Pierre Poilievre has said that if the Conservatives form the next federal government, it not would provide “a single taxpayer dollar” to supervised consumption sites (SCS) for addicts, calling them “drug dens.”
Poilievre’s comments are a reflection of what you get when you address social problems with dogma rather than evidence.
People don’t intend to get addicted but they do. Education and social services would help prevent that, but Conservatives don’t like spending money on street-level programs.
Once addicted, people start committing crimes, partially because they’re high, but mostly because they need money to buy and a place to consume. The harder law enforcement makes this, the more underground it goes, making treatment harder, and the more it costs, making crime more likely.
Giving people who become addicted safe options lowers crime and makes treatment more feasible.
The places – and there are only 38 of them – where there safe injection sites are already sketchy high-crime areas. The anecdotes in the comments assume crime was caused by the safe injection sites, but it’s very likely crime would have occurred anyways.
If Poilievre were to listen to the evidence, he’d know that The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police say “there is a large body of evidence illustrating the efficacy of SCS in achieving a number of health and social objectives, especially when clients are offered access to integrated health and social services, including primary care, treatment and housing” including “decreased fatal overdoses” and “decreased injections in public.”
If he were to listen to evidence, he’d find “All studies converged to find that SISs were efficacious in attracting the most marginalized PWID, promoting safer injection conditions, enhancing access to primary health care, and reducing the overdose frequency. SISs were not found to increase drug injecting, drug trafficking or crime in the surrounding environments. SISs were found to be associated with reduced levels of public drug injections and dropped syringes.”
There’s no effective dogma-based solution in sight.
It’s not possible to just wave a magic wand and make drug addiction go away. A clear-eyed evidence-based approach is the only way. That doesn’t always mean more drugs and more sites, as we’ve seen in B.C. It does mean working with health care professionals and police.