On Sunday morning, I had some time to kill in Calgary before a flight home to Toronto, so I grabbed a coffee and started looking for a park bench to sit and read my book. I soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. Every bench was occupied by one or more drug addicts. Over the course of an hour, I saw a man injecting drugs in between his toes, a guy smoking meth while glaring at me aggressively, and hordes of people doubled over from fentanyl. Of the couple hundred people I passed, about 75 were obviously on drugs. I decided to try to find brunch, but few businesses were open. Not surprising. Who’d want to do brunch in this post-apocalyptic environment?
It’s not just Calgary that looks like this. Toronto, Edmonton, and Ottawa are equally depressing. But not every big city has these problems. I recently spent two weeks in Japan, including visits to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, where I noticed zero litter — not a cigarette butt, not a coffee cup — and just one person sitting on the curb apparently intoxicated. A police officer had him detained at that very moment. I went on dozens of subway rides without feeling unsafe once.
Japan convinced me that Canadians don’t need to accept so much urban disorder. Addicts deserve compassion and treatment, but there are no excuses for letting them destroy our downtowns, to say nothing of themselves.
So what’s Japan doing differently? Enforcement of strict laws against drug possession seems to be the solution. Japan has convinced me, despite my strong civil libertarian leanings, that it’s time to end the failed decriminalization experiment and treat possession of hard drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine as crimes again.
The prevailing viewpoint among Canadian experts is that we should treat drug addiction only as a health issue, not as a crime. As a result, drugs were officially decriminalized in British Columbia and unofficially decriminalized in many other places with a new focus on “harm reduction.” They have now been officially recriminalized in B.C. but even if technically illegal there is no sign yet of a zero-tolerance approach.
Harm reduction in some ways makes sense, but we now know that harm reduction in the form of decriminalization of hard drugs causes too many other harms to be worth it. It hasn’t stopped drug deaths, and it’s made our downtowns depressing, dirty, and dangerous. Drug addicts increasingly clog up public hospitals. Drug addicts constantly steal to maintain their habits.
Japanese officials have resisted pressure to stop treating drug use as a crime. They still arrest anyone caught possessing drugs. First-time offenders are consistently punished with a sentence of 18 months in prison, suspended for three years, which means they can avoid jail only if they behave. Repeat offenders tend to get two years. Those guilty of production or importation of hard drugs up to life in prison. Japan’s Supreme Court recently upheld a 25-year sentence for a man who imported 2 kg of meth.
Contrast that to Canada where arrests for possession are relatively rare and sentences are lenient. Only about 5,000 arrests were made in 2021 for opiates including fentanyl and heroin. Prison sentences for possession are unusual, and mandatory minimum sentences for production and trafficking range from just one to three years. Even possession by someone with a long rap sheet of 15 grams of fentanyl, a highly-toxic substance that can kill in miniscule amounts, wasn’t enough to warrant jail time according to one Ontario judge because, “addiction is a public health issue first and foremost,” and there was little need to denounce the behaviour or try to deter others.
The result of this approach is not just downtowns that look like scenes from zombie films – it’s also the deaths of addicts. In 2019, Japan’s annual rate of opioid deaths was 2.5 per million people. In Canada, the figure was roughly 160 opioid deaths per million in 2021.
As a civil libertarian, I think people should decide what they do with their bodies and the state needs a strong justification to interfere. Drugs like alcohol, marijuana, or psilocybin mushrooms don’t tend to lead to significant harms to anyone other than the user, and should therefore be fully legal. But when a person’s actions cause serious harm to other people, as fentanyl and methamphetamine use inevitably does, those actions ought to be criminalized. I take comfort in the fact that Japan manages to uphold a zero-tolerance policy for drugs while maintaining a high score on civil liberties.
Treating hard drug possession as a crime would require amendments to the Criminal Code and to provincial enforcement policies, but it would not necessarily cost taxpayers more. Many of those who would be imprisoned would no longer be in the streets causing other crimes. If some addicts are successfully diverted to treatment, that could cost the health care system less long-term. If fewer dealers are on the street, and the consequences of using are scarier, this should eventually lead to fewer addicts sucking up public funds. At the very least, we would get our downtowns back.
National Post