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No, drug prohibition is not ‘white supremacy’

Published

3 months ago

14 minute read

From Break The Needle

British Columbia’s top doctor released a report arguing that the legalization of all drugs combats “racism” and “colonialism.” That’s historically illiterate.

The notion that drug prohibition is inherently racist has become exceedingly popular within the harm reduction world and, by extension, inside many public health institutions and graduate programs. Yet anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history can see that this is absurd. Societies from all across the world have long understood the dangers of addictive substances and supported efforts to criminalize them—so why is this being ignored?

Though the “prohibition is racist” movement usually flies under the public’s radar, it was thrust into the limelight earlier this month when B.C.’s top doctor, Bonnie Henry, released a report calling for the legalization of all drugs. Not only did Henry recommend that dangerous substances—including meth, cocaine and fentanyl—be sold in stores much like alcohol and cannabis, her team asserted that prohibitionist policies are “based on a history of racism, white supremacy, paternalism, colonialism, classism and human rights violations.”

One would hope such sweeping declarations would have been backed with fulsome arguments and historical references, but that didn’t happen here.

Instead, the report simply emphasized how Canada’s original drug laws, dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were motivated by racist animus against Chinese immigrants. As opium was popular among these immigrants, the drug was believed to pose a special moral threat to white society and was among the first substances to be harshly policed. This, in turn, gave the state a new legal tool to harass Chinese Canadians and, in some cases, deport them.

After briefly explaining this point, Henry’s report concluded that, “Over time, the moral panic associated with drug use expanded to target many more groups of people, including Indigenous people, Black people, women, people of colour, and people of lower socioeconomic status.” This extrapolation was presented as a self-evident fact, without any evidence or citations to explain or substantiate it.

Henry’s recommendations were immediately rejected by the provincial government and savagely ridiculed in the media. Yet the views articulated in her report, shocking as they may have been to many, were not actually exceptional. They only rehashed the dominant beliefs of the harm reduction world—beliefs have also, over the past decade or so, permeated deeply into Canada’s public health bureaucracies.

Henry’s report may be dead in the water, but the underlying ideas which animated it are still very much alive and will, in all likelihood, continue to influence Canadian policymakers within the cloistered hallways of the civil service. This is a shame, because it is difficult to overstate how strange these kinds of beliefs are.

To argue that drug prohibition is broadly based on a history of racism, mostly because it was misused for racist purposes a century ago, is kindergarten-level reasoning. There are ample examples of non-European societies, past and present, embracing criminalization. This is glaringly obvious and, in many cases, common knowledge.

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Non-Western drug prohibition throughout the ages

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of non-European drug prohibition is Sharia law, which has banned the consumption of mind-altering substances since the 7th century. One wonders how harm reduction activists can claim, with a straight face, that prohibition is rooted in “colonialism” and “white supremacy” when Islam’s religious and legal texts supported it centuries before global European empires emerged.

Since harm reduction scholars are so concerned about Chinese experiences, it would be instructive to look toward China itself, where prohibition is also popular.

In the late 18th century, the British began exporting large quantities of opium to the Qing Empire (China), which quickly fomented a wave of addiction and social disorder. Soon after, Qing officials embarked on a multi-decade campaign to criminalize the drug. “Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. Its use is prohibited by law,” wrote the Daoguang Emperor in an edict issued in 1810.

By the mid-19th century, the Qing worried that, without drastic action, China would be left bereft of money and productive men—so they banned all sales of opium and destroyed any supply of it they could find, including European wares. This angered the British, who profited handsomely off the opium trade, and led them to victoriously wage war against the Qing—not once, but twice—to forcibly stop prohibition.

Narcotics thus continued to flow through the veins of China’s body politic, wreaking havoc for generations. Since then, Chinese nationalists have bitterly remembered the Opium Wars as a colonial crime which marked the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation.”
The 98th Regiment of Foot at the attack on Chin-Kiang-Foo (Zhenjiang), 21 July 1842, resulting in the defeat of the Manchu government. Watercolour by military illustrator Richard Simkin (1840–1926).

This raises an important question: how exactly can anyone square this history with the ideological framework of the harm reduction movement? Were the Qing embodying some mystical form of white supremacy? Perhaps we should be grateful that the British sent their anti-racist warships to decolonize China’s drug laws.

