Federal candidates are silent on reforming national drug policy

published on September 3, 2015 by Mimi Williams, in VUE WEEKLY

Richard Nixon coined the phrase, Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy gave it a celebrity boost and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has embraced it with open arms. Considering skyrocketing deaths due to drug overdoses, prisons bursting at the seams and ever-increasing gun violence on our country’s streets, it seems reasonable to assert that the War on Drugs has been a resounding failure. But that doesn’t mean any of the federal political parties has plans to alter course any time soon. In fact, International Drug Overdose Awareness Day came and went this past Monday without a peep from any of them.

In the 54 years since the United Nations adopted the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (an international effort to prohibit the growth, production and sale of narcotics), all Western nations have struggled with rising rates of drug abuse. Given the choice of two paths to deal with the issue—medical rehabilitation with a focus on harm reduction, or criminalization—Canada, like many other countries, pursued the latter.

Despite a decades-long war on drugs, this summer has seen a spike in drug overdose deaths across the country, with Alberta leading the way. Law enforcement and health officials have raised the alarm about fentanyl, a synthetic opiate narcotic 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine and 20 times more powerful than oxycodone (better known by its trade name, OxyContin). Fentanyl is normally used as an anaesthetic under medical supervision or prescribed as a slow-release patch to treat chronic pain; combined with heroin, cocaine and other street drugs, it is proving to be a lethal combination of epidemic proportions. In our province alone, 145 people died of fentanyl overdoses in the first seven months of 2015, a significant increase from the six deaths reported in 2011.

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Federal candidates are silent on reforming national drug policy

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