Western Standard - Decriminalization Didn’t Work： BC’s Drug Policy Collapse

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone.

00:00:29.280 My name is Liam Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard. And if you've been keeping

00:00:33.920 up with news out of BC, you'd know BC may have resorted to an actual logical policy. Well, at

00:00:41.320 least they've scrapped one policy that's proved completely illogical. This infamous policy was

00:00:47.760 introduced back in 2023, which led to the drug-addled homeless population growing on BC

00:00:53.560 these streets. This policy decriminalized drugs to, as the BC government stated, reduce the stigma

00:01:00.540 surrounding drugs so they can support people to access important health and social services.

00:01:07.120 If you live in any major city in Canada, you've witnessed the epidemic of the opioid crisis.

00:01:13.920 This is an issue not just in Canada, but internationally. However, it is exacerbated

00:01:20.140 by bad policy which canada seems to specialize in whenever you've walked downtown in your canadian

00:01:27.020 city i bet you've seen homeless addicts daily on the streets and although many don't like to admit

00:01:33.900 it these people are clearly a danger not only to themselves but to bystanders normal citizens

00:01:40.620 walking around the city who at any moment could be attacked by these people let's be clear obviously

00:01:47.500 not all of these people are aggressive. Some may even be friendly, if a bit out of it, but that's

00:01:52.800 not the point. It's like rolling a dice, and the odds that they're dangerous are much higher than

00:01:57.720 if it were, say, a sober person functioning member of society. This is supported by psychology. A

00:02:03.700 2019 psychiatry study found that substance-induced psychosis, especially from cannabis,

00:02:09.460 amphetamines, and hallucinogens, can lead to schizophrenia. About one in four people with

00:02:15.480 substance-induced psychosis later developed schizophrenia, with cannabis posing the highest

00:02:19.920 risk. You need not look any further than the celebrity examples, which may not be Canadian,

00:02:25.840 but still show the same chronic inability to get those people off the streets. If you're around my

00:02:31.400 age, you would know a Nickelodeon child actor named Tyler Chase. Known for a role in the show

00:02:37.540 Ned Declassified School Survival Guide, Chase played Martin Qualley, which was more of a side

00:02:43.580 character. The point is, if you've ever asked, I wonder where he is now? Most of us would now know

00:02:50.780 he resides on California streets, homeless and addicted to drugs. His story lays out the

00:02:58.020 overshadowing question of, what do we do with these addicts and how do we actually help them?

00:03:04.700 His fellow co-star Daniel Curtis Lee tried to do just that, visiting Tyler during Christmas and

00:03:11.140 setting him up in a hotel room, the only problem was, according to TMZ, Tyler trashed the place

00:03:17.580 only a few hours later. Motel employees had called Daniel to inform him that the room was

00:03:23.940 left wide open, the fridge was flipped over, and the microwave was in the tub. Apparently,

00:03:29.860 Tyler's family had warned Daniel that putting him in hotel rooms was a bad idea based on previous

00:03:36.040 experience of doing something similar. Another actor, Sean Wise, who starred in Mighty Ducks,

00:03:41.780 had a rehab room for him waiting, but Tyler refused. If anything, this story shows what's

00:03:48.080 going on on my city streets as well as probably yours. It becomes clear what the homeless population

00:03:54.240 is actually going through. Most of them are not alone, but are choosing to isolate themselves

00:04:00.040 and live without shelter. Reflecting on the experience, Daniel said something particularly

00:04:05.580 important. California's policies are broken. California is a blue democratic state.

00:04:14.000 Its policies surrounding addiction parallels some of BCs, like their safe supply. Known as 0.85

00:04:23.680 the National Harm Reduction Program, which includes syringe service programs and safer smoking kits

00:04:29.560 to name a few. BC had their own safe supply and even went further by initially allowing people

00:04:37.680 to possess small amounts, up to 2.5 grams, of illegal substances for personal use. So what do

00:04:45.820 you do to help recover these people? And what do you do with people who seem to want to isolate

00:04:51.120 and give up on themselves? According to more than 20 years of research by Julian Summers,

00:04:56.520 a clinical psychologist at simon fraser university specializing in homelessness and addiction what

00:05:03.320 the government can do has a lot to do with giving people purpose so welcome julian thank you for

00:05:10.680 joining us today for pleasure leo great to be talking with you it really is okay well i just

00:05:17.960 wanted to um you've done some really interesting research on addiction um and recovery of addiction