Even today, the legacy of the Opium Wars continues to inform Chinese attitudes towards drugs—both within China itself (where strict prohibitionism is the norm) and in the diaspora.

In San Francisco, America’s petri dish for drug liberalization, it is Chinese-Americans who are leading a public backlash against progressive policies and calling for greater prohibition. Similarly, Chinese-Canadians were instrumental to Vancouver’s political pivot during the 2022 municipal elections, wherein the centrist ABC party swept the city council and the mayor’s office. Just this spring, Chinese-Canadian protestors in Richmond, the most ethnically Chinese city in North America , thwarted the launch of a new supervised consumption site, only to have a white progressive woman shout “Go back to Hong Kong” at them. No doubt another anti-racist activist.

When I interviewed almost a dozen Chinese-Canadian small business owners and workers in Vancouver’s historical Chinatown last summer, their support for prohibition was clear—and the legacy of the Opium Wars was invoked several times. Many other ethnic groups are processing similar historical traumas, and facing similar erasure. Do harm reduction activists forget, for example, that early European colonists devastated North American Indigenous communities by plying them with alcohol?

Indigenous leaders did not respond to that crisis by calling for more booze. On the contrary, they pushed for prohibition. Illustratively, when Treaties No. 6 and 7 were negotiated during the 1870s, Indigenous representatives asked for the “exclusion of fire water” from Saskatchewan, and that “no intoxicating liquor be allowed to be introduced or sold” on reserves. Even today, dozens of “dry” Indigenous reserves throughout Canada continue to ban alcohol and drugs to whatever extent they can.

When I interviewed over a dozen Indigenous elders and community members in Calgary last summer, their opposition to drug liberalization was clear—some went so far as to condemn decriminalization and “safer supply” programs as “pharmaceutical colonialism.” Ronnie Chickite, chief of the We Wai Kai Nation in British Columbia, told me this spring that his entire band council was “entirely against” decriminalization and that provincial officials had allegedly ignored them.

Building upon these interviews, two senior contacts in the Ontario government confirmed to me earlier this year that Indigenous leaders across the province seem to commonly hold prohibitionist beliefs. Who would have thought that Indigenous people could be such raging white supremacists?

Surveying the world today, it is clear that drug prohibition is actually strongest in non-European states—particularly East Asian and Middle Eastern ones—while liberalization is actually more popular in the West. It is telling that the harm reduction movement seems intent on ignoring this, or, alternatively, positioning non-white prohibitionism as a symptom of corrupting European influences. Both responses are, ironically, more than a little racist—how else can one describe the systematic erasure of non-European voices?

How is it that harm reduction advocates, who make such a theatre of their own “anti-racism,” cannot grasp that non-white communities have intellectual and cultural agency and do not simply let white people dictate their beliefs? In their obsessive disdain for European civilization, these advocates close their eyes to the rest of the world and inadvertently reproduce the same cultural narcissism that they ostensibly condemn—their calls for racial justice conceal a Eurocentric mindset sopping  with paternalism.

How is this possible? How has this happened? A glimpse of an answer can be found in the “Acknowledgements” section of Henry’s report this month, where brief biographies of the report’s contributors were provided. Each contributor fixated on their ethnicity and, in many cases, proclaimed themselves as “third generation settlers” or “occupiers.” Unsurprisingly, almost everyone on the team was white. Though there were some Indigenous voices (who were seemingly relegated to working on exclusively Indigenous-related tasks, of course), not a single Asian, black or Middle-Eastern voice could be found.

The B.C. provincial health officer report’s contributors section:

So it seems that a bunch of white progressive bureaucrats produced a document that fixated on “colonialism” and “racism” while ignoring the actual beliefs of many, if not most, non-white communities. Nothing could encapsulate the harm reduction zeitgeist more perfectly: the privileging of empty gestures over real consultation, the self-indulgent self-flagellation of the white bourgeoisie, the patronizing assumption that minority communities have homogenous political beliefs that happen to align with progressive causes.

All of this would be comedic if lives weren’t at stake.

It should be clarified that there are many valid ways to criticize drug laws from a racial justice lens. Laws are just tools which we use to order society, and, like any tool, they can be abused—so it is fair to explore how some laws, in some contexts, have racist intentions or outcomes.

