything to make alternate arrangements to attend a meeting on a Tuesday evening. And it appears Kinew and his floundering Housing and Addictions Minister, Bernadette Smith, are counting on it. On Saturday, a source with eyes and ears on the street told me, “Sounds like a big group of local ‘harm reduction activists’ are planning to pack the in-person meeting early and have it reach capacity so opponents will be left out.” While the email stated, “This research is being conducted by PRA Inc., a CRIC member company that follows the CRIC Pledge to Canadians,” questions are already being raised about whether that pledge covers this kind of deliberate engineering — by the proponents — of a meeting held on unrealistically short notice. It’s not an emergency, except to Kinew and Smith. It is also being held with deliberately restricted seating capacity. And make no mistake, it is deliberate, because there’s a hall within the radius that has an occupancy permit allowing 400 citizens to attend. It’s not just within the radius — it’s across the street: the Pampanga Banquet Hall. It’s obvious Kinew and Smith are desperate to avoid any repeat of the pushback their last proposal encountered, which led to the scuttling of their grand plan for a safe injection site at 200 Disraeli Freeway across from Argyle High School east of Main Street. Smith stated, “The proposed supervised consumption site … is located where people need the services and sits well beyond 250 metres from any school or registered child care facility.” While that’s technically true, it is also misleading. Because Giizhigooweyaabikwe Park, located at 242 Lizzie St., is about 125 metres south across Logan Avenue. The park has undergone $350,000 in renovations since 2018 and is described by the City as “a 1.5-acre oasis in the city’s Centennial neighbourhood.” It is mostly used by families, residents, and area organizations that — how convenient — are located outside the radius and therefore won’t have their concerns or opinions counted. “You are right about the park, it will be a permanent encampment with drug deals 24/7,” a reader who works in the social services field told me. “I challenge any of these politicians to go take a walk around Insite in Vancouver after the sun goes down and tell us how safe it is.” They added, “Businesses in this neighbourhood are going to lose their minds… this is going to bankrupt everyone within two blocks; and when those businesses leave, you won’t be able to sell or lease the property next door to this dystopian nightmare.” “There are a number of great Chinese restaurants in the area,” said another source with clients in the neighbourhood. “I occasionally go and have dim sum at them. One waitress was close to tears — she said the NDP know they have problems speaking English and pushing back. They know what happens when they put these God-awful places in, they feel abandoned.” The NDP has chosen a location that, unlike the vibrant residents’ groups in the East Exchange and Point Douglas, has no active community representation that I can identify."

Woke Canadian lawmaker admits taxpayer cash is being used to give free crack pipes to addicts - "A liberal Canadian lawmaker has admitted that taxpayer money was being used to fund crack pipes for addicts. Kendal Weber, Health Canada's assistant deputy minister, made the admission as she was being grilled by Dan Mazier, a Conservative member of Canada's Parliament. He asked her at a House of Commons committee: 'On October 2nd, you testified at this committee that no funding from Health Canada was being used to purchase crack pipes. Do you still stand by this answer today?' 'While Health Canada does not directly purchase harm reduction supplies, Health Canada does provide funding to community organizations that do invest in prevention, harm reduction and in treatment projects,' Weber said. She started to add that the funding could be used for 'harm reduction supplies to minimize the transmission' when Mazier cut her off. 'It was a pretty direct question,' he said. 'Is any of the funding from Health Canada being used to purchase crack pipes? It was just a yes or no answer.' Weber confirmed: 'Yes, we do provide funding to community organizations for harm reduction tools including pipes.'... 'Just months ago, they said no public funds were spent on this. They lied.' The conservative politician accused Canada's Liberal Party of continuing to 'promote rampant drug use instead of recovery.' Mazier previously told the House of Commons that he had found a vending machine 'full of drug supplies such as foil and crack pipes' on a recent trip to British Columbia. 'Anyone could access these drug supplies, because they were free and accessible,' he said on November 24. Mazier asked whether the Canadian government 'should be funding vending machines full of crack pipes' or if they should fund treatment 'that gets addicts off this poison that is killing them.'... 'I used it myself to see how easy it was,' Mazier wrote on X. 'No ID. No questions.' He said: 'A toddler could use it.'"