00:05:25.640 and how to help people who are dealing with homelessness. So I wanted to just ask you,

00:05:31.080 let's get straight into the topic, and why don't you tell audience members what your research was

00:05:35.640 about and how long it lasted for? Wow. Well, the research that you're, I think,

00:05:43.160 drawing most attention to was kind of the product of a progression that started out in the late

00:05:51.080 1980s, early 90s, looking at brief interventions with people and short courses of psychotherapy

00:05:58.520 with people, but also really paying attention to the other things like non-therapeutic or

00:06:05.460 non-professional things that really seemed to make a difference helping people to overcome

00:06:11.160 addictions. And where that work led me and my colleagues over a number of years was to focus

00:06:18.960 on the people who seem to have the most complex addictions, the most severe addictions, the

00:06:24.680 greatest risks related to their addictions, and find out what were the most effective ways of

00:06:31.000 helping them to escape from that type of risk, to escape from the circumstances that they were

00:06:37.380 living in and pursue just vastly greater well-being, as well as overcoming their addictions.

00:06:46.940 And one of the things that we found using randomized controlled trials was that when we compared the types of housing people had, whether it was housing with other people, for instance, who had experienced homeless addictions and housing them all together with supports, or usual care in Vancouver, which is a mix of low barrier facilities and fairly intermittent forms of support.

00:07:13.700 we contrasted those with providing people with choices of housing in healthy buildings where

00:07:22.380 they were where our clients were one of the only people coming from our service into that building

00:07:28.740 so basically the composition of the buildings was otherwise just organic and we provided them with

00:07:35.020 24 7 supports in in that in those uh apartments we found that compared to the other two conditions

00:07:42.140 housing people altogether with supports or usual care, that only the people that got the choices 0.59

00:07:48.900 of housing in healthy settings improved dramatically. 71% less likely to be criminally

00:07:56.680 convicted, 45% less likely to have medical emergencies. This is in the very first year

00:08:02.460 after being randomized. And their descriptions of their experiences were very unlike those that we

00:08:11.340 heard from the people housed together and the people in usual care they they talked about

00:08:15.700 experiencing a just a new lease on life a new sense of identity new opportunities and those

00:08:22.920 were layered on top of having new responsibilities they had places now that they cared about that

00:08:29.560 mattered to them and they were orienting their attention more and more to building on those

00:08:36.040 achievements and protecting the things that they had taken responsibility for so that they didn't

00:08:42.700 have to worry about losing them. Wow, that's okay. That's really cool. I wanted to ask as well,

00:08:50.820 so do you think the reason why people have such a significant recovery difference

00:08:57.780 in that circumstance is because it's just like a big part of it is like the people they're

00:09:04.980 surrounded by like they're not surrounded by people who are also addicted to substances and

00:09:09.460 stuff so maybe they're more influenced by people who are living more like just normal lives

00:09:14.460 yeah that that in fact is is very much what our clients told us so as part of this research we

00:09:22.520 were looking at multiple ways of measuring what was happening in their lives one of the

00:09:30.700 key sources of measurement was simply talking to them. We also looked at things like administrative

00:09:35.460 records, so like hospital records and criminal justice records, with their consent, and lots

00:09:42.700 and lots of different questionnaires. And that is exactly what they said, that it was for many

00:09:48.440 people, the first time in their life that they felt that they were being treated as a normal

00:09:56.560 person without constraints. And that's kind of an important, I guess, finding that emerged from

00:10:10.300 our work. There are a lot of people who experience homelessness. There are a lot of people who

00:10:16.120 experience addictions and other forms of mental illness. The characteristics of the people who

00:10:22.860 kind of get stuck in homelessness with addictions, it's not a random cross-section of society.

00:10:31.500 What we see when we look at their pasts is really shockingly high levels of what we call

00:10:39.580 adverse childhood experiences, forms of abuse, forms of neglect. We were recruiting the people

00:10:46.620 who were regarded by people in the downtown east side of Vancouver as being the hardest to house,

00:10:51.940 the least likely to get assistance. And when we identified that group, about 500 people,

00:10:58.480 when we identified them, about 25% had been in foster care. A minority of them had grown up

00:11:06.340 knowing their biological parents. And on top of that, they had these, as I said earlier,

00:11:12.780 these just shockingly high rates of adverse childhood experiences.

00:11:19.520 So they were, in a way, kind of psychosocially starved.

00:11:26.760 And the fact that they oriented to this experience of being treated with dignity, with respect,

00:11:35.060 some of them described initially, like, I feel like I'm faking it as a normal person.

