Back to the War on Drugs – Canada’s Public Health/Public Safety response to the Fentanyl Overdose Crisis: By Ashley Mollison

http://thevolcano.org/2018/04/09/back-to-the-war-on-drugs/

Discussions of decriminalization of opiates focus on possession, maintaining the false division of victim-user and criminal-dealer. People are not dying from marijuana overdoses, but the Trudeau government has solely committed to cannabis legalization over all other drugs. In her report for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), Susan Boyd writes that from 2015 to 2016, drug related arrests have gone down 5.5%. Looking closer at the numbers, while possession arrests for cannabis have gone down, arrests for all other drugs (heroin, meth, and “other drugs” including fentanyl) have gone up.