For the week of Jan. 28, 2024:
One year down, two to go, for British Columbia’s hard drug decriminalization experiment.
A Simon Fraser University clinical psychologist is not surprised that the death toll from toxic drug overdoses in B.C. hit a record 2,511 in 2023.
Dr. Julian Somers of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction predicted a year go that the public health emergency would worsen.
“We’ve been spending more incrementally each year,” Somers said. “The things we’re spending on — pharmaceuticals and hospital beds, buildings where people are congregated together with consumption sites — those have been shown empirically not to result in meaningful change. So it’s more than a theoretical prediction. The evidence indicates that that’s not the way to get out of this crisis.”
Somers is Bob Mackin’s guest on this edition of thePodcast.
Plus Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines.
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