00:11:41.140 and and eventually though that that wore off and and they began to feel like actually i am a normal

00:11:48.000 person and they could start turning their attention to things that that had really mattered

00:11:52.580 to them and that they had kind of avoided thinking about like returning to paid work

00:11:58.380 or reconnecting with their own kids about a quarter of our clients had kids under the age of

00:12:05.220 18 that they were estranged from. And just, you know, when you're living in shelters or a low

00:12:11.960 barrier facility, an encampment, struggling with addiction, it's very common for people to really

00:12:18.640 banish all thoughts of those kinds of connections to society, of paid work, of family and things

00:12:26.220 like that it's too painful but you know what we learned is that um people uh hang on they're

00:12:35.220 they're surviving and part of what they're surviving for they may not even know this but

00:12:40.200 what what we learned is part of what they may be surviving for is the chance the the hope

00:12:46.020 that one day they may actually have an opportunity to experience that kind of respect and support

00:12:52.600 and uh what we found as as i said earlier is the results are transformative wow that's very cool

00:13:00.680 um i also quickly i wanted to touch as well on just the i did a story on this a while back but

00:13:08.620 originally i think global did it on uh you talked to david eby when he was the housing minister of

00:13:14.300 bc back in i think it was 2021 right yeah um okay yeah so and you basically told him all this

00:13:22.580 research that you've been discussing here right now with us and he apparently the government

00:13:28.660 deleted the data on this so and then they went with obviously the decriminalization stuff but

00:13:33.860 they scrapped it now it's officially scrapped so i wanted to ask you what do you think the

00:13:40.420 consequences of them implementing the policy they have now scrapped were on the province of bc and

00:13:47.060 And do you have any hope that they actually might implement your research in the future?

00:13:57.260 Answer the second question first.

00:13:59.000 It's a little easier.

00:14:00.780 Yeah, they will.

00:14:02.120 And I would emphasize that the work that my colleagues and I have done is really part

00:14:09.020 of a larger body of research that converges on the same themes, the same types of policies

00:14:17.580 and services in terms of their effectiveness. And so eventually, a government in BC is going

00:14:29.160 to have no choice but to shift direction in a general sense to prioritize prevention

00:14:36.820 and social reintegration. If we think about health sciences 101 or healthcare 101,

00:14:44.920 anytime you've got something that looks like an epidemic, the only two ways that you're going to

00:14:50.100 be able to make and improve things are prevent new cases from entering into the epidemic pool,

00:14:56.680 so that's prevention, and treating cases that are in that pool and that maybe are at high risk.

00:15:02.620 in the 10 years since BC had a declared public health emergency involving addiction and drug

00:15:09.560 poisoning, the government has done nothing. I mean, this is shocking, but nothing to develop

00:15:17.820 a prevention strategy and nothing to develop an exit strategy to rapidly assist the people that

00:15:26.520 are currently at risk. So I'm now turned to the first part of your question. What was the impact

00:15:34.360 of this D-Crim experiment? The impact, I think, goes deeper and is more destructive than many 1.00

00:15:43.180 people currently realize. We see the evidence in our communities and in the lives lost. But

00:15:49.760 the system that was in place prior to COVID and prior to Mr. Eby's government was already a very

00:15:59.680 flawed approach. It wasn't even a system. And it was further complicated by the fact that within

00:16:06.400 this kind of flawed array, this patchwork of services, there was evidence of conflicts of

00:16:13.000 interest and even corruption. Simple example, I know these are charged terms I'm using, but

00:16:19.700 Ernst & Young produced an audit in 2023. It's online. Taxpayers paid for it. Revealed that the

00:16:26.660 CEO of BC Housing not only diverted funds to his wife's corporation to the tune of tens of millions

00:16:33.280 of dollars, but he also diverted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into a private company that

00:16:41.120 he created, made himself CEO of, and Ernst & Young reported that the government was not aware or had

00:16:49.020 not approved of this activity. And at the time, he had over $70 million in outstanding loans. He was

00:16:58.180 using this money essentially to create a lending bank. So this is a very, very serious, to my way

00:17:05.740 thinking this is a very serious insight into the culture um that's operating it says it's an even

00:17:13.100 further uh um uh indictment to know that the government didn't take any serious action

00:17:21.500 i i've not read any i follow this i've not seen any reporting as to whether or not the government

00:17:27.420 has even got the money back so at the same time that this that this was happening this housing

00:17:34.540 in drug policies are two of the major pillars that need to move in order to make things better.

