Larry Campbell, former B.C. Coroner, Vancouver mayor and Liberal senator, says that British Columbia’s NDP government made a mistake when it decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs without thinking through the impact on communities.Tijana Martin /The Globe and Mail
Larry Campbell has seen Canada’s drug crisis up close. As an RCMP drug-squad cop in the 1970s, he watched heroin flood the streets of Vancouver. As a city coroner in the 1980s, he saw overdose victims lying dead with needles still in their arms.
By the time he became Vancouver’s mayor in 2002, he had concluded that tougher laws and more policing were not the answer. He supported the opening of North America’s first supervised drug-consumption site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He called for the full legalization of marijuana years before it happened. Sitting in Ottawa as a member of the Senate, he said that the government should legalize opioids, too.
Now, he is having second thoughts.
Mr. Campbell, 76, says that British Columbia’s NDP government made a mistake when it decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs without thinking through the impact on communities. He says the government made an even worse mistake when it started dispensing prescription opioids to drug users, through the practice known as safe supply.
The government, he says, has put too much stress on reducing the harms that come with using drugs and not enough on helping people quit using them altogether.
“I’ve been a big harm-reduction guy forever and, after decriminalization, I just came to the realization that we were going down the wrong path and nobody was standing up,” he said in an interview.
He recently went to Alberta to look at its recovery model for addressing the overdose crisis and was impressed by what he saw. Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has been de-emphasizing harm reduction and investing heavily in creating an effective system of addiction treatment. The centrepiece of its effort is a network of treatment centres, known as therapeutic communities, where those with addictions can stay for up to a year.
“We’ve got to figure out how we help people not only stay alive but have a life,” Mr. Campbell said.
His remarks are significant because of his long engagement with the issue and his history as a prominent public figure in British Columbia.
After a dozen years in the RCMP, he became Vancouver coroner and, in 1996, chief coroner of B.C. The CBC television drama Da Vinci’s Inquest was based loosely on his story. The central character is a crusading coroner who was once an undercover cop.
Mr. Campbell was elected mayor in 2002 under the party banner of COPE, or the Coalition of Progressive Electors. He served until 2005. That same year, he was appointed a Liberal senator. He retired in 2023 after 17 years in the Red Chamber.
His change of perspective coincides with a shift in the debate over how to end the drug crisis. In the spring, British Columbia recriminalized drug use in public places after a wave of complaints about open use in parks, hospitals and transit stops.
Ontario, meanwhile, asked Ottawa to stop approving safe-supply sites. Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford said drug users on the program are selling their prescription pills or trading them for lethal drugs like fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid.
Advocates of the harm-reduction approach say the worries about safe supply are overblown. They say that right-wing politicians preying on the fears of the public are leading a backlash.
Mr. Campbell says he is just adapting his views to reflect the facts.
Despite all the effort put into harm reduction, he says, British Columbia just had its deadliest year ever for drug overdoses. More than 2,500 people died in 2023, compared with 200 or 300 a year when he was chief coroner. Each time he visits the Downtown Eastside, the epicentre of the province’s drug crisis, he feels “terrible sadness, almost to the point of despair.”
To combat the crisis, he says, governments have to take a more balanced approach. Harm reduction is still important. Supervised consumption sites allow users to take their drugs in a hygienic setting, with trained attendants on hand in case they overdose. Handing out naloxone kits allows police, paramedics and ordinary citizens to reverse overdoses in minutes.
But those measures are only part of the answer. He says authorities should be paying more attention to the other pillars of the accepted four-pillar approach to the problem: prevention, enforcement and, above all, treatment.
“Harm reduction, from my point of view, had gotten all of the publicity, gotten all of the money, and treatment was not there for the most part in the Canadian system.”
Asked for a response, B.C.’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions issued a statement saying it was investing not just in harm reduction but in educating young people about the dangers of drugs and expanding treatment for those with addictions.
Since 2017, it said, the government has added 607 new substance-use beds. It also cited its “new model of care,” the Road to Recovery, which aims to support people with addictions throughout their recovery, from withdrawal to treatment and beyond.
Mr. Campbell gives the government some credit. He says it was brave to try decriminalization, but also brave to change course after the public outcry. No one should feel unsafe in their own community, he says. “More governments need to be able to say, ‘We were wrong, and we’re going to stop this and we’re going to try something else.’ ”
Mr. Campbell says he is sure his old allies in the harm-reduction movement will be upset at how he has changed his tune, “and that’s why people don’t like to speak out, because they don’t want people to be yelling at them. And so, lots of people stay silent.”
For him, though, “Silence is never, never an option. Because then you’ve just accepted the status quo, and you’re part of the problem.”