[CliffFletcher]

Sometimes you just have to admit when something isn’t working.

B.C.’s former chief coroner Larry Campbell fought for drug decriminalization. Now he backs its reversal

… The government, he says, has put too much stress on reducing the harms that come with using drugs and not enough on helping people quit using them altogether.

“I’ve been a big harm-reduction guy forever and, after decriminalization, I just came to the realization that we were going down the wrong path and nobody was standing up,” he said in an interview.

He recently went to Alberta to look at its recovery model for addressing the overdose crisis and was impressed by what he saw. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has been de-emphasizing harm reduction and investing heavily in creating an effective system of addiction treatment. The centrepiece of its effort is a network of treatment centres, known as therapeutic communities, where those with addictions can stay for up to a year.

“We’ve got to figure out how we help people not only stay alive but have a life,” Mr. Campbell said.

… Advocates of the harm-reduction approach say the worries about safe supply are overblown. They say that right-wing politicians preying on the fears of the public are leading a backlash.

Mr. Campbell says he is just adapting his views to reflect the facts.

Despite all the effort put into harm reduction, he says, British Columbia just had its deadliest year ever for drug overdoses. More than 2,500 people died in 2023, compared with 200 or 300 a year when he was chief coroner. Each time he visits the Downtown Eastside, the epicentre of the province’s drug crisis, he feels “terrible sadness, almost to the point of despair.”

To combat the crisis, he says, governments have to take a more balanced approach. Harm reduction is still important. Supervised consumption sites allow users to take their drugs in a hygienic setting, with trained attendants on hand in case they overdose. Handing out naloxone kits allows police, paramedics and ordinary citizens to reverse overdoses in minutes.

But those measures are only part of the answer. He says authorities should be paying more attention to the other pillars of the accepted four-pillar approach to the problem: prevention, enforcement and, above all, treatment.

“Harm reduction, from my point of view, had gotten all of the publicity, gotten all of the money, and treatment was not there for the most part in the Canadian system.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ersal-coroner/