The province of British Columbia began a 3-year “experiment” Tuesday legalizing the world’s hardest drugs, with the absurd goal of decreasing overdoses.
The province of British Columbia, in western Canada, becomes the first region in the West to fully legalize the possession of hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamines, and non-medicinal morphine.
As of Tuesday, the largest province in the North American country allowed residents over 18 to possess up to 2.5 grams of the world’s hardest drugs without legal consequences.
This includes possession, purchase, sale, and any other action related to these drugs.
The local government had to seek permission from the national government to implement this measure.
After several months of review, the far-left Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave the go-ahead for the province to do so, and federal agents will not arrest people possessing these hard drugs, unlike in the rest of the country.
Under the slogan “Addiction is not a Crime,” British Columbia decriminalized drug possession and trafficking for 3 years.
“We are the first province to take this step and treat addiction as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue,” officials assured.
The province is one of the regions with the most addicts in the country.
Since 2016, British Columbia has recorded more than 10,000 deaths from hard drug use, prompting the government to declare a public health emergency.
Since then, the ministry specialized in Mental Health and Addictions (different from Health) was created to implement awareness measures and even open government centers where addicts can “get high in a risk-free environment”.
It has directly decided the total legalization of all drugs, even the hardest ones.
There is no evidence that legalization reduces overdose deaths; on the contrary, drug levels have risen substantially in countries where it has been decriminalized, such as the Netherlands, although decriminalization occurred there for soft drugs.
There is no record of any other Western country that has legalized these types of stimulants.
There is evidence that legalization decreases the power of drug cartels and gang violence, but these are not problems that British Columbia currently has.
Several voices have publicly expressed opposition to drug decriminalization, including Chuck Doucette, president of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, who said that “making it easier for them to use drugs is like palliative care.”
“You just sentence them to a slow death from drugs, whereas if you get them off drugs, you give them their life back, they can enjoy life,” Doucette reproached in an interview for the New York Times, adding that the plan does not give drug addicts aids to address the root causes “that led them to use drugs in the first place.”
Others have pointed out that a similar plan in Oregon enacted two years ago has not yielded good results and that most overdose deaths still occur.
In the US case, there were not as many hard drugs as in the decriminalization that began in Canada.
With information from Derecha diario