Is anyone OK with no jail time for accessory to a killing?: Selley - "Khalila Mohammed had a hell of a day on July 7, 2023. When an alleged drug-related robbery outside the Toronto supervised-injection clinic where she worked led to a shootout, in which an innocent passerby was killed, she decided to help the wounded alleged robber (who is not accused of firing a shot, but is charged with manslaughter): tending to his injuries; stashing away his bloody clothes; facilitating his fleeing the scene; advising him to lay low; and lying to police about what happened. She later pursued a romantic relationship with him... Mohammed was a worker at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre and a supporter of harm reduction and drug decriminalization. The victim was passerby, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, by all accounts a much-beloved mother of two. Ironically, considering her apparently beyond-reason devotion to the harm-reduction (or drug-taking?) cause, Mohammed, and indeed the clinic where she worked, also played a significant role in knocking centrist Canadians and even generally-lefty Torontonians away from harm reduction as a model for coping with the opioids crisis. Mohammed’s lawyer, the estimable Brian Greenspan, said she developed “misplaced compassion” even toward the people selling the clinic’s clients the garbage that supervised-injection facilities are supposed to protect them from, should they overdose on the garbage in question. Not even a month after the shooting outside the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, the same facility was found to be offering chocolate bars in exchange for used needles — not just to their clients (which really isn’t a bad idea), but on a sign in their front window to the general public, effectively encouraging people (say, neighbourhood kids) to hunt down dirty drug needles. “In an exuberance to get used needles off the street one of our staff posted a sign that was never meant for the public. In no way, shape, or form was that communication meant for children,” Jason Altenberg, CEO of the facility, bizarrely told National Post at the time. Who is “exuberant” about cleaning up needles in the vicinity of supervised-injection facilities? One of the selling points of such facilities was they were supposed to lead to fewer used needles scattered around the neighbourhood. For myriad reasons, it hasn’t worked — or if it has, the effects have been swallowed whole by the larger opioids problem, which (fingers crossed!) reached its nadir during the COVID-19 pandemic... Khalila Mohammed won’t spend a day behind bars for her astonishing series of decisions on July 7, 2023 — not unless she violates the terms of her so-called “house arrest,” which allows her to leave home for work, education, to go to the gym, for counselling, for family emergencies, to perform community service … well, OK, it’s less “house arrest” than a “regular daily routine,” but she’s not allowed to be out after 11 p.m. The Crown, to its credit, argued for a proper custodial sentence that somewhat fit the crime: two years behind bars. “People who have done less have been put in jail. A conditional sentence is not sufficient,” prosecutor Jay Spare told Ontario Court of Justice Judge Russell Silverstein. “Denunciation and deterrence require actual jail.” This is a crucial point that often seems lost in modern mainstream criminal-justice discussions: The notions of denunciation and deterrence aren’t relics of the Dark Ages; they’re explicitly stated goals of criminal sentencing."

B.C. health authorities tried to allow purchase of regulated heroin without prescriptions, court hears - The Globe and Mail - "B.C. health authorities tried for four years to create a heroin compassion club whose members could purchase a regulated version of the drug without a prescription, an effort to reduce toxic-drug deaths that was ultimately derailed by political blowback."

Meme - Canada Proud: "This is what happens when you let the NDP run your province."
"A new report says that there is so much fentanyl being smoked in BC supportive housing offices that workers are being exposed to it even when they're in their offices with the doors closed. This was concluded from testing 14 different facilities.
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN BC UNDER DAVID EBY'S
NDP SOURCE: Vancouver Sun, July 21, 2025"

Links - 6th June 2026 (2 - Drugs: Canada)

Pressure rises to shut down Granville Street SROs with emergency calls up 822%, HVA says : r/ilovebc - "Those of us against them more than 10 years ago were called NIMBY's ... the outcome is exactly what we expected. Ta da!  Involuntary institutionalization. Every single one. Giving them a condo in prime real estate is not going to magically make them kick a drug habit, shake their mental illness and become productive members of society.  All the money spent on building these would be better spent building / staffing a singular location where they can get help. How many tens if not hundreds of millions are being syphoned from first responders and hospitals.  I personally know many first responders and it's not uncommon to bring the same person back to life five times in one day.  What do they call it... compassion exhaustion. Enough is enough, this isn't working, time to try something else. Maybe then life, business and culture will restore the vibrancy Granville and other areas were once known for.  Anyone advocating for SROs etc either a) doesn't live in the city, b) financially benefitting from these programs (developers etc.), c) doesn't have children d) mentally ill themselves."
"We’re definitely reaching that point. Even the science has caught up to them as study after study has failed to show any improvements to addictions rehab beyond the very basic reduction in overdose risk.  Researchers are so desperate to prove that these initiatives work that they’re now counting increased life expectancy as an increased chance of rehab success since you can’t rehab if you’re dead. Thats how little these initiatives move the needle for the homeless population with severe drug addiction, that stopping them from accidentally killing themselves is considered a win.  Institutionalization is needed now."

