Canadian drug policy takes a step backward

What do people want their country’s drug policies to accomplish?

To answer this question, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition reached out to people around the country including service providers, people who use drugs, and their family members.

The responses were startling. Story after story confirmed that many people desired policy that would minimize the harms of drug use—and that Canada’s own drug strategies were thwarting that goal.

With the support of the Open Society Foundations, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition collected these views to create Getting to Tomorrow: A Report on Canadian Drug Policy, the first comprehensive report by a civil society organization on the failures of Canada’s approach to drug policy. Its recommendations include:

• Replace the current national anti-drug strategy with one focused on health and human rights.
• Decriminalize all drugs for personal use.
• Create a regulatory system for adult cannabis use.
• Increase efforts to eliminate stigma and discrimination against people who use drugs.
• Scale up comprehensive health and social services, including housing and treatment services that engage people with drug problems.
• Enhance educational programs about drug use and promote life-saving interventions including safer consumption services, opioid substitution therapies, heroin assisted treatment and critical harm reduction services.
• Collect and monitor data on drug use and its effects in Canada.

The failures of the existing system are all the more disappointing because Canada used to be a leader in progressive drug policy. In the recent past, harm reduction was a key pillar of the national drug strategy. The former federal government supported innovative approaches like supervised injection sites, heroin assisted treatment, and the expansion of needle exchange programs as well as a focus on prevention through social development rather than “Just Say No”–style programs that have been shown not to work.

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