Rampant drug deaths in British Columbia have more than once pushed public health officials into uncharted territory. It became the first province to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs for personal use in 2022, about two decades after Vancouver opened the first supervised injection site in North America. But as overdoses rise in some British Columbia cities, there’s disagreement in one city over how to address it.
In Richmond, one of British Columbia’s largest cities with 230,000 people, city council chambers turned raucous this week as a full public gallery of residents opposed a plan to have staff study whether a safe site for drug use would be practicable in the community. The plan was adopted Tuesday, but it’s off to a rocky start, with few officials and agencies coming out to defend it.
More than 100 residents signed up to speak at the meeting, some in tears, others screaming. The city’s mayor of 22 years, Malcolm Brodie, competed with residents for control of the room, and tensions escalated to shouting matches in the hallway, where Mounties intervened.
[Read: Canada Decriminalizes Opioids and Other Drugs in British Columbia]
Residents have expressed fears that the facility could be harmful to the community and lead to drug-related crime and disorder.
“We don’t feel safe and I don’t want Richmond to turn into another Hastings or Chinatown,” one resident, Swimmy She, told Council, referring to two Vancouver neighborhoods hit hard by the opioid crisis, where open consumption of drugs is pervasive.
The divisions over the plan are “very troubling to me,” said Kash Heed, one of the councilors who brought the motion. He added that politics and discord in the community “have created a really bad situation now, with respect to something that we want to do for our most vulnerable population who are dying in tents, or staying at home and dying alone, because of the stigma attached to their acute drug addiction.”
Last year, 26 people died from drug use in Richmond. There were 2,511 deaths in the province and paramedics responded to more than 42,000 emergency requests for medications, up 25 per cent from the previous year. Most of the deaths occurred in Vancouver.
[Read: Fentanyl From the Government? A Vancouver Experiment Aims to Stop Overdoses.]
The Council’s motion states that the safe consumption site could benefit the city by reducing drug crime and improving addiction treatment.
But false information, including claims that the site supplies drugs, have spread in social media groups, Mr. Heed, a former provincial safety minister and police officer, told me.
Cities do not have the authority to create safe consumption sites; which is up to the province. The plan approved Tuesday by council is to study the creation of a safe consumption site in the hospital area and to begin seeking approval from provincial authorities.
Earlier in the week, provincial Health Minister Adrian Dix gave his support to the plan, highlighting the “remarkable” level of safety of these facilities and the evidence that they save lives. But outside of Council, there is little support for a new safe consumption site in Richmond.
Vancouver Coastal Health, a regional health authority serving Richmond, said in statements to local news outlets that a safe, stand-alone injection site would not be the “most appropriate service” because it works best in places with high concentrations of drug users.
Premier David Eby, of the New Democratic Party, and some members of the Legislature representing Richmond offered no support for the council’s plan when asked about it at a news conference. He instead cited the position of Vancouver Coastal Health.
The provincial government has passed legislation to ban public drug use in a broad list of spaces, such as parks, beaches, playgrounds and areas near workplaces. According to the legislation, which should have come into force in January. 1, police officers would direct users to other areas. But a provincial Supreme Court judge granted a temporary injunction against the ban until March, ruling that it threatened to cause “irreparable harm” to drug users by pushing them into less safe areas to take drugs. The province has appealed the decision.
Safe drinking sites have recently faced public complaints and lawsuits filed by community members. Last summer, Vancouver Closed one of these sites after two years of activity. This week, members of a Toronto neighborhood asked the courts to approve a class action against a safe consumption site where a mother was killed by a stray bullet seven months ago; she was a community health worker at the facility among those arrested.
More potent drugs are worsening the overdose crisis for frontline workers. Last week the mayor of Belleville, in eastern Ontario, declared a state of emergency after 23 overdose deaths in two days, also caused by the presence of xylazine, an animal tranquilizer, in the supply of medicines. Speaking at a press conference, he called on the provincial government to allocate funds to support detox facilities.
“The scale of these problems and the pressure placed on our emergency services have reached breaking point,” he said.
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Last year, 70% of illegal crossings from Canada occurred at the border with New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, known as the Swanton sector. Migrants are increasingly looking further north for ways to enter the United States.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his counterparts in Australia and New Zealand issued a statement Thursday calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza as Israel plans a ground offensive in the south.
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Karen Kicak, the Toronto-based writer and television producer behind the sitcom “Workin’ Moms,” writes about why her first cigarette was her last.
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“My husband loves new bars of soap, so when I need to replace mine, I take his and give him the new one,” writes Shannon Moise, a Times reader in British Columbia. It is one of the 100 small acts of love collected by the Pozzi section.
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A Canadian ship that sank in Lake Superior in 1940 has been found, but researchers are still perplexed by its captain’s strange behavior. And on Prince Edward Island, researchers are investigating the origin of human remains found on a rocky shore that was unsafe for ships in the 1800s.
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Scientists monitored the diets of 20 polar bears in Manitoba by fitting them with collars with integrated cameras to understand how climate change may affect the bears’ survival.
Vjosa Isai is a journalist and researcher for the New York Times in Toronto.
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