00:17:39.780 So Mr. Eby was aware of this, and he took no steps to fundamentally change it. A lot of the

00:17:47.280 funding that we've spent more of in terms of government policies has essentially been growing

00:17:53.320 the same types of endeavors that were flawed and in place at the time. On the drug side, several

00:18:01.120 public figures, started their own safe supply companies. In fact, Dr. Henry, our provincial

00:18:11.300 health officer, announced that decriminalization and safe supply were the ways that the government

00:18:17.040 should go. She announced that in 2019 in her report. And in 2020, very next year, four of

00:18:23.980 her senior colleagues all announced safe supply companies. So this is evidence that, as I said,

00:18:31.640 many people may not appreciate, they may not even be aware of it, but it speaks to essentially some

00:18:37.280 of the cultural problems within our public services that themselves need to be addressed

00:18:43.820 and improved in order to get to better public policies. I think that we're, I remain optimistic

00:18:51.140 in part because these things that have been holding us back are finally coming to the public's

00:19:00.100 attention. And something else that is going to, I think, have to drive change under any new

00:19:06.420 government is the fact that Mr. Eby took us from a $5 billion surplus in BC to a something like

00:19:13.220 $12 billion deficit, which means that any new government is going to not only have to revise

00:19:20.340 policies, but they're going to have to make a very strong business case for where they're

00:19:27.100 going to be spending, all of which should put dysfunctional, conflicted policies under

00:19:36.880 a microscope and on the shortlist to be removed.

00:19:41.060 Wow.

00:19:42.500 Okay.

00:19:43.220 Well, I also wanted to ask you about just how mental illness and substance abuse is related, just because I think it's good to know about.

00:19:56.720 So from what I know, is substance abuse, it kind of perpetuates mental illness, right?

00:20:02.900 Is that how it works?

00:20:04.120 I think if you think about, at least with respect to addiction, harmful addictions, the most compelling, overarching way to think about who's at risk or what puts people at risk is to think about this construct of psychosocial integration.

00:20:29.080 It means being connected to other people, being connected to things that matter, things that matter so much that, you know, you or I, many of our colleagues are not really thinking about, you know, going to the dark web later today and purchasing drugs or going to a dealer and purchasing drugs.

00:20:51.620 I'm not referring to occasional use or that sort of thing, but really harmful addictions.

00:20:59.180 And it is when people are, this is consistent over time.

00:21:04.040 There's a lot of research on this, the link between psychosocial integration and risk

00:21:08.940 for addiction.

00:21:10.700 There's also a lot of research like our work showing that social reintegration is one of

00:21:16.260 the most powerful causes of helping people to overcome their addictions.

00:21:21.620 So that's true for other forms of mental illness, too. Very common forms of mental illness include anxiety or mood disorders, depression. And unfortunately, the symptoms that arise when we experience these syndromes operate as negative feedback loops.

00:21:42.820 So depression tends to leave us feeling as though we can't get outside when getting outside and doing things is exactly what we need to do. Anxiety disorders tend to keep us removed from things that we associate with anxiety and so never actually testing or reality testing some of our irrational beliefs and keeping us stuck there.

00:22:03.720 And addiction the same, the continual distraction, distracting our brains from the world and the painfulness of the world that we live in, means that we're always hampered in our capacity to actually do things that might be necessary to get out of that state.

00:22:26.240 So these symptoms themselves tend to be mutually exacerbating. But in the background, and so

00:22:34.480 someone might say, well, okay, so in a roundabout way, what you're saying is, yeah, they do cause

00:22:38.380 each other. And there is evidence showing that if you have a diagnosis with a non-substance-related

00:22:45.560 disorder, you're at much higher risk of developing a substance use disorder, and the other way

00:22:50.860 around. The thing I'm trying to emphasize, though, is that in the case of all of these symptom

00:22:56.360 clusters, there's another factor that may actually be more important than these interactions. And

00:23:03.260 that is, what are the conditions that people are living in? What are the opportunities that they

00:23:08.160 have to be engaged in meaningful lives and lives that are sufficiently meaningful that it'll

00:23:14.020 motivate them to occasionally challenge some of their symptoms? Like, I don't want to do this

00:23:20.080 today, but I know I should, I know I must. And in the case of addiction, there's really nothing

00:23:27.620 else that has the power and the capability to help people overcome addictions. There's no

00:23:36.980 biological test for an addiction. There's no medication that treats addiction. Addiction,

00:23:44.400 I haven't said this yet, but at the core of diagnosing addiction is the experience of a loss

00:23:51.660 of control over something that's harmful. Okay, so loss of control. And people describe this

00:23:57.380 whenever you talk to them about their addictions. There's no medication that treats loss of control.