Woke Canadian lawmaker says children should NOT be discouraged from using drugs - "A Canadian lawmaker opposed a bill aimed at discouraging students from using drugs because she is 'deeply concerned' by the prospect of shaming people.   British Columbia Legislative Assembly member Stephanie Higginson spoke in opposition of the Drug Use Prevention Education in Schools Act on Monday.  The bill calls for drug use prevention education and mandatory anti‑drug messaging in schools.   Higginson, who is a member of the social democratic political party BC NDP, said she is 'deeply concerned' about 'explicitly discouraging drug use' in schools.  'I believe this bill takes a misguided and potentially harmful approach that could do more damage than good,' she said.   'The approach outlined in this bill is not only outdated. And in fact, it reminds me of the 1980s era "Scared Straight" that was in place when I was young.  'The bill mandates a curriculum that explicitly discourages drug use and promotes stigma against drug use as a deterrent. This language is deeply concerning.'  Higginson argued that stigmatizing drug use will discourage students from asking for help... Higginson represents the Ladysmith-Oceanside district on Vancouver Island.  A recent report from the British Columbia Coroners Service found that some of the highest number of unregulated drug deaths in 2025 thus far were in Vancouver and Central Vancouver Island, which includes Higginson's district."

Oppose open drug use? Rack it up to colonialism, says B.C. report | Toronto Sun - " If you oppose widespread drug open use in society, it’s likely due to colonialism and racism. That’s what British Columbia’s Human Rights Commissioner wants you to believe and it’s what she’s telling provincial politicians in B.C. in a new report.  Kasari Govender claims that she is pushing for a science and fact-based approach to dealing with the opioid crisis. Instead, she’s pushing a far-left wing ideological approach that has only resulted in more people dying. “Beyond challenges within the health-care system, this crisis is also rooted in colonial approaches that prioritize individualism over community, wealth over health and power over empathy,” Govender wrote in a new report... Here’s the problem with her claim: The hard numbers, specifically the number of deaths, don’t back up her claims. British Columbia has long been at the forefront of liberalizing drug policy and always with the claim that it would save lives. Yet, over the 10 years between 2014 and 2023, the number of opioid overdose deaths in B.C. went up sevenfold from 370 to 2,589.  During that time, the provincial government adopted policy after policy to add safe injection sites, to add so-called “safer supply,” and even lobbied the federal government to decriminalize all drugs in the province, starting in January 2023. Over that same time period, the number of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario rose from 676 deaths to 2,593, or 3.75 times greater. In 2023, Ontario, a jurisdiction with a population three times greater than B.C.’s, had just four more overdose deaths.  The difference is Ontario didn’t go as far down the drug advocate rabbit hole as B.C.  Both provinces were hit with the scourge of fentanyl at around the same time, and both provinces were subject to the federal government’s failed “safer supply” policy that made things worse, but B.C. went further. It became so bad, the stories of rampant drug use in public, the increase in petty crime, the horror stories of parents describing children’s play parks as unusable, prompted Premier David Eby to pull back the decriminalization policy...  “This decision was not supported by the evidence available; rather, it was based on unsubstantiated public perception that street disorder increased under decriminalization, of which there is no data to support,” Govender wrote in her report.  To back up this claim she turns to police data showing no significant rise in the number of disturbing the peace calls across British Columbia during the decriminalization period.  Let me point to the death statistics once again, including that 199 more people died from opioid overdoses in 2023 compared to 2022. The numbers started falling after the decriminalization was repealed. We cannot let advocates and activists drive drug policy, and Govender is clearly an activist. Govender is a former board member of the Pivot Legal Society, a group that pushes for decriminalization and argued that B.C.’s decriminalization efforts didn’t go far enough.  Govender calls her policy proposals a human-rights based approach to drug policy. What it really is a rehash of the same failed policies pushed by activists for years wrapped up in a nice new package, but that will only lead to the same results – more people dying."

