Geoff Russ: Stigma around drug use is colonial, and a good thing

Most people do not want to actually live in a decolonised world.

Is it colonial to stigmatise the use of illegal drugs?

If so, colonialism is not the unambiguously evil enterprise that many officials make it out to be. The position of British Columbia’s public service is that stigma is a colonial legacy, and therefore bad. On the contrary, stigma is a time-tested and simple way to keep a society from falling apart.

Canada’s colonial history contains valuable norms, institutions, and attitudes that are worth defending.

Last year, BC’s Human Rights Commissioner, Kasari Govender, declared that it was a human rights violation to treat drug abuse as a “moral failing.” In her view, punitive measures to combat, manage, or even marginally disrupt drug use are failed, unenlightened, and “colonial”.

Communities may judge specific and destructive behaviours, and enforce deterrence and prohibitions via legal and social pressure, rules, and consequences. Both stigma and the laws governing intoxicated conduct exist for a reason. We need moral lines to justify laws. We should remember that uneven enforcement comes at the expense of the innocent.

Illegal drugs have killed more than 16,000 people in B.C. since the province declared a public health emergency in 2016. Overdoses are now the leading cause of death for British Columbians aged 10 to 59.

Drug use and addiction are not lifestyle choices that uptight neighbours should ignore. In addition to the death toll, they contribute to disorder, facilitate exploitation, and break families before saddling them with lifelong grief. Communities are entitled to respond with their own social regulations when the consequences of drug use spill into their lives.

Drugs affect your life, even if you do not use them. Your cousin may be unable to sleep because her partner is strung out and spiralling. Your parents might start reading obituaries as if they were weather reports. Coworkers have to make sacrifices to cover shifts because somebody else is not showing up again or cannot be trusted at the cash register.

Children have to learn the boundaries between safe public spaces and urban chaos. They should not have to grow up seeing parks and streets turned into playgrounds for adult self-destruction.

Here is the great hypocrisy of the anti-stigma movement. A good, healthy family does stigmatise drug use. Parents who find little bags of weed in their teenager’s jean pockets usually don’t convene “non-judgemental” stakeholder meetings to talk about it.

Instead, they confront their child and confiscate their weed, their rolling papers, and perhaps more. Discipline is good, including for budding stoners.

Granted, most people who smoke marijuana do not go on to become users of fentanyl and crack cocaine, but most fentanyl and crack cocaine users started as stoners. Marijuana is a gateway drug for many.

Adult drug users are not toddlers, and should not be treated as such. Compassion is not synonymous with infantilisation.

It is fashionable to slap the “colonial” label on traditional methods of coercion and judgement, but coercion and selective judgement are part of the foundation of powerful cultures and civilisations. Killers, rapists, thieves, those who neglect children, drunk drivers, and scammers are all stigmatised because they harm others, and are motivated entirely, or partially, by selfish reasons.

Obviously, a drug user is not a murderer, and should not be punished as such. Addicts deserve our compassion and help, and should be offered a comfortable path to recovery. This does not mean we should pretend that using illegal drugs is a harmless choice.

We have laws to punish crimes because we love the innocent and want them to live in a safer world. So-called “harm reduction” policies often lack moral clarity and have devolved into harm redistribution, with innocent bystanders suffering as a result. Shaming people is not a worse evil than tolerating death, predation, and disorder.

This is the “decolonised” world once the theatrics are stripped away. It means stripping a community of its right to say no to immoral, selfish, and harmful behaviours, and gaslighting people into thinking they are not exactly that.

Our public spaces belong to the public, not the loudest and most destructive. It is not right that the Cenotaph in the middle of Vancouver’s Victory Square is often surrounded by people using drugs and leaving their pipes and needles lying about.

Colonialism is why Canada and BC exist, with all their laws, expectations, as well as the vast majority of the population. It is good that these things exist.

