1.The actual cost of the drugs themselves is pennies and the supply chain is straightforward. Safe supply is far cheaper than treatment, if the concern is cost.
2.Overdose deaths have increased everywhere. This is what I meant by media narratives promoting falsehoods. The only published study showed that drug decriminalization in Oregon did not lead to increased deaths relative to other areas. This study was never promoted by the media and nor is the increase in deaths in all the places that haven't engaged in decriminalization.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/27/oregon-drug-decriminalization-measure-110-overdose-deaths/
Danielle Smith in Alberta even deliberately lied about the number of death to promote her false claim that Alberta's drug treatment programs work.
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/06/29/Drug-Deaths-Discredit-Alberta-Model/
3.Some people morally don't like the idea of the government being a 'drug dealer' I don't like the government, in my name, killing people through policies that Defacto promote unsafe illicit drugs and I don't like these same policies Defacto promoting criminal gangs.
It's a fairly obvious point in economics that when something is illegal, only the worst people will engage in the activity on the supply side such as these gangs and, for instance, when it was illegal to compete against the monopoly taxi cartels. Uber was run by some of the worst people alive and they were all let go when their business was legalized (or around the same time.)
Of course, government as the 'drug dealer' is only the case where drugs remain illegal, legalize and regulate drugs and they'd operate as any other market, such as with cannabis, cigarettes....
So, I agree with you, get government out of the way, and there is no need (or a much smaller need) for the government to provide 'safe supply.' As with other regulated industries, the cost of the regulations are paid for through the taxes paid by the industry.
3.Voluntary drug treatment can work and can be promoted as well, but keeping people alive, especially when it's government policy that is causing the illicit unsafe supply, should be the priority.
4.As to the cost of illicit drugs. Wow, we need to make drugs illegal to stop this...oh wait, drugs already are illegal and governments can't prevent people from making them or selling them and other people using them. The alleged savings from drug treatment in terms of cost might be possible but is another example of 'government spending pays for itself' which this federal Liberal government has become so fond of claiming.
On the effectiveness of drug prohibition, another Thomas Sowell quote unironically:
“Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”
Milton Friedman explained all the reasons prohibitions can never work, except to increase prices of illicit substances, which is usually a bad thing in itself and is usually welcomed by the illicit gangs.
Of course, Friedman might have been referring only to relatively free societies like the United States, because prohibition is claimed to be effective in authoritarian states like Singapore. However, certainly it's impossible to simply pick and choose what policies Singapore uses to supposedly achieve this. You might not need to do everything Singapore does to claim to be 'drug free' but the citizens certainly need to have the mindset that authoritarian policy is worth the cost.
This is an article written by Friedman that summarizes (some of) his arguments:
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/214093/full
Oddly, left out is probably the most important argument in all this: drug dealing is not a crime like theft because both parties in the deal want the deal. This is where the term 'victimless crime' comes from. Even those who disagree with that term need to recognize that because of this, only authoritarian measures can prevent the sale of drugs, such as widespread use of cameras, searches of bank records and police warrantless 'stop and frisk.'
It certainly seems to be the case that most people who claim to support 'the war on drugs' generally balk at doing the things necessary to actually prosecute it.
Coming back to this only because you clearly put a lot of thought into this, and I don't want to completely ignore it. That said, I've been spending a little too much time on the internet lately and I'll probably take a little hiatus, so I might not continue this discussion further.
The thing is, I don't necessarily think you're
wrong in the points you make. I can't speak for BlahTheCanuck (but we do seem to have very similar views on this...and basically everything else lol) but a lot of people who are frustrated with this approach to drug policy, myself included, are actually pretty agnostic on the "decriminalize" part of it. You're right that prohibition hasn't worked, the criminality of drug use didn't stop so many people from getting addicted anyway. Ultimately I just don't think it matters what the Criminal Code says, because at some point Canada reached a consensus that pursuing war on drugs strategies was a futile endeavour. You cite the Alberta model, which also hasn't proven a resounding success - but even this conservative approach by a very conservative government isn't one that emphasizes, or really even enforces, the criminality of drug abuse.
That's why I think decriminalization is a false priority. Look, when even the most right-wing government in Canada isn't actually enforcing the criminality of drug abuse, I think it's pretty dishonest to act like the criminal status of drug abuse is the fundamental issue of the opioid crisis. I'm not accusing you or any other private citizen of dishonesty, but I do think this is a fair accusation to make of the politicians who have packaged an entire suite of fairly radical changes to drug policy under this banner.