Dan Mazier on X - "“If you give me the foil and crack pipe to do the drugs, you may as well give me a bullet and gun to kill myself”  That is what a recovered addict told me in British Columbia.  The next day I walked up to a vending machine that dispenses pipes and paraphernalia for drugs like fentanyl.  I used it myself to see how easy it was.  No ID. No questions.  A toddler could use it.  There are no barriers anymore.   Instead of helping addicts recover, the government is promoting and normalizing lethal drug use.  This has to stop."
But not giving drug addicts free drugs violates their human rights!

Adam Zivo: Wab Kinew's worthy plan to lock up meth addicts - "“People who are suffering from meth addiction do not have the right to determine how the rest of us are going to live in our society,” declared Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew last week, ahead of passing a bill permitting the involuntary detainment of drug-intoxicated individuals for up to three days. The move is a step in the right direction to restoring order on public streets, even if more work needs to be done on treatment... In Canada, a small number of prolific, often drug-addicted offenders seemingly cause the bulk of public disorder. A 2022 letter from the B.C. Urban Mayors’ Caucus, for example, indicated that only 40 individuals in Vancouver were responsible for 6,385 “negative police contacts” in one year. The city of Kelowna similarly found that, in 2024, just 15 people were responsible for 1,335 police files... Drug addictions are tough to break, which is why involuntary treatment in the United States, for example, often lasts for weeks , if not months... While Manitoba’s reforms should be lauded as an improvement, the better route would be to further criminalize public intoxication and give addicts the chance to avoid incarceration through structured, long-term treatment. This would not only give people a better chance of rehabilitation, it would more stably segregate anti-social individuals — as opposed to relying on cycles of discretionary, short-term detentions. Even so, Marshall Smith , architect of Alberta’s recovery-oriented addiction strategy, spoke highly of Kinew’s reforms and said that, although some academics and activists criticize involuntary care in all its forms, it is clearly better than providing no care at all. “I am just happy that the people who are dying under overpasses and being incinerated in homeless encampments are going to be able to get the care that they need,” he said."

B.C. Human Rights Commissioner says stigmatizing drug use is a violation - "British Columbia's rights watchdog has criticized the province for stigmatizing people who use drugs, calling it a violation of their human rights to treat their health issues as "moral failings." Kasari Govender said in a position statement issued by her office Thursday that B.C.'s recent focus on involuntary care and "criminal justice responses" to the toxic drugs crisis is driven largely by stigma... "Absolutely, governments drive their decisions from the people, and there's incredible value to that … in the democratic system," she added. "(But) we also live in a constitutional democracy where it's not only about majority rules. We also have protections in place which protect our fundamental human rights." Lapointe said in February that she was disappointed by the province's overhaul of its safer-supply program, saying the move to a "witnessed-only" model, in which people are supervised while consuming their prescription drugs and aren't allowed to take them home, appears to ignore scientific evidence... "Treating people who use drugs as if their health issues are moral failings is a violation of their human rights,” she said in her statement... Govender contrasted the handling of the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. "As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, any other health problem with massive fatalities would be treated with the utmost urgency," she said."
Not giving drug addicts free drugs violates their fundamental human rights, and judges need to be very clear about that. Non-drug users do not have human rights, so they can be ignored. All negative social outcomes are due to "stigma", "discrimination" and "poverty"
Given the disaster of the covid response, calling for drugs to be treated more like covid is a recipe for disaster. Ironically, they're not going to push coerced treatment despite drawing this parallel, because somehow that's against drug addicts' human rights

Kash Heed: We cannot arrest our way out of B.C.'s drug problem | Vancouver Sun
Clearly, the solution is to promote drugs