This is best illustrated by the wealth of scholarship criticizing American cannabis laws—in this case, critics have been able to concretely show that specific laws, in specific contexts, are being enforced unfairly and exacerbating inequities without producing justificatory social benefits.

Yet this mode of analysis, which focuses heavily on outcomes and concrete data, is an entirely different beast from the essentialist arguments recklessly flung around by the harm reduction movement. It makes sense to test measurable hypotheses about specific laws and their implementations. But to argue that drug prohibition is intrinsically “racist” is to succumb to ideological hallucination.

This essay originally appeared in The Hub and has been syndicated to Break The Needle through a co-publishing agreement.

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Addictions

Ontario to restrict Canadian government’s supervised drug sites, shift focus to helping addicts

Published on November 21, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government tabled the Safer Streets, Stronger Communities Act that will place into law specific bans on where such drug consumption sites are located.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is making good on a promise to close so-called drug “supervision” sites in his province and says his government will focus on helping addicts get better instead of giving them free drugs.

Ford’s Progressive Conservative government on Monday tabled the Safer Streets, Stronger Communities Act that will place into law specific bans on where such drug consumption sites are located.

Specifically, the new bill will ban “supervised” drug consumption sites from being close to schools or childcare centers. Ten sites will close for now, including five in Toronto.

The new law would prohibit the “establishment and operation of a supervised consumption site at a location that is less than 200 meters from certain types of schools, private schools, childcare centers, Early child and family centers and such other premises as may be prescribed by the regulations.”

It would also in effect ban municipalities and local boards from applying for an “exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Canada) for the purpose of decriminalizing the personal possession of a controlled substance or precursor.”

Lastly, the new law would put strict “limits” on the power municipalities and local boards have concerning “applications respecting supervised consumption sites and safer supply services.”

“Municipalities and local boards may only make such applications or support such applications if they have obtained the approval of the provincial Minister of Health,” the bill reads.

The new bill is part of a larger omnibus bill that makes changes relating to sex offenders as well as auto theft, which has exploded in the province in recent months.

In September, Ford had called the federal government’s lax drug policies tantamount to being the “biggest drug dealer in the entire country” and had vowed to act.

In speaking about the new bill, Ontario Minister of Health Sylvia Jones said the Ford government does not plan to allow municipal requests to the government regarding supervised consumption sites.

“Municipalities and organizations like public health units have to first come to the province because we don’t want them bypassing and getting any federal approval for something that we vehemently disagree with,” Jones told the media on Monday.

She also clarified that “there will be no further safe injection sites in the province of Ontario under our government.”

Ontario will instead create 19 new intensive addiction recovery to help those addicted to deadly drugs.

Alberta and other provinces have had success helping addicts instead of giving them free drugs.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, deaths related to opioid and other drug overdoses in Alberta fell to their lowest levels in years after the Conservative government began to focus on helping addicts via a recovery-based approach instead of the Liberal-minded, so-called “safe-supply” method.

Despite public backlash with respect to supervised drug consumption sites, Health Canada recently approved 16 more drug consumption sites in Ontario. Ford mentioned in the press conference that each day he gets “endless phone calls about needles being in the parks, needles being by the schools and the daycares,” calling the situation “unacceptable.”

The Liberals claim their “safer supply” program is good because it is “providing prescribed medications as a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply to people who are at high risk of overdose.”

However, studies have shown that these programs often lead an excess of deaths from overdose in areas where they are allowed.

While many of the government’s lax drug policies continue, they have been forced to backpedal on some of their most extreme actions.

After the federal government allowed British Columbia to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs including heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, meth and MDMA beginning January 1, 2023, reports of overdoses and chaos began skyrocketing, leading the province to request that Trudeau re-criminalize drugs in public spaces.

A week later, the federal government relented and accepted British Columbia’s request.

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Addictions

BC Addictions Expert Questions Ties Between Safer Supply Advocates and For-Profit Companies

Published on November 20, 2024

By

By Liam Hunt

Canada’s safer supply programs are “selling people down the river,” says a leading medical expert in British Columbia. Dr. Julian Somers, director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University, says that despite the thin evidence in support of these experimental programs, the BC government has aggressively expanded them—and retaliated against dissenting researchers.

Somers also, controversially, raises questions about doctors and former health officials who appear to have gravitated toward businesses involved in these programs. He notes that these connections warrant closer scrutiny to ensure public policies remain free from undue industry influence.

