Amid a policy shift away from harm reduction, senior police officials in Canada have been signalling their approval, though some of them ostensibly supported harm reduction and drug decriminalization before.
Experts say not only are the police wrong to suggest that decriminalization or harm reduction don’t work, but that police actions have themselves undermined such initiatives.
In British Columbia and elsewhere, there’s been a recent pattern of governments caving to a right-wing backlash against harm reduction. In May 2024, BC’s provincial government effectively ended its half-hearted decriminalization pilot—which removed criminal penalties for up to 2.5 grams total of opioids, methamphetamine and cocaine—by re-criminalizing low-level possession in all public spaces.
Two major police organizations which had expressed support for this very limited form of decriminalization said they were revoking it.
The change was prompted in part by police claims of disorder on the streets related to decriminalization—the kind of claim which police have exaggerated in the past, and which ignored confounding factors such as a 32 percent increase in homelessness between 2020 and 2023 in greater Vancouver.
In late 2024, two major police organizations which had previously expressed support for this very limited form of decriminalization said they were revoking it. The BC Association of Chiefs of Police and its national counterpart both announced in November that they no longer support decriminalization of any possession for personal use.
Outgoing police leaders have also used their retirement to speak ill of harm reduction and drug policy reform.
Scott Sheppard, chief superintendent of the Yukon’s Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) detachment, retired in February. A month earlier he told CBC, “I worry that we’re almost creating a bit of an industry around this whole idea of harm reduction. And I don’t think it’s achieving, at least not yet, what it’s intended to achieve.”
“[I]t’s one thing to provide safe supply or a safe consumption site,” he said. “But if you’re not in a position to provide that follow-up care and … wraparound service, I don’t see that as a success. In fact, we might very well just be prolonging the issue.”
While harm reductionists would agree that wraparound services are important, evidence is clear that safe supply programs and overdose prevention sites (OPS) prolong and improve the quality of people’s lives.
“When people start entering into the discussion about decriminalization, then the hairs on the back of my neck really begin to stand up.”
Sheppard, speaking on the CBC show Yukon Morning, continued, “And then when people start entering into the discussion about decriminalization, then the hairs on the back of my neck really begin to stand up because that becomes really, really worrisome then.”
“I just don’t believe the evidence supports going in that direction,” he said. “And even looking at the last several months in British Columbia, just as a point of comparison, if you were to ask most people living in that area to give an objective opinion about it, they say it went horribly wrong.”
Shaun Wright, who was superintendent of the Prince George RCMP detachment in central BC, similarly called decriminalization in the province “probably the most horrific failure of public policy that I’ve seen in the last three decades.”
“I just think it encouraged or resulted in a significant increase in public disorder and the normalization of hard drug use, which I think is extremely detrimental to our young people,” Wright told the Prince George Citizen, following his retirement in August 2024.
But Dr. Joe Hermer, chair of the sociology department at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said the RCMP’s enforcement of a City of Prince George bylaw undermined decriminalization.
In 2021, the city passed the Safe Streets Bylaw, banning, among other things, drug use in public spaces. After the BC decriminalization pilot came into effect, several other municipalities followed suit.
“It’s an interesting case of how, almost in a completely unaccountable way, you can have municipalities usurp federal health and law reform,” Hermer told Filter.
The RCMP didn’t push the bylaw—in fact, Hermer said the police force “really wanted nothing to do with the bylaw” when it was drafted and implemented—but officers began enforcing it in the summer of 2023, as political pressure mounted.
“I think the most dangerous impact by law enforcement on that population is that they tend to displace people into circumstances where they end up using alone.”
“I think when they realized that they could use [the public drug use] section of the bylaw … then it became more likely that they would use [it] in a selective way informally,” Hermer said.
The BC Assembly of First Nations, which issued a report on the bylaw in 2022, called it “counterproductive, cruel, and inherently racist,” CBC reported.
The bylaw was ultimately mirrored by the changes to BC’s province-wide decriminalization pilot that effectively brought it to a close.
While politicians speak of the pilot as still being in place, advocates note that the 2024 changes remove what little protections the original policy offered. Unhoused people are among those most affected by criminalization, and recriminalizing public drug use without adequate access to OPC renders it moot for them.
Under the Safe Streets Bylaw, this was already the reality for people who use drugs in Prince George, Hermer said, meaning the benefits of decriminalization weren’t actualized.
He noted that the province has urged people never to use drugs alone, so that someone can respond with naloxone in the event of an overdose. “I think the most dangerous impact by law enforcement on that population is that they tend to displace people into circumstances where they end up using alone,” he said.
In 2023, Prince George RCMP went so far as to enter a wellness space operated by Uniting Northern Drug Users (UNDU) at an encampment in the city’s Moccasin Flats area, without a warrant. Upon entering, officers saw open drug use in the area and seized drugs under the Safe Streets Bylaw, police told CBC.
But that wasn’t the only time police enforced the bylaw, according to Juls Budau, a freelance researcher currently doing a master of social work program. Budau worked with Hermer on researching the bylaw, and formerly operated two OPS in Prince George.
In a focus group she ran to understand the impact of bylaw enforcement on people living in shelters and the encampment, participants reported being ticketed for smoking fentanyl outside the UNDU trailer.
The city’s bylaw department had also ordered in 2021 the removal of a supervised inhalation structure from another OPS, which had been created in collaboration with the local health authority.
“There’s just a way in which the RCMP always reverts to a prohibitionist type … of solution.”
These actions, Hermer said, are consistent with historical police attitudes. Police leadership have often claimed to support harm reduction, only for police actions to contradict that—going all the way back to the groundbreaking 2003 opening of Insite in Vancouver.
“RCMP commanders … [are] well aware that the poisoned drug crisis, the overdose crisis, is a social policy, medical issue, a failure of those types of safety nets,” Hermer said. “But even understanding that, there’s just a way in which the RCMP always reverts to a prohibitionist type … of solution.”
And though police announced the end of their support for decriminalization in late 2024, drug policy analyst Karen Ward said she never believed they meaningfully supported it in the first place.
Ward suggested their statements of support—issued amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter resurgence and the rise of the defund movement—were intended not to advance decriminalization, but to slow it down, by injecting themselves into the discussion.
She noted that police undermined decriminalization by insisting on an unreasonably low threshold that individuals were allowed to carry. While drug-user groups suggestd 18 grams per substance—a threshold backed by the BC Health Coalition—the provincial government ultimately requested a cumulative 4-gram threshold in its application to Health Canada for an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
Health Canada further reduced that to 2.5 grams, at the behest of police, who were pushing a 1-gram threshold.
That 1-gram threshold would have given police almost unfettered discretion to continue seizing drugs. The BC Association of Chiefs of Police said in 2022 that average drug seizures ranged from 1.3-1.9 grams, depending on the city.
The result, Ward said, was a “decriminalization” that was “watered down to the point of an empty gesture.”
Photograph by British Columbia Emergency Photography via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
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