Toronto condo suing charity next door for $2.3 million - "Toronto Standard Condominium Corporation No. 2058, the official name for the board of CASA Condos at 33 Charles St., filed a legal proceeding against Sanctuary Ministries Toronto, at 25 Charles St., just east of Yonge Street... The board is alleging that Sanctuary has “permitted illegal, illicit, disruptive, interfering and egregious conduct to occur on its property,” leading to a reputation that the drop-in centre is a “free-for-all haven and/or destination for illegal and illicit activity.”  The statement of claim makes more than a dozen specific allegations regarding illegal activity on Sanctuary’s property that it says has sometimes led to the condo’s residents being subjected to “aggressive” and “violent” behaviour. Aside from seeking more than $2 million in damages, the condo board wants the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to grant them an injunction to prohibit and restrain anyone who occupies or frequents Sanctuary from trespassing on their property, or causing, creating, or permitting any “nuisance that interferes with the use or enjoyment” of it by owners and residents.  This order is also looking to bar anyone who threatens, harasses, annoys, assaults, or abuses the 421-unit condo’s residents, workers, or others present from 33 Charles St.  Lastly, it is calling for Sanctuary to “maintain in good order and condition” its own property, and prevent the use of drugs and “violent, dangerous and disruptive conduct” there. Earlier this week, Condo Board President Peter McDonald told CP24 that Sanctuary is “not a good neighbour,” calling the church it operates a “cult.”  “Personally, I don’t feel Sanctuary is a church. They’re in the business of helping enable homeless drug addicts,” said McDonald, who has lived in the building since it opened 15 years ago and has served on its board for that entire period. “We knew going into this (that) it’s going to be a difficult situation because we’re suing a charity.” The condo board president went on to say that the residents of 33 Charles ultimately want improved safety in their neighbourhood.  “The number one issue is that people are afraid to walk along Charles Street,” McDonald said.  “We’re not against The Sanctuary. … What we want is a change in the way (it) operates.”  McDonald said the myriad problems they have with Sanctuary are more than a decade in the making and efforts to address them, which have involved hiring a lobbyist along with additional security, aren’t working... Among other things, CASA Condos, in its statement of claim, says Sanctuary is engaging in and/or allowing “illegal, illicit, disruptive, interfering and egregious conduct to occur on its property,” open drug use and drug dealing/trafficking as well as alcohol consumption, which in turn is resulting in “repeated physical alterations, overdoses, harassing, threatening and violent conduct” towards condo residents, workers, and those on the abutting sidewalk...  the documents do also allege that the charity is “permitting and allowing” its clients to trespass onto the condominium’s property “to cause damage,” including by intentionally triggering fire alarms, removing cable and other infrastructure, and “causing damage to personal property of the condominium residents, including vehicles.”  In the statement of claim, lawyers for the condominium board say it has “repeatedly appealed” to Sanctuary to “take meaningful action” to no avail... Luisa Sotomayor, an associate professor at the University of Toronto and the director of its planning program, said the lawsuit launched against Sanctuary is “wild, but not surprising.”  “We have residents of luxury condos redefining what it means to live downtown. … It’s clearly an exercise in power and privilege,” said Sotomayor.  “They want the location, the specific lifestyle but seeing poverty is not part of that equation. It doesn’t align with the gentrified aesthetic values.”
Toronto condo's lawsuit against street ministry is deeply cruel
If you don't enable crime, you're a bad person.
When left wingers talk about "gentrification" they mean a lack of drug use, crime and harassment. No wonder they hate "gentrification" so much

Ont. PI’s surveil safe consumption sites: findings revealed - "An affidavit filed by private investigators retained by the province to surveil supervised consumption sites says they observed apparent drug transactions, public intoxication, discarded drug paraphernalia, physical altercations and public drug use in their vicinity. But harm reduction advocates and the people who run the sites say they paint a misleading picture.  “All they have here is more evidence of people trying desperately to survive a drug poisoning crisis,” said Sarah Ovens, an organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society.  In particular, she said the numerous pictures contained in the affidavit of people holding glass pipes show how the city needs more sites where people can smoke potent drugs under supervision... The reports recommended boosting community safety supports to address concerns of neighbouring residents, but keeping them open, maintaining funding and expanding harm reduction, including consumption sites."
Damn heartless Doug Ford wanting drug addicts to die! The solution is to give out even more free drugs and let people use them with government support. Trust the Experts!

Ontario hired private investigators to surveil safe consumption sites. Here’s what they reported : r/toronto - "This is an issue with no easy solution because even the advocates don’t really deny that consumption sites bring social disorder, the argument then becomes how much anti social behaviour is a society willing to tolerate in the hopes it will be solved in the long run."

‘Who wouldn’t want pure cocaine?’: the radical plan to prevent overdoses with better drugs - "Near Dulf’s office, a doctor named Christy Sutherland prescribes it free of charge at the center of a neighborhood in which thousands of people use drugs openly on the street with the government’s consent. Sutherland stops by to talk shop with the Dulf people that day. Mostly she and Nyx discuss how it is hard to source as much fentanyl as they need; for the 100-plus people Sutherland sees, she needs kilos. There are not enough legal, regulated manufacturers of the stuff."
Amazing whitewashing of the disaster that is BC's pro-drug policies, branded as "compassion", and blaming problems on not being radical enough. Maybe if it had been written a few years earlier there could've been some plausible deniability but in 2025...
This being The Guardian, of course it's written by an activist and misleading. And attacking capitalism, naturally.