Safer supply programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by distributing free addictive drugs—typically 8-milligram tablets of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin—to dissuade addicts from accessing riskier street substances. Yet, a growing number of doctors say these programs are deeply misguided—and widely defrauded.

Ultimately, Somers argues, safer supply is exacerbating the country’s addiction crisis.

Somers opposed safer supply at its inception and openly criticized its nationwide expansion in 2020. He believes these programs perpetuate drug use and societal disconnection and fail to encourage users to make the mental and social changes needed to beat addiction. Worse yet, the safer supply movement seems rife with double standards that devalue the lives of poorer drug users. While working professionals are provided generous supports that prioritize recovery, disadvantaged Canadians are given “ineffective yet profitable” interventions, such as safer supply, that “convey no expectation that stopping substance use or overcoming addiction is a desirable or important goal.”

To better understand addiction, Somers created the Inter-Ministry Evaluation Database (IMED) in 2004, which, for the first time in BC’s history, connected disparate information—i.e. hospitalizations, incarceration rates—about vulnerable populations.

Throughout its existence, health experts used IMED’s data to create dozens of research projects and papers. It allowed Somers to conduct a multi-million-dollar randomized control trial (the “Vancouver at Home” study) that showed that scattering vulnerable people into regular apartments throughout the city, rather than warehousing them in a few buildings, leads to better outcomes at no additional cost.

In early 2021, Somers presented recommendations drawn from his analysis of the IMED to several leading officials in the B.C. government. He says that these officials gave a frosty reception to his ideas, which prioritized employment, rehabilitation, and social integration over easy access to drugs. Shortly afterwards, the government ordered him to immediately and permanently delete the IMED’s ministerial data.

Somers describes the order as a “devastating act of retaliation” and says that losing access to the IMED effectively ended his career as a researcher. “My lab can no longer do the research we were doing,” he noted, adding that public funding now goes exclusively toward projects sympathetic to safer supply. The B.C. government has since denied that its order was politically motivated.

In early 2022, the government of Alberta commissioned a team of researchers, led by Somers, to investigate the evidence base behind safer supply. They found that there was no empirical proof that the experiment works, and that harm reduction researchers often advocated for safer supply within their studies even if their data did not support such recommendations.

Somers says that, after these findings were published, his team was subjected to a smear campaign that was partially organized by the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), a powerful pro-safer supply research organization with close ties to the B.C. government. The BCCSU has been instrumental in the expansion of safer supply and has produced studies and protocols in support of it, sometimes at the behest of the provincial government.

Somers is also concerned about the connections between some of safer supply’s key proponents and for-profit drug companies.

He notes that the BCCSU’s founding executive director, Dr. Evan Wood, became Chief Medical Officer at Numinus Wellness, a publicly traded psychedelic company, in 2020. Similarly, Dr. Perry Kendall, who also served as a BCCSU executive director, went on to found Fair Price Pharma, a now-defunct for-profit company that specializes in providing pharmaceutical heroin to high-risk drug users, the following year.

While these connections are not necessarily unethical, they do raise important questions about whether there is enough industry regulation to minimize potential conflicts of interest, whether they be real or perceived.

The BCCSU was also recently criticized in an editorial by Canadian Affairs, which noted that the organization had received funding from companies such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Tilray (a cannabis company). The editorial argued that influential addiction research organizations should not receive drug industry funding and reported that Alberta founded its own counterpart to the BCCSU in August, known as the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence, which is legally prohibited from accepting such sponsorships.

Already, private interests are betting on the likely expansion of safer supply programs. For instance, Safe Supply Streaming Co., a publicly traded venture capital firm, has advertised to potential investors that B.C.’s safer supply system could create a multi-billion-dollar annual market.

Somers believes that Canada needs more transparency regarding how for-profit companies may be directly or indirectly influencing policy makers: “We need to know exactly, to the dollar, how much of [harm reduction researchers’] operating budget is flowing from industry sources.”

Editor’s note: This story is published in syndication with Break The Needle and Western Standard.

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Dr. Julian M. Somers is director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University. He was Director of the UBC Psychology Clinic, and past president of the BC Psychological Association. Liam Hunt is a contributing author to the Centre For Responsible Drug Policy in partnership with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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