Western Standard - February 06, 2023


HANNAFORD BC has it wrong, maybe hard drugs ought to carry a stigma

Topics
kicking drugs
Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Caitlin Bennett
Mental health minister accuses Poilievre of lying about assisted suicide MPC Daily Market Update Feb 7, 2023

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

124.0

Word count

818

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

B.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs, including heroin, morphine, fentanyl, and fentanyl, crack and powder cocaine, meth, and ecstasy, and the rest. In Alberta, the government has not done what BC is doing and made it easier to possess drugs.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Last week, B.C. announced it would decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs, opioids, including heroin, morphine, and fentanyl, crack and powder cocaine, meth, and ecstasy.
00:00:17.080 On Tuesday, the following day, the B.C. coroner's office announced that last year there were 2,272 suspected illicit drug toxicity deaths. That's the jargon.
00:00:33.740 Dead people, then, who had overdosed, presumably without intending to. And what killed them? It was almost the same as last year.
00:00:49.520 2,306 people, an all-time high in the province, and it was almost the same cocktail of drugs that killed them.
00:00:59.160 Included among the toxic drugs were opioids, including heroin and fentanyl, cocaine, meth, and ecstasy.
00:01:13.260 Are you getting this? That's all the same stuff.
00:01:18.680 In B.C., about six people a day are dying because they overdosed on, say it with me, opioids, meth, ecstasy, and the rest.
00:01:32.720 These are typically men in the prime of life, aged between 30 and 59.
00:01:37.620 And the governmental response is what? To make it easier for them by making it legal to possess small amounts of opioids, meth, ecstasy, and the rest.
00:01:53.040 Did nobody make the connection?
00:01:58.000 We know what they're smoking out there. Maybe they should smoke less of it. 0.57
00:02:02.160 Not just in B.C., by the way.
00:02:04.460 The decriminalization of drugs that kill people is an experimental joint venture with the government of Canada.
00:02:12.240 Federal Health Minister Carolyn Bennett was right there on the podium with the B.C. government.
00:02:17.040 Now, I know there's a libertarian argument that the war on drugs hasn't worked for 50 years, so it's time to try something else.
00:02:30.120 It's hard to argue with that.
00:02:33.180 But the message you send still matters.
00:02:37.480 After all, there's a libertarian argument about a lot of things, like wearing seatbelts in your car and a helmet when you're riding a motorbike.
00:02:45.940 You may not agree. I may not agree.
00:02:49.800 But governments have decided that whatever libertarians think, they're going to insist on seatbelts and helmets.
00:02:57.280 They reason that it costs other taxpayers too much to fix people up after they've carelessly bent themselves out of shape and cracked open their skulls.
00:03:09.020 It's also the reason that governments discourage smoking.
00:03:13.060 It's because treating your cancer is expensive for everybody else.
00:03:19.520 And so, notwithstanding the old falsehood that you can't legislate morality,
00:03:25.620 even in free Western countries like Canada, governments signal what they think is correct behavior,
00:03:32.920 and a lot of people have changed their minds in 60 years and think it's the way things should be.
00:03:37.320 So, if people's drug habits are a burden on society, which they are,
00:03:43.940 it's perfectly consistent for governments to rule on them in the public interest.
00:03:50.220 Furthermore, the argument that the war on drugs hasn't gone well
00:03:54.540 doesn't mean that we should legalize possession for small amounts.
00:03:59.260 Because why? Because it sends the wrong message.
00:04:04.520 Those small amounts can still kill people.
00:04:09.640 So, what is the signal we want to send?
00:04:13.460 What is the correct behavior we want governments to promote?
00:04:18.220 Is it not that people shouldn't be addicted?
00:04:25.280 The addicts would be with you on that.
00:04:28.980 Ask any addict you know if they would recommend dependency to a friend.
00:04:35.900 Anyway, that's BC for you.
00:04:38.540 There is another way.
00:04:40.740 And here in Alberta, we're exploring it.
00:04:43.460 Kicking drugs is not easy.
00:04:45.100 But people do it.
00:04:47.000 You may even know somebody who has.
00:04:49.080 And in Alberta, the government has taken the view
00:04:51.660 that if somebody seriously wants to quit, they will help them.
00:04:56.340 It has therefore not done what BC is doing
00:04:59.060 and made it easier to possess drugs.
00:05:02.880 Instead, it has set up 9,000 new publicly funded addiction treatment spaces.
00:05:08.840 It's an expenditure of more than $120 million,
00:05:11.940 which is only a down payment on what addiction costs taxpayers anyway.
00:05:19.480 To get a better idea of that, you'd need to add in the cost of ambulance services,
00:05:24.140 hospital treatment, and crime committed by desperate people.
00:05:27.920 In 2021, more than 1,600 Albertans died of mostly accidental overdoses.
00:05:34.220 Final numbers aren't in, but in 2022, it's heading to be rather less.
00:05:38.160 Month over month since May, the numbers have gone down significantly.
00:05:43.160 As for 2023, it's obviously too soon to tell.
00:05:46.140 But a policy aimed at keeping people alive,
00:05:49.100 rather than endorsing and even facilitating a habit that could kill them,
00:05:53.840 seems more like the Alberta way.
00:05:58.000 As for me, I'm all for it.
00:06:00.640 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
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