It is good that we live, or try to live, by the ideals of peaceable, ordered liberty, and stability. Nobody wants to live in a world where roving bands can run around beheading, enslaving, and cannibalising people they dislike without fear of consequence.

Property rights, impartial courts, well-functioning hospitals, enforceable contracts, and efficient public services are all colonial imports. Granted, our property rights are now uncertain in B.C., our medical system is in an expensive shambles, and our public service is now a glorified welfare program. However, the degeneration of all these pillars is what we associate with decline, as we do rising drug addiction and death.

If the term “colonial” means “old norms that keep order”, then we should be unapologetic about protecting them.

Sooner or later, most people will have to make peace with the fact that Canada is a product of colonialism, and so are their own lives, including the parts of it they enjoy on a daily basis. Even decolonial ideology itself is a product of colonial universities and intellectuals.

Ironically, the loudest advocates for “decolonisation” benefit the most from it. They include well-paid state administrators, credentialled gatekeepers, and elected politicians inside the Westminster parliamentary system. All of their pensions and prestige are downstream from the inheritance they pretend is an embarrassment. It is very rich that they get so wealthy from condemning the foundations of their careers and good fortune.

It does not have to be this way, either. Singapore has been romanticised by Western conservatives to the point of parody, but not without good reason. A former British colony, Singapore is a bastion of ironclad public order.

Being caught with less than four pounds of marijuana can result in a death sentence. Using the drugs themselves usually results in a caning for the offender.

BC and Canada do not need such harsh policies, but it is fair to say the Singaporean method contains an underlying truth: stigma is not a human rights violation. Nor is treating drugs as socially corrosive, and attaching consequences to their use. Mercy is compatible with treating certain behaviours as unacceptable.

Singapore’s own medical professionals have noted that people fear using drugs due to the severe legal consequences, and reports have found that lifetime illegal drug consumption stands at just 2.3 per cent. People in Singapore are fortunately still permitted to drink alcohol.

Alcohol is usually used as a “gotcha” question by anti-stigma activists. The data shows that fentanyl and other illegal drugs are far more likely to kill you on a per capita basis than a glass of beer.

In fact, Western societies reached their pinnacles when people were raging alcoholics by modern standards. It is true that excessive alcohol can make somebody into a public nuisance or public threat. Laws against public drunkenness have existed in North America since at-least the 17th century, when they were passed in colonial Virginia.

Even before those laws, alcoholism and rude drunkenness were stigmatised by English society. Wives and children often suffered terribly at the hands of inebriated husbands and fathers back then, and many still do today. Nonetheless, most Canadians today drink to varying degrees. Hardly any are abusers, and most lead normal lives.

Can the same be said of the comparatively tiny portion of Canadians who use fentanyl? No, obviously not.

The whole argument that draws a line between alcohol and synthetic drugs was always ridiculous. It does not need to be entertained beyond these few paragraphs, for it is a silly distraction.

Alcohol is regulated, socially bounded, and culturally legible. Fentanyl is not.

Here in Canada, especially in B.C., the official line is that drug use is a combination of hurt feelings, poverty, and mental illness. However, even the left-wing NDP government has begun to sheepishly admit that its attempts to decriminalise drug use and liberalise the laws surrounding it have backfired.

Premier David Eby himself admitted that the regime had become a “permission structure” that contributed to disorder. His concession is that norms matter, and relaxing them changes people’s behaviour.

B.C. does not need to declare a war on addiction, but it should not be ashamed to demand standards of good conduct from all of its citizens regarding drugs. We already do this for a litany of crimes, and we should not accept special pleading from the safe supply lobby. Treatment should be expanded, but enforcement should be expanded alongside it. Public spaces are certainly a non-negotiable public good, and must be protected.

Is stigma against drug use a colonial import? Certainly.

Is it bad? Certainly not.

It is a prime example of why the decolonial discourse is not merely wrong, but inverted. We cannot treat the social tools that prevent collapse as moral crimes, and then act surprised when the collapse actually happens.

Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.