A big part of the problem is really just the shock factor of how we've made drug abuse a public matter. Canadians have every right to be shocked and offended that the abuse of deadly drugs is now something that ordinary non-addicted people can't get away from. In the name of harm reduction, the BC pilot project made
everywhere an acceptable venue for hard drug abuse, including particularly sensitive places like playgrounds, hospitals, and schools. It's patently ridiculous to expect that Canadians would just think this is okay and normal. It's clearly not lost on David Eby, who was looking at a 2001 Gordon Campbell style landslide a few months ago, and is now at risk of losing to frankly a very amateurish Conservative party that basically nobody has voted for in 7 decades. And this is part of a broader frustration with Canada's progressive intelligentsia, who make their arguments based
entirely on studies and theories rather than an observation of how these policies shake out on the ground. But the ground is where the rest of us peasants live.
There's also something so inherently preposterous about the idea that making it easier to access a bad thing could ever lead to less people doing that bad thing. In recent decades, pretty much every western government has significantly curbed cigarette smoking, in large part by making it basically impossible to smoke anywhere indoors.
Here in Ontario, you can't smoke inside a workplace, restaurants and bars (incl. patios), children's playgrounds, government buildings, stadiums, arenas, etc, all places where people used to smoke not too many years ago. Cigarette smoking has become a very inconvenient habit to have. Now, nicotine is a very addictive drug and smokers struggle to quit, but the greatest success of these policies was that less and less people picked up the habit in the first place, because they were less exposed to it. It became less "normal" to smoke. Vaping reversed this trend, but now governments are trying to crack down on that too, following the same model that had resounding success with cigarette smoking.
I'm not equating nicotine to fentanyl, I know these are different drugs. Granted nicotine has been proven to be as addictive as heroin, but fentanyl is a different beast, and you can't OD on cigarettes the way you can with opioids. Regardless, governments followed a very obvious, common-sense strategy to reduce the number of people who pick up smoking in the first place - make it less likely for people to be exposed to that habit, and they're less likely to pick it up.
Let's think about literally any other kind of addiction. If I'm an alcoholic or at risk of alcoholism, and the government makes it easier for me to access alcohol by installing whiskey vending machines on street corners, am I more or less likely to drink? If I enjoy gambling a little too much, and the government announces thousands of new casinos, am I more or less likely to gamble? I could go on, but it should be pretty damn obvious that making it easier to access a thing makes it more likely for more people to do said thing. And if said thing is addictive, then making it easier to access invariably leads to more addicts.
Maybe there's a public health benefit to supplying government-funded, tested opioids to opioid abusers, namely in reducing overdoses. Sure. But does the same policy not also make it harder for those addicts to quit, and perhaps more importantly, does that not make it easier for people at risk of addiction to fall into that habit? I don't know how you could argue that it doesn't. Making addicts less likely to overdose and die is a good thing, but creating more addicts and making it harder for them to quit is not.
And beyond opioids - on opioids and other IV drugs, I've argued that supplying clean needles is actually a good thing because it reduces the likelihood of STD transmission. But what about drugs that are smoked, like crack? As far as I know, you can't get AIDS from sharing a crack pipe. So what's the argument for the government supplying those?
The onus is on the governments of the day to figure out something that works for the public. The public, broadly speaking, rightly sees drug abuse as a disgusting and destructive force, and doesn't think increased public exposure to such things is in our best interest. They also don't want their taxes to go to buying drugs and creating more addicts (ironically, this is something that leftists correctly criticize about Reagan-era CIA funneling cocaine into America in order to support the Contras in Nicaragua...funny how flooding the streets with drugs is a good thing when the left does it, but a bad thing when it's the right). I think those are the main concerns, at least those are the concerns I have. The way we construct drug policy needs to take into account the interests of the broader public which doesn't use these drugs, and the tendency of progressives to scorn the public for supposedly being regressive and not enlightened enough to understand their pet projects is probably the single biggest reason for right-wing populism being on the rise all around the world.
Credit where it's due, Trudeau did take this into account when rejecting Toronto's request for decriminalization. But frankly I think Poilievre deserves more credit for actually bringing this up in parliament and forcing Trudeau to defend his decriminalization policies, something he couldn't do and therefore is backing down from.
