Bill 34 is carceral realism in practice
Bill 34 is carceral realism in practice
Given the opportunity to imagine another mode of dealing with disorder, the BC NDP instead retreated to the only thing our governments know: policing
Note: It’s been a while since I last posted here. It’s bizarre, but some people actually pay real actual money for this, and I’ve tried to maintain some regularity in posting twice a month in recognition of that, but this last month got away from me with a number of extra freelance assignments I had taken on. I’m hoping this month will be clear enough for me to write an extra post to make up for it!
We need to talk about Bill 34. More specifically, we need to talk about how we talk about Bill 34.
This isn’t entirely about the falsehoods spread by Adam Zivo, premier David Eby and Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West — it’s about the framing of Bill 34 (which Zivo’s, Eby’s and West’s comments do, likely not coincidentally, serve to maintain).
Bill 34, also known as the Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act, is always framed as an issue of public substance use. And it’s true that one section of the bill outlines where drugs cannot be used.
But there’s a blue elephant in the room that has generally gone under the radar. The fight over Bill 34 isn’t really about public drug consumption — it’s about police power and displacement of unhoused people. It’s a bill that exemplifies our utter lack of imagination for addressing disorder in any way but through the violence of policing.
What the bill does and doesn’t do
The areas defined within the law where drug use is prohibited are so broad that they would apply to nearly any public space, except the middle of the road and alleyways, with only pockets of sidewalk here and there in areas like the Downtown Eastside where one would be allowed to consume drugs.
Under Bill 34, police are given the ability to displace drug users from the vast majority of public spaces on the mere suspicion that they are currently consuming or have recently consumed substances. The original wording of the bill stated a police officer with reasonable grounds to believe a person is consuming an illegal substance in the space could tell that person to move along.
By third reading, the bill had been amended to include those who an officer believed had recently used drugs in that space. If police deem a person not to have moved along sufficiently, they then have the option to confiscate their drugs and/or arrest them.
Part of the issue with the policy, the part that makes it quite clear that it wasn't about deterring public drug use, is that no alternatives are offered. No additional overdose prevention sites are tied to the bill. Nor any new housing for unhoused drug users. Nor a safe supply of drugs to ensure drug users can use alone safely.
Lacking imagination
The BC NDP, in authoring the bill, betrayed no imagination for understanding why people would use drugs outside in the first place.
The discourse around Bill 34 shows a similar lack of imagination across most of the political spectrum. The responses to the recent court ruling granting a temporary injunction against Bill 34, as a charter challenge to the law awaits a full hearing in court, largely revolve around the same premise: the harm reductionists just want drug users to be able to use drugs whenever, wherever, however, whyever, and that’s it, job over, *dusts off hands*.
On its own, this argument is lazy thinking. It doesn’t conceive of those in favour of harm reduction as three-dimensional individuals with rational thoughts. The why of drug users supposedly wanting to terrorize neighbourhoods with their drug use is left to the imagination — whatever animalistic reasoning you can think of is probably it.
The conclusion follows, then, that you simply can’t rationalize with drug users. You can only use force. This justifies our longstanding approach to homelessness and drug use: policing and prisons.
If we’ve only ever seen the drug use that we don’t like dealt with through policing, then it can be hard to break that mould, even if the mould has proved over decades to be ineffective, and even counterproductive. It’s carceral realism. When Mark Fisher defined capitalist realism, he expanded on a quote he attributes to Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
“That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it,” Fisher wrote in his book, Capitalist Realism.
Retreating back to policing
The above quote applies equally to how we view addressing disorder: not only are policing and prisons seen as the only viable way to deal with disorder, it’s now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative.
Our only solution, over and over again, to addressing disorder is through policing, and Bill 34 is a stark example of this fact.
Decriminalization is only one of several means to an end, and without significant investment in other resources, the main result of decriminalization will be that people no longer, or at least do not to the same degree, experience the negative effects of incarceration. That’s a positive result, but it won’t solve the disorder that’s created by a toxic drug supply and, importantly, by poverty.
The discourse around public drug use largely blames decriminalization, as if removing criminal penalties for a meagre 2.5g cumulative of drugs will actually do all that much for a lot of street-entrenched drug users. It conveniently ignores the 32% increase in homelessness since 2020, leaving more and more people with nowhere else to use drugs but in public.
Rather than addressing the causes of issues, policing is a hammer that seeks to stamp out the symptoms, but in a way that more often just displaces them, even aggravates them, rather than quelling them. It’s like if acetaminophen just temporarily moved your headache to your back, and it’s also worse now.
Police-generated disorder
We also have to consider where these systems arose out of: the RCMP was created to stamp out Indigenous resistance to settlers taking land for themselves. In the US, police forces evolved out of privately funded slave patrol gangs.
What was the disorder in these cases? The settlers displacing Indigenous people to claim land and the paramilitary that enforced it, or those who resisted? The slave-owners who held captive humans abducted from another continent and forced to do hard labour, or those who sought to flee this violence?
The same question can apply today, as police support city workers as they dismantle unhoused people’s shelters and throw their essential and personal items in the garbage — in the middle of winter, no less — and arrest those seeking to protect tent city residents or even simply document the displacement. Those doing the displacement in question, then, why the displaced are upset, as if they aren’t even aware of the violence they’re committing.
This is a practice of displacement to nowhere. Without enough shelter space available, the result is less safety for women and and diminished access to resources that could potentially connect them with, among other things, housing, along with a host of destabilizing effects. It also is associated with an increased risk of death from overdose and injection-related infections.
If done correctly, decriminalization could have been a departure from this model of addressing homelessness and drug use — this model essentially being a continuation of colonial displacement. But it wasn’t paired with a significant investment in housing, nor in increasing access to safe supply, nor in other services that can boost people’s standard of living.
They tried nothing and they were all out of ideas.
So here’s one:
Housing, safe supply and other poverty-reduction services are investments that can stabilize lives enough to help pull people out of cycles of criminalization, and lead to improved public health and safety.
Without this investment, disorder won’t go away — at best, it’ll only be temporarily displaced.