Two additional points:
- Diversion of recreationally-used psychotropic medications is hardly an activity only undertaken by street drug addicts receiving "safe supply" prescriptions. It's been engaged in by patients of all stripes for as long as the drug laws have been around.
- "Safe supply" is not a new idea. This is the traditional treatment for opioid dependence and only disappeared from the North American consciousness after doctors began to be prosecuted in the wake of the passing of the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act. It is therefore older than the drug laws, and much older than methadone.
Some suggestions for politicians and activists:
- With Canada's swing back towards the right, drug policy activists and politicians hoping to move forward progressive drug policies should remember that drug policy reform can be attractive to a big-tent audience. When organizations like the CDPC start giving their opinion on every left-wing pet issue out there, they're alienating many potential allies. I stopped donating to them after their loud support for the contentious 2020 railway blockades by Native American activists, for example. Whether or not the protests were worth supporting, they had nothing to do with drug policy. I'm sure they lost many more supporters than they gained with these signals of support for left-wing issues. People who agree with the left-wing line on all those issues are already allies more or less by default when it comes to progressive drug policy reform. It's everybody else you have to convince. Leave the rest to PressProgress et al.
- People don't like drug addicts getting free drugs. Just charge them the damned list price for the drugs. It's not really fair -- a depressed person with prescription drug insurance isn't charged for their Prozac, and both SSRI therapy and maintenance therapy are legitimate health treatments for a psychiatric indication -- but sometimes the practical has to prioritized over the ideal. Hydromorphone pills are dirt cheap. In any case, just make sure the government isn't paying for it -- if private insurers do, that's not going to get a National Post headline. We all know the retail cost of prescription drugs is insignificant compared to black market markups, crime incentivized by having to pay those black market markups, the cost of hospitalizations related to street drug complications, legal costs of trying in vain to suppress the drug black market, etc. but we have to remember the general public is not as interested in this stuff as we are, so things have to be kept simple.
Two books everybody (especially politicians) who wants to join the public debate should read on this topic:
The Consumer's Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher
- This was published by Consumer Reports (yes, that Consumer Reports) in the early '70s and is essentially the Bible of recreational drug use. Opioids get the most comprehensive focus. There is nothing (substantially) new under the sun that wasn't tackled by Brecher.
The American Disease by David F. Musto
- How did global drug prohibition start? What was the situation preceding it? This is the essential history.