00:24:05.060 There are medications that may reduce some of the harms associated with having an addiction.

00:24:09.040 that's not treating an addiction though the only things that treat addictions are things that occur

00:24:14.900 in our social world okay well let's see oh okay another good one i wanted to ask you about

00:24:24.680 um okay yeah so in on your website you have a few booklets but in one of them you uh stated a bunch

00:24:34.820 of facts. For example, between 2010 and 2017, the rate of people having schizophrenia, bipolar

00:24:42.860 disorder, and substance abuse doubled, actually, in BC. So why do you think this is?

00:24:54.060 So this is actually a phenomenon we see in a number of places around the world in roughly

00:25:00.900 the same era and the most compelling explanation i have for why this occurred um when when in

00:25:09.540 previous years the trend lines were more stable um is to look to the global financial crisis

00:25:16.660 and the impact that had between 2008 and 2010 on among other things uh public services social

00:25:24.820 services to support people, and also opportunities in lives. We saw the beginnings of big changes

00:25:32.660 in the economy, in infrastructure, and changes that, among other things, gave rise to what we

00:25:43.100 refer to as deaths of despair. So this is a combination of suicide, alcohol, deaths from

00:25:50.860 alcohol-related causes, and deaths from drugs. And all of these began to surge, especially in

00:25:58.600 North America, in that same 2010 onward period. We also saw the OxyContin crisis or OxyCrisis.

00:26:09.820 And people who are on the inside in pharma are well aware of the fact that

00:26:17.180 But areas that have what we rate as higher scores on deprivation, these are the areas where you're most likely to find customers for drugs like opioids.

00:26:34.880 And that's true whether you're selling on behalf of pharma or selling on behalf of cartels or illicit traffickers.

00:26:43.880 traffickers. The same knowledge applies. So we have these macro trends occurring. And at the same

00:26:52.360 time in BC, where these numbers came from, we had no increase in our capacity to either prevent harm

00:27:01.780 or help people to reenter society. Mechanisms that we had in place that had been shown to achieve

00:27:07.680 that when people were in crisis include drug treatment court, community court, so their

00:27:13.160 specialized justice programs that aim to keep people out of prison by incentivizing them and

00:27:18.600 supporting them to re-enter society, maintain jobs, avoid addiction, avoid crime. And it takes

00:27:26.920 resources, yes. It takes the same resources that we've used in our voluntary interventions.

00:27:32.880 But we did none of that. And so as a consequence, we saw not only rising rates of diagnosis,

00:27:38.740 But a higher percentage of people with diagnoses, including addiction diagnoses, winding up being involuntarily admitted to hospital and sentenced for crimes or simply detained in our correctional facilities.

00:27:55.160 And that percentage went up at the same time that the average number of prior convictions doubled, nearly doubled from about three and a half to six point something average convictions per person.

00:28:07.500 So we had very clear evidence already by 2021, in fact, earlier than that, that we had a very severe social crisis unfolding that definitely involved addiction, but it often involved addiction along with other mental illnesses.

00:28:24.540 And there was, unfortunately, no willingness on the part of this government to acknowledge those facts and then do the things that were known at the time to best help people who were in those crises.

00:28:39.860 Okay. I also wanted to ask you about, okay, so you said in I think the same book that I was

00:28:50.920 referencing before, oh yeah, the BC hospitals increased by 50% in that time period. Okay,

00:29:00.600 yes. So I wanted to ask you, if this were to be implemented, all the research you were doing and

00:29:06.800 the things you're advocating for, do you think that this would actually decrease hospital wait

00:29:12.700 times as well? Because if there's less people, you know, in hospitals, yeah, there would be more

00:29:17.460 room, there'd be more resources. Yeah, I go even further. So I've been working in the area.

00:29:26.980 One of the themes that my work has addressed over many years now is primary health care reform.

00:29:34.560 And this is primarily, so our GPs and family doctors are the people we're most likely to see in our system of care and people who are most likely to prescribe treatments for mental disorders.

00:29:52.680 And, but their ability to help people is completely dependent on the resources that they have available to refer to.

00:30:02.260 So when those resources are few and when the burden of addiction and other mental illness is going up and up and becoming more complex, there is like almost a breaking point that we reach.

