Geoff Russ: If involuntary treatment for addicts is a radical solution, so be it
Harm reduction policies are in retreat across Canada, and there are no moderate solutions to the addictions crisis.
Every day, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is pushed further to the brink, and the cause of that decline is not a mystery.
Horrible choices made by generation after generation of political leaders have resulted in mass addiction, homelessness, and urban decay.
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a containment zone, almost akin to District 9, where drug use, human chaos, and death are corralled. The City of Vancouver, British Columbia’s provincial government, and Ottawa have all played a role in managing this horrifying decline of life.
A quick walk around East Hastings and Carrall reveals the impact in plain view.
You can watch a body slumped against a venerable old building and remain unsure whether that person is alive or dead. The bricks they lie against have probably been blackened by a fire of some kind, amidst inescapable foul smells emanating from every alley.
The B.C. provincial government reported that the toll from “unregulated drug deaths” was 1,749 in 2024, down eight per cent from the previous year. This is not a cause for celebration when there were just 330 such fatalities in 1993.
Part of what caused the problems of the DTES and other similarly afflicted neighbourhoods of Canadian cities was the policy of harm reduction, which involved the government supplying narcotics that were not cut with more deadly substances.
It was a dead-end policy, literally and figuratively. Sean Speer of The Hub correctly noted recently that many conservatives and journalists successfully pushed progressives to retreat on that front.
Cutting out harm reduction will only freeze the current crisis. Now is the time to go even further and normalize involuntary treatment as the default.
With sufficient treatment centres, the scenes of the DTES can end within 48 hours as authorities step in to stop open-air drug use and move people into care. It has to be involuntary, for many of these unfortunate people are incapable of making coherent decisions or looking after themselves, let alone each other.
Is it an infringement on personal liberty? Perhaps.
However, liberty is a privilege of those able to properly exercise it, and those suffering from severe addiction are not of sound mind, nor do they have the power of true choice.
Leaving them to wander alleyways is to treat them like free-range livestock. It is an abdication of responsibility to help our fellow Canadians.
Allegedly “compassionate” approaches have achieved little else aside from prolonging the unhappy lives of young men and women as their addiction to fentanyl and other drugs slowly melts their minds and bodies, as is the norm in B.C.
There is no justification for it beyond progressive platitudes, which have been exposed by the passage of time and a mounting death toll as nothing more than sweetly worded inhumanity.
Excluding policing and senior government spending, Vancouver’s current operations intended to help homeless drug users with mental illness cost a tall $50 million annually.
The cash is burned on “management” at the street level, daily emergency responses, and cleanups. Single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels are filthy, cluttered, and dangerously prone to catching fire. Vancouver Fire Rescue Services responds to an average of one SRO fire per day in the DTES.
Nobody can pretend that these hundreds of millions of dollars have been well spent. All they do is delay the inevitable until a siren wails and another dead Canadian is delivered to the coroner.
It will require stern political will, but it is worth it to clean up the DTES and other drug-filled neighbourhoods across Canada.
Wiping clean the open-air drug use and rapidly shifting people into involuntary care is true, tough compassion, both for those suffering from addiction and for the wider public.
Critics have pointed out that such dramatic actions will result in legal challenges alleging a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Let them happen, for the Charter contains the Notwithstanding Clause, s. 33, which enables the provincial government to override such a challenge.
Giving a clean bed, warm accommodations, and three meals a day to somebody in an enforced drug-free environment is worth the controversy of a Charter challenge, rather than letting them fade away.
Alberta has already shown that prioritizing treatment works, and its approach is gentle. Calling it the “recovery-oriented” system, Alberta has provided on-demand access to medication, therapeutic, supervised living units, and a pathway to long-term recovery for those who want it.
In February, opioid-related deaths had collapsed by nearly 40 percent since 2023. That is progress, no matter how much harm reduction activists may grumble about it, and it is a resounding success for Danielle Smith’s government.
It is true that you cannot “arrest your way” out of addiction, but nobody can recover their way out of Vancouver’s government-sanctioned anarchy.
Far more than an attempt to restore health and safety, a hard-line approach to ending mass addiction is a move to rescue the city’s dignity.
Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona are Vancouver’s historic old city. They do not deserve to be left to rot, with the ancient brick buildings decaying until they collapse and are replaced by soulless glass and steel.
Compare that to Old Montreal, one of the most desired parts of that city, where tourists flock to enjoy fine dining. The palatable parts of Old Vancouver are confined largely to Water Street, a block away from the epicentre of the DTES.
A great triumph would be restoring the DTES with repaved streets, lit windows that aren’t covered by plywood, and sidewalks where sober, healthy people mingle, instead of it resembling an open-air morgue.
Right now, the status quo is the embodiment of cruelty.
It is cruel to see people overdose in a bus shelter. It is spiritually defeating to send firefighters into the same SRO week after week. It is infuriating to see public servants waste their time lecturing about whether or not it is dehumanizing to call somebody “homeless,” or a “person experiencing homelessness.”
Involuntary treatment is not a moderate course of action. If it is a radical solution, so be it.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment.
