Doing the research job journalists refuse to do. It took seven seconds.

A disappointing and profoundly uninformative reporting from Canada Re-Criminalizes Public Drug Use in British Columbia by Ian Austen.  The subheading is A province that was a global pioneer in harm reduction took a step back after a political backlash.  It feels like Austen is deliberately holding back on critical information in order not to criticize a favored policy.  Or possibly, it is just badly written and edited.  

British Columbia passed some drug reform legislation, seems to think the outcomes have been less than what was anticipated and has now recriminalized drugs.  That's the basic story.  For an informed news consumer, what you want to know, in roughly this order, is:

What was the nature of the original reform?

When did it occur?

What were the measures of success?

What have been the outcomes to date?

Have there been unintended consequences?  

What are the changes being proposed?

It is strikingly difficult to get this information from Austen's report.  There is a dearth of hard facts and explicit writing and there is a surfeit of unsupported opinions. 

What was the nature of the original reform? - Paragraph 1:  "A program allowing people in British Columbia to possess small amounts of drugs, including heroin and cocaine, without fear of criminal charges."  Lacks specificity.  What emerges is that the original reform allowed for public use of drugs in addition to possession.  

When did it occur? - Paragraph 10: "The decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of drugs was a three-year exemption that started in January 2023."  We have to wait all the way to paragraph 10 to discover that this was to have been a three year experiment but that the consequences have been so negative that they are intervening at the seventeen month mark of the thirty-six month trial.  

What were the measures of success? - Paragraph 5:  "The goals of decriminalizing possession were to enable police officers to focus their time on large drug distributors rather than users and encourage users to be open to treatment."  And that is all that is said.  There is no information about whether there was an increase in arrests of large drug distributors nor whether there was an increase in users seeking treatment.  A curious silence suggesting that neither outcome was achieved.  

What have been the outcomes to date? - Paragraph 4:  "The province’s coroner estimated that there were a record 2,511 toxic drug deaths last year. Drug overdoses from toxic substances kill more people ages 10 to 59 than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural diseases combined in British Columbia, according to the provincial coroner’s office."  See below.  They expected deaths to decline under the new policy and they instead rose 11%.  

Have there been unintended consequences?  Paragraph 11:  "but public use appears to have spread beyond the neighborhoods where it was most common before decriminalization."  The article does not discuss whether decriminalized drugs has led to increased crime.  Yet another curious omission.  

 

What are the changes being proposed? - Paragraph 1: "At the request of the province and after a public backlash, people in British Columbia are no longer permitted to use drugs in public places."  

By focus and heroic interpretation, what appears to have happened is something roughly like this.

British Columbia has a well established drug problem manifested in drug overdose deaths and public nuisance crimes.  Under the auspices of harm reduction, the government passed legislation seventeen months ago removing penalties for owning and public use of small amounts of drugs.  Public drug usage spread geographically and the number of drug overdose deaths set new records.  

Because of the spread of public use of drugs and because of the rise in drug overdose deaths, the government has modified the three year experiment at the halfway point by making it illegal to use drugs in public.  Drug ownership and private use of drugs remains legal.

Of the nineteen paragraphs in the article, nine of them are by advocates for the original drug reform program despite its failure to accomplish the stated goals.  Zero paragraphs are devoted to anyone opposed to the original decriminalization or supportive of the recriminalization of public drug use.  

Austen's reporting culminates with a drug reform advocate's argument:

Mr. Mullins also disputed that public drug use had become a substantial problem in British Columbia since decriminalization.

“There is no data or evidence that there’s any actual danger to people,” he said. “So it’s all about feelings and these feelings are being whipped up by conservative politicians.”

A final claim made despite the fact that the decriminalization led to a wider public use problem and higher number of deaths despite the policy being about harm reduction.  

What is it we ought to know that Austen has not shared?

For one thing, what has been the rate of increase in drug deaths? - Austen tells us that in the first full year of the reform program, that total overdose deaths rose to a record 2,511.  But a sense of scale is important and missing.  Were there 2,490 deaths in 2022 and it rose to 2,511 in 2023 (a minor rise) or was it something much greater.  

Let's try some investigative journalism.  Typing in "Drug overdose deaths in British Columbia in 2022" into Google, I get from BC Gov News:

The number of deaths being investigated by the BC Coroners Service in 2022 is the second-largest total ever in a calendar year, and only 34 fewer than the 2,306 deaths reported to the agency in 2021. Toxic drugs were responsible for an average of 189 deaths per month in 2022, or 6.2 lost lives each and every day.

Now we have some data context.  Drug overdose deaths by year:

2021 - 2,306

2022 - 2,272

2023 - 2,511

Deaths were falling before the reform under the Harm Reduction policy and then they increased 11% in the year following the reform.  Crudely and simplistically, one could argue that the Harm Reduction reform led to an additional 239 deaths.

Kind of important information that would have provided important context to the article, lending support for why the government was so focused on an intervention only halfway through the three year experiment.  An 11% increase in deaths when it was anticipated that they would fall is certainly an alarming trend.

Interestingly, Austen hardly deals with crime statistics at all other than "concerns from small businesses about problematic drug use."  But drug problems and crime tend to go hand-in-hand.  Was there a rise in violent or property crimes between 2022 and 2023?  Hard to tell.

Canadian crime statistics seem to come a year in arrear and I am not seeing full data for 2023 yet.  But looking at news accounts, both violent crime and property crime seem to have jumped in 2023 after some years of decline so perhaps that is a factor as well.

Austen seems clearly sympathetic to the Harm Reduction policy and reluctant to acknowledge that the new law caused worsening consequences to both drug users and to the public.  Doing the simple Google research that Austen apparently did not wish to do, we can discover that the proposed decriminalization was a catastrophe (an excess 239 deaths) and did not achieve any of its goals.

That is useful information.  Why did the reporter not want to report it?

It invites speculation but all we can know is that factual reporting and truth seeking were not the journalistic product on offer.