WATCH: Eby admits he was 'wrong' on drug decriminalization - ""I was wrong on drug decriminalization and the effect that it would have," Eby said. "I wasn't alone — but it wasn't the right policy."  He went on to explain that the decision to take that route came at a time of rising overdoses and was made with the hopes that offering a "safe supply" of drugs would allow addicts to live long enough to seek treatment and eventually be weaned off illicit substances altogether.  "What it became," Eby continued, "was a permissive structure that, in the effort to reduce stigma that it was ok to use drugs anywhere, resulted in really unhappy consequences not just in British Columbia but other jurisdictions that attempted this."  He noted that at the beginning, chiefs of police offered their support, but it "very quickly" became apparent that it "wasn't working" and the government reversed course.  Eby touted the new involuntary care beds being set up in facilities across the province, saying this would help those who are "unable to ask for help, or unwilling to ask for help but absolutely require it." BC decriminalized drug possession in January 2023. Since then, studies have shown that it resulted in not only more overdoses, but more diversion of the drugs."
How ignorant. He needs to read The Guardian

Amy Hamm: Unlike Vancouver, Boston isn't a drug hellscape. Here's why - "Much, if not all, of this failure can be laid at the feet of radical harm reduction activists who’ve overtaken addiction discourses within academia and health-care institutions. Boston is a vision of what Vancouver could be, were it not for the policies pushed by these activists. Both Vancouver and Boston have roughly similar populations, just shy of 700,000. Boston is within a blue (Democrat) state, and Vancouver is within an orange (NDP) province. Boston declared a public health emergency in 2021 regarding addiction and homelessness . Before that, in 2014, then-Governor Deval Patrick declared an opioid epidemic and public health emergency . Sound familiar? At one point, opioid overdose deaths were more numerous in the state of Massachusetts than in the province of B.C. (where we have approximately 1.4 million fewer residents). Today, B.C. has more overdose deaths — despite having a smaller population... Boston was clean, and felt safe and calm. Including the “ Boston Common,” known as the “rough” area of the city. It was nothing like Vancouver. I saw a single homeless tent, but not one homeless or intoxicated street person, during my visit. There were no discarded needles, and no one on the nod in a back-alley alcove, let alone on the sidewalk in front of shops in broad daylight. The alleys and side streets didn’t reek of urine like they do in Vancouver — unbearably so when there are days or weeks between rain. There were no addicts attempting to hawk stolen wares on the outskirts of tourist areas. Boston is clearly also struggling with an opioid epidemic — the state has the overdose death numbers to prove it — but it lacks the escalating chaos and filth that one finds in all corners of Vancouver, resulting from our parallel opioid epidemic. Where does the answer lie? Massachusetts, like B.C., promotes “harm reduction.” However, the state also places a significant focus on recovery — something that the harm reduction activists of Vancouver and B.C. seem unwilling to do. The province bankrolls an endless list of harm reduction services that enable addicts to stay sick and keep using. When our addicted want treatment, they’re forced to wait weeks or months, typically, to enter a recovery program — at which point they’re often no longer interested. I saw this occur countless times when I worked as an outreach nurse in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It caused moral distress that was partly responsible for my decision to return to a hospital job. How can we claim to be helping anyone when we keep them mired in addiction via hundreds of millions in government funding? The forward to a “ harm reduction toolkit ” released by Boston city officials in 2021 leads with an explanation that the city has a “long and proud history of providing services to people struggling with substance use. We are home to countless treatment programs, ranging from detox to recovery housing.” B.C.’s harm reduction activists, meanwhile, become enraged at policy changes such as the province’s move to witnessed , versus take home, “safe supply” drugs. They react similarly to suggestions that we place more focus on treatment and recovery, particularly when the proposed treatment is involuntary . Years ago, someone I went to nursing school with was hired as a nurse at InSite, one of Vancouver’s supervised injection sites. She told me that harm reduction was a “sexy” area of nursing to work in. I assumed that she meant it was cool, all the rage, progressive and contributed to one’s reputation as a sort of elitist saint. Her assertion quite ironically smacked of the “white privilege” she was fond of discussing at length. There is nothing “sexy” about Vancouver’s failed harm reduction experiment, which is not just ineffective , but barbaric."

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.