Las descriminalización de las personas que consumen drogas: Una cartilla para gobiernos municipales y provinciales en Canadá

La Red Legal sobre VIH exhorta a las autoridades locales a hacer uso de la flexibilidad que le permiten sus facultades para enmendar el daño producido por la criminalización contra personas que consumen drogas, hasta que la legislación cambie a nivel federal. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

By HIV Legal Network

As the COVID-19 pandemic and the overdose crisis sweep across Canada, all policymakers have an obligation to adopt evidence-based measures that uphold the health and safety of people who use drugs.8 This includes municipal and provincial governments, who can take immediate steps to minimize the harms of current drug laws by decriminalizing drug possession for personal use (i.e. “simple drug possession”) in their own jurisdictions.

This report outlines how they can do this through a request to the federal Minister of Health, who has a broad power to issue exemptions from the federal law criminalizing simple drug possession. As outlined below, this approach is not novel, and employs an existing provision in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) that already allows supervised consumption services to operate without risk of criminal prosecution.