At the beginning of 2023 and for a three-year trial period, it will be authorized to hold for its personal use of up to 2.5 grams of drugs, in British Columbia, a province very affected by the opiate crisis which killed thousands of Canadians.
Le Monde with AFP
The demand came from the province of British Columbia, itself. Canada announced, Tuesday, May 31, the decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of so -called “hard” drugs in this province of the west of the country.
British Columbia, the largest city of which is Vancouver, is thus the first Canadian province to know this exception which will concern heroin, cocaine, opiate and other hard drugs. The objective is to deal with dependencies rather than winning users for possession.
“We do this to save lives but also so that people who take drugs regain their dignity and their right to choose,” said Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Mental Health and Outbuildings, adding that this project could be applied in other provinces. According to the Minister, “for too many years, the ideological opposition” aimed at considering the possession of drugs as a health problem “cost lives”.
“This is not legalization”
From January 31, 2023 and for a period of three years, adults will be able to have on them up to 2.5 grams of drugs for their personal use. They will receive information on access to medical aid for addictions. Until now, the most serious cases of possession of hard drugs provided for fines and prison terms.
“I want to be very clear, it is not legalization. We did not make this decision lightly,” added Carolyn Bennett at a press point.
In 2021, the province identified more than 2,200 deaths linked to opiates, or six people per day. In total, from January 2016 to September 2021, Canada identified nearly 27,000 deaths and more than 29,000 hospitalizations for overdoses linked to opiates, according to government figures. These figures have shown a “disturbing increase in overdoses and deaths related to opioids since the start of the pandemic of Covid-19”, according to this same source.
in the United States, Oregon did the same
At certain times as during the first wave of the pandemic in May 2020, the number of deaths linked to overdoses in British Columbia was greater than the number of deaths of the coronavirus, which plunged the province in a double health crisis.
“Today is a memorable day,” reacted Kennedy Stewart, mayor of Vancouver, the city at the epicenter of the crisis. The latter described the agreement between the province and the Canadian government as “a historical, courageous and revolutionary stage” in this public health struggle.
His province is the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs for personal use after Oregon, a very progressive American state in the North West, in November 2020. Other Canadian metropolises like Montreal and Toronto also said that they planned to request a legal exemption for the possession of small quantities of hard drugs.