Top B.C. health officials marked the 10th anniversary of the declaration of the toxic drug crisis as a provincial health emergency on Monday with a reflection on the evolving nature of consumption and the pitfalls and politicization that undercut the decriminalization pilot.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer, acknowledged first that the reality is that drugs aren’t going away, and the government will never be able to eliminate all of the subversive elements creating a toxic drug supply. So the focus must be on supports and ensuring a combination of responses.
“We will never keep up with the organized crime and the trade and drugs and the changes in drugs and how they’re distributed,” she said in a roundtable discussion at the B.C. legislature on Monday morning (April 13). “What we need to do is ensure that we have the processes in place that support people.”
Since the declaration of a health emergency in 2016, more than 18,000 people have died from drug overdoses in the province. The numbers declined last year to 1,826 from 2,315 in 2024.
There has been some positive progress, according to Henry.
“I look back, and naloxone, when this emergency was declared, it was only available by prescription,” she said. “And now we know it’s everywhere. We know it saves lives everywhere.”
But Henry lamented some backsliding as well.
“We’ve taken many steps back in recent years, where people are going again to vilifying people who are visibly homeless, some of whom use drugs, some of whom have mental health issues,” she said.
One of the most high-profile initiatives Henry advised was decriminalization. The province introduced this as a three-year pilot, but abandoned it at expiration. Henry blamed a misunderstanding of the measure.
“We didn’t have the degree of support and understanding in the community,” she said.
Henry says the program should have been presented as decriminalizing the person, not the substance.
Health Minister Josie Osborne said the pilot was meant to reduce stigma so people could reach out for help, but “it didn’t have all the results we hoped to see.”
Dr. Daniel Vigo, the province’s advisor on mental health and addictions, went further several days before Osborne and Henry’s comments, telling the Canadian Press that harm reduction and safer supply became “harm enhancement” for people with severe mental illness.
Claire Rattée, B.C. Conservative critic for mental health and addictions pointed to Vigo’s comments as just the latest evidence of the government’s policy failures addressing the crisis.
“They champion safe supply, decriminalization, all these ideological projects that they’ve taken on,” she said. “And now their chief scientific officer has broken ranks and said very clearly that this is actually causing more harm than good.”
Rattée, who once had issues with substances herself and went through treatment in 2011, says that even naloxone has had some negative impacts, freeing up people to lean on this method of reversing overdoses, even though that can leave them with severe brain injury from the lack of oxygen during the overdose event.
This has created a situation where fewer people are dying, but they are still being left with life-altering injuries.
“People refer to it as almost like zombies on the street,” she said.
Rattée wants the government to take more responsibility for this and invest more in treatment and recovery. She said that is what should have been done in tandem with decriminalization, if it had any chance of working.
“And that didn’t happen,” she said. “And I think that the government needs to take some responsibility for that and provide British Columbians with a clear path for how we get out of this mess.”