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By Mel Rothenburger

Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: We don’t have a moral obligation to give drug users free rein

Nov 18, 2023 | 7:29 AM

CHALLENGES TO NEW restrictions on public consumption of illicit drugs show just how far things have gotten out of whack in our society. Increasingly, it seems, those who indulge in antisocial behaviour receive favoured status.

Bill 34, which came into effect as the Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act last week, is the Eby government’s answer to complaints from multiple municipal councils about the unintended consequences of decriminalizing possession of small amounts of illicit drugs.

In effect, it’s an effort by the government to fix a problem it created. The three-year decriminalization pilot went into effect early in the year and is supposed to destigmatize hard drug use and encourage addicts to get help. There are no statistics on how many people have been referred to services and how many have accepted, so it’s hard to imagine how the effectiveness of decriminalization is supposed to be measured.

Anyway, local councils became worried about users of illicit drugs ingesting said drugs in public places such as parks, beaches, playgrounds and sports fields. Kamloops City council jumped on the bandwagon to broaden restrictions on where decriminalized illicit drugs can be consumed.

Legal challenges were fully expected and two have sprung up. One is from the Pivot Legal Society at the Coast, which I wrote about last spring when it threatened to sue Campbell River if the City put a drugs-in-parks bylaw into effect.

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That City council backed down and scrapped the idea, with Pivot Legal bragging it had ensured that “it means that people who use drugs can actually experience the benefits of B.C.’s decriminalization policy.” It hinted at suing other municipalities if they tried similar bylaws but the new provincial law has shifted its attention.

Now the society has filed an application under the Constitutional Question Act challenging the restrictions.

Another group, the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, claims in a B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit against the province and attorney general that Bill 34 puts the health and safety of drug users “at extreme risk.” Therefore, say the nurses, it violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Former Kamloops MLA/ Health Minister Terry Lake comes up in both the nurses’ action and Pivot Legal’s comments on Bill 34: in 2016, Lake declared a public health emergency and ordered that overdose prevention services be available in “any place there is need for those services. Both groups want the order enforced. Pivot Legal says in a Facebook post that the government has, instead, “caved to unevidenced moral panic.”

Both the nurses group — which has 76 members in B.C. — and the Pivot Legal Society seem to believe drug users should be able to ingest their illicit drugs anywhere they want because, they say, it’s safer to do it in public than in an alley or room.

So the argument in favour of decriminalization has switched from removing the stigma to the “right” to consume illicit drugs in public.

While no-drugs-in-parks laws are reasonable and well-intentioned, I’ve never thought they’re worth the paper they’re printed on because of enforcement issues.

An “explanatory note” attached to Bill 34 requires local governments to consult before considering their own bylaws, authorizes police to order a drug user to stop using drugs in a public place, or to move, and gives the police authority to seize and destroy the drugs.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth says the law isn’t intended as punishment. So what happens if a drug user fails to comply? Theoretically, they could be arrested and possibly jailed. I doubt that will ever happen but maybe I’ll be proven wrong.

One more piece of trivia on this: the BC Greens — an ever more irrelevant voice in our politics — are siding with the free-to-consume-drugs-anywhere argument. They declare that Bill 34 “targets poverty and homeless without providing evidence-based support….”

The concept of allowing illicit-drug consumption anywhere is simply astounding. Please name me a city in which that has worked. There are plenty of cities where it hasn’t. The evidence is that drug users doing their drugs in or near public amenities ruin the day for everyone else, and are a potential safety hazard too. That’s all the evidence we need.

Certainly, it’s more convenient for the drug users but the general population shouldn’t be expected to give up its enjoyment and safety of public places for their benefit. It just shouldn’t.

A simple answer for the provincial government would be to admit the decriminalization experiment isn’t working and to end it forthwith. The number of deaths from toxic drugs this year is on a par with 2022, before decriminalization.

It won’t do that, of course. It will struggle through to the program’s deadline, insist it has worked, and make it permanent.

And the rest of us will suffer for it.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.