00:30:16.980 This is not only true in the primary care setting, it's true in the hospital setting, as you're referring to.

00:30:22.880 One of our publications from two years ago looked at about 5,000 people who had been admitted to St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver for an addiction or other mental illness.

00:30:35.140 They stayed in the hospital for, on average, several weeks, and one in five of them were discharged to no fixed address, essentially homelessness.

00:30:44.720 No surprise, those people were very likely to be readmitted to the hospital. And you can only imagine the sense of futility among clinical staff and just how crazy making it would be to spend weeks and weeks of clinical time and expertise helping someone to establish a level of stability and well-being.

00:31:08.020 And to be doing that on behalf of taxpayers, this is something that we're all paying for this, knowing that it's very likely that when the person is best ready to leave, you're going to be putting them back out into a situation that's very rapidly going to undo all of the good work that you've done, and you're going to be seeing them again.

00:31:27.860 So this is literally a crazy-making environment. Now I'm referring to the hospital context here, but of course, you can think across many, many, many groups in society, first responders, who literally can develop relationships on a first-name basis with the people that they're resuscitating because they're doing it so regularly.

00:31:53.500 And no one is coming in to fundamentally rescue those individuals so that they don't need to be resuscitated another time.

00:32:02.480 Business operators, family members, community members who are suddenly expected to become tolerant of stepping over people or walking around people, walking around human excrement on our sidewalks, that this is something we're supposed to tolerate all of a sudden.

00:32:21.660 And all of this is really, I describe this as essentially the elements that make up mass addiction. When addiction reaches a certain prevalence point in society, these kinds of additional effects are almost ubiquitous in our communities.

00:32:43.480 And the effects I'm describing are not people who are also experiencing addictions. They're people who are experiencing very, very serious harms that are a result of having so many people who experience addictions.

00:32:59.320 So all of this, unfortunately, means that we will inevitably, in places like BC, other places that experience mass addiction, we will, in a matter of time, experience a breaking point.

00:33:15.220 And we can redirect our policies prior to that, recognizing that that's where we're heading.

00:33:24.020 And I hope that's actually what we're going to do next in BC. Because if we don't do that, then the crisis just continues to escalate. And it sets the stage for other forms of turnaround that are not so democratic, not so gradual and well thought out, more abrupt. And we've seen that, unfortunately, historically as well.

00:33:48.000 hmm okay well i got one more question for you julian um do you think not only would your

00:33:56.440 research maybe be implemented in bc but do you think other provinces might be interested in

00:34:00.920 doing something similar yeah so i i i became uh absolutely persona non grata in bc around the end

00:34:10.160 of 2021. And my research career was essentially terminated in BC at that time, but only in

00:34:22.380 BC. So other provinces, other states, other countries have been very interested in our

00:34:30.320 work and in the work of other teams that's very closely related. So I've had the real

00:34:38.240 pleasure of being able to advise other governments. And in those cases, the changes are not, you know,

00:34:46.240 it's not straightforward, of course, changing government policies, especially when, you know,

00:34:51.160 people sometimes have a real affection for them. But, you know, you can look across the country

00:34:58.960 in Canada, and currently, there are a number of places, Alberta, Ontario are probably leading

00:35:05.920 examples of provincial governments that are going in sort of an opposite direction toward

00:35:11.700 what we refer to as a recovery-oriented system. No one is, and this is true internationally,

00:35:19.500 maybe the lone exception I can think of is Scotland, where there's a potential jurisdiction

00:35:27.100 still thinking of emulating what BC tried, this decriminalization, pharma-first

00:35:35.320 type of an approach. But I don't think, I mean, there are powerful, powerful advocates for

00:35:44.600 recovery in Scotland. Favor UK is one in England and Scotland. And I think that the more they

00:35:53.800 are able to show that places like BC are admitting defeat on that suite of policies,

00:36:02.280 that it becomes very unlikely that any place in the world is going to want to emulate what bc

00:36:09.000 tried to do right it's like an example for everyone wow okay well thank you again jolene

00:36:17.160 i really appreciate you joining us today it's my pleasure okay and if you guys enjoyed this

00:36:23.800 video you should definitely check out the rest of our videos where we have more

00:36:28.520 great information and news also check out our actual site for news it's westernstandard.news

00:36:36.280 and yeah thanks everyone for joining and see you next time

Western Standard - February 07, 2026

Decriminalization Didn’t Work： BC’s Drug Policy Collapse

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