The attack by Pierre Poilievre and others on safe supply will cost us lives

We must have law and order, they say. There are more unhoused Canadians, more tent cities, more drug overdoses, more deaths, and you may have to see a homeless person on the subway, so we must get tough. Yes, this may be a complex blend of a global pandemic, a housing crisis, the underfunding and erosion of existing institutions, a toxifying drug supply, and maybe some crypto mixed in, to help move drugs around.

But we are told we must get tough, and that will solve everything. That will bring it home.

“Worst of all, crime and chaos, drugs and disorder rage in our streets,” said Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s federal Conservatives, in the House of Commons last month. “Nowhere is this worse than in the opioid overdose crisis, which has expanded so dramatically in the last several years.”

Such concern, deep concern. Poilievre introduced a motion to ban safe supply of drugs, or safer supply, as some people call it, as if there can be safe supply of a narcotic in our society. That’s the kind of thing a person might say after several alcoholic drinks or maybe some cannabis, purchased at either a government-run store or a private establishment.

The bill was soundly defeated, but Poilievre keeps blaming safer supply — which is often hydromorphone, pharmaceutical-grade heroin — for increases in overdoses and crime. The actual evidence seems to indicate that is just about the opposite of what is actually happening, but who trusts actual evidence these days?

“The cause of deaths is unregulated drugs, and the evidence is clear both from the BC Coroners Service as well as Health Canada,” says Ben Perrin, a UBC law professor specializing in criminal law, the opioid crisis and the justice system. “They do the toxicology reports, and they’re able to distinguish between fentanyl that’s street fentanyl, and in heroin and cocaine of course, and all that. And the overwhelming majority of people who have died have died from a combination of (those) drugs. So there’s absolutely no doubt about that.”

Perrin notes 80 per cent of Canada’s 35,000 overdose deaths since 2016 were the result of fentanyl, which has contaminated the drug supply for addicts and casual users alike because it’s cheaper and incredibly potent. Safe supply is designed to limit those fatalities. It’s not without its complications, but as the Globe and Mail noted, studies in Toronto, Vancouver and London, Ont., have shown real benefits to safe supply.

On the other hand, some people amplify Poilievre’s message. There are very long, anecdote-based stories in the National Post, and shorter ones in the right-wing tabloids; right-wing faux-documentaries from Aaron Gunn released on YouTube; exploitative Twitter accounts or videos that use drug addicts and the homeless as props, some from Poilievre; an SFU professor whose work has been heavily criticized by some 58 of his colleagues; the Government of Alberta.

Put the money from safe supply into rehabilitation only, Poilievre and others say. The idea of involuntary confinement has been floated. No more safe supply.

“No, safe supply isn’t killing people,” says Zoe Dodd, a community scholar at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, at Unity Health. “People are dying from the unregulated drug market. They’re dying of fentanyl and fentanyl laced with benzodiazepines and other drugs. That’s been the case for many years now.”

“It’s not about addiction and mental illness. It’s about trying to invisibilize people who are on the street, and not actually address the problem that we have in this country, which is about the unaffordability of housing, which affects everybody.

“They’re telling people to go to organized crime for your drugs instead.”

There are those who actually deal with the problem and support safer supply: frontline doctors, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the BC Centre For Disease Control, Toronto police, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, Toronto Public Health, almost every Toronto mayoral candidate, Quebec’s Health Ministry, Health Canada. This is a very partial list.

Poilievre dismisses them as profiteers off the existing system, or as too self-interested. The group Moms Stop The Harm have offered to meet with Poilievre; he has declined. Perhaps he thinks the Moms Stop The Harm are too self-interested, having lost children to opioids.

Perrin, meanwhile, grew up in Calgary, campaigned for the Reform Party, interned for Preston Manning on Parliament Hill, went on canoe trips with Andrew Scheer and other prominent conservatives, and served as in-house counsel and chief criminal justice and public safety adviser to then-prime minister Stephen Harper in 2012-13.

And when he went back to Vancouver, Perrin started hearing about people dying from opioids. Early in 2016, BC declared a public health emergency, and Perrin felt he had abetted a system that wasn’t working; he reconnected with his Christian faith, and immersed himself in the evidence around this issue.

Now Perrin will walk you through the SALOME study on supervised heroin use in the early 2010s, which showed measurable benefits and was shut down by the Harper government anyway, which fundraised off the decision and got sued. Perrin notes the worry of the diversion of safe supply is a known and acknowledged issue — most hydromorphone is prescribed, not safe supply, for the record, and has been around for years — and that the proposed either-or of putting all available money in treatment instead of safe supply is absurd.

“It’s not an academic debate,” says Perrin. The “campaign against safe supply is having a direct impact now. It is causing crackdowns, it’s causing skittishness. Here in B.C. they cancelled meetings with stakeholders about expansion of safe supply.”

So do we need a simple solution from a party that dominates in ridings outside urban centres and wants to demonize and exploit real issues in major cities for electoral gain, that says the PM is giving dillies to schoolgirls, and which has perhaps accurately judged that most people just want the homeless and the drug users to go away, whatever it takes? Do we need a party that is opposed to both safe-injection sites and public drug use, and a politician who says what is happening is the opposite of what is happening?

“What concerns me most in the context of the unregulated drug crisis is that Poilievre’s policies will contribute to people dying,” says Perrin.

That does seem to be the point, doesn’t it?

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur