Brad West fed CHEK viewers an unmitigated stream of misinformation
Brad West fed CHEK viewers an unmitigated stream of misinformation
Steel & Vance interview with West about a recent court decision pausing a law empowering police to displace drug users was untethered to reality
It started off with a tweet. It doesn’t matter that the framing of the tweet was entirely incorrect, nor that the tweet was promptly corrected by a dozen people who knew better. The tweet was enough to land a politician a spot on TV to continue misinforming the public.
Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s appearance on CHEK TV’s show Steel & Vance, hosted by Jody Vance and Lynda Steele, to discuss a recent court decision about provincial legislation empowering police to displace drug users was an unmitigated stream of misinformation. To count the points in the discussion where West wasn’t spreading falsehoods would be to catalogue the breaths he took between speaking.
That’s hyperbole — there are a few nods to reality. Points that are debatable, brief moments where West is alluding to procedural matters in the court case or explaining his own city’s bylaw around public drug use. And he spends some time responding to Dana Larsen’s stunt, sending mushrooms and a coca leaf to all 87 MLAs in the province.
But it’s hard to recall a time that I’ve seen such consistent falsehoods not only being told but going unchallenged in a non-National Post mainstream Canadian news outlet.
West’s points, while bereft of truth, are comfortable fictions that pad people’s outrage amid an ongoing toxic drug crisis that the government, indeed, is not doing enough to address, and they are being echoed throughout ~the Discourse~.
For what good it’ll do, I’ll list his claims, with links to the specific time in the YouTube video where he’s making the claims, and provide responses to them.
We’ll start with the tweet, which was read aloud prior to West appearing onscreen.
Claim 0: The framing
This is a mischaracterization of both the court ruling and the law that was put on pause. West claims over and over again that the ruling was about using drugs in playgrounds, and it is, in fact, not. The law that the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, represented by lawyers with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and Pivot Legal Society, challenged was sweeping legislation that would have empowered police to displace drug users from nearly all public spaces — even if they only have reasonable grounds to believe the person is using drugs.
Bill 34 did, indeed, include a ban on using drugs within 15m of playgrounds, spray pads and skateparks. But that’s one sub-subsection in a law with 12 sections. It also banned drug use in sports fields, parks, beaches, outdoor recreation areas, and within 6m of doorways, transit stops and any place that is prescribed within regulations on top of the law.
The law applies to so many places that if you don't have a home or overdose prevention site to use drugs in, the middle of the road is essentially your only option.
West and others focused heavily on playgrounds because that’s what will rile people up. It's a classic moral panic tactic.
Never mind that using drugs in playgrounds was already and continues to be banned.
And never mind the actual arguments that have been made against the law. Attempting to give police the power to displace people from nearly anywhere if they believe the person used drugs — including authority to confiscate drugs or arrest if they deem the person to not be complying with their orders — is a return to criminalization.
Giving police power of discretion regularly means applying the law unequally to poor people, people with mental health issues, and Black and Indigenous people.
Claim 1: Public drug use has undeniably increased. We can’t prove that statistically because there are no statistics to be reported about it. But you can believe your eyes — I hear it from my bylaw officers, and I see it myself. I think the public sees it too.
This is the most debatable point. It’s true that we don’t gather statistics on public drug use. But when West tells me to believe my eyes, I can tell him my eyes haven’t seen public drug use expanding into new areas in New Westminster or when I go to downtown Vancouver.
That being said, I suspect there is likely more public drug use — in the last three years, houselessness in Metro Vancouver has increased by 32%. If a person doesn’t have a home to use drugs in privately, where else are they supposed to go?
An overdose prevention site?
Because there are no overdose prevention sites in West’s city of Port Coquitlam.
There’s only one in New Westminster. Despite there being far more in Vancouver, there still aren’t enough for everyone to attend. (Steele even seemingly bemoans increasing overdose prevention sites.)
In fact, the decision specifically discusses this: “Even where OPS [overdose prevention sites] or SCS [supervised consumption sites] exist, they do not operate 24 hours per day or 7 days a week, and only 19 provide inhalation services, despite the fact that smoking is the most common method of consumption among unregulated drug toxicity deaths at 65% in 2023.”
Internal reports by decriminalization project managers in BC’s six health authorities also seem unconvinced that this has been an issue. Participants in a peer engagement session in Interior Health called it a “media frenzy,” and where comments on engagement with law enforcement weren’t redacted, those sections make few comments or state that there were no law enforcement concerns.
Again, I could believe that there has been some increase in public substance use. If just a fraction of that 32% increase in unhoused people use drugs, their primary option is in public. But I don’t see it in places where it didn’t already happen. Going to Kits Beach or to Robson Square, walking around the Drive, going to parks in Burnaby or in New Westminster, I simply don’t see this increase in drug use that people are talking about.
Claim 2: No matter what legislation is brought in to regulate public drug use, the group that challenged this law will challenge it again. They don’t want any limits on where and when people can use drugs.
If West claims to understand the ruling, he’s working hard to prove otherwise.
Here’s what BC Supreme Court chief justice Christopher Hinkson wrote: “I reject the submission, however, that the application before me is to permit PWUD to use drugs ‘nearly wherever they want’. It is not asserted by the plaintiff that the Province cannot pursue any law or policy on the matter in issue. To conflate the general powers of the Province with the wording and purpose of the specific enactment at issue, the plaintiff contends, would constitute a misunderstanding of the nature of this litigation and would be inaccurate.
“The plaintiff concedes that the Province can always re-legislate in a manner that meets constitutional standards should the Act ultimately be struck down, and the Province has both legislative and policy alternatives that it could pursue.”
West has responded to this point on Twitter that health minister Adrian Dix said of the decision: “It takes away our ability to do what every other province does, which is to regulate where drugs can be used.”
But that doesn’t change what the ruling says, and it’s bizarre, if not entirely dishonest, to hold the minister’s interpretation of the ruling over that of the person who penned it.
The fact of the matter is: where drugs can be used is already regulated. The “decriminalization” pilot project was a result of a Health Canada exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act for up to a cumulative 2.5g. Baked into that exemption were regulations on where people could not use drugs — near schools or daycares, for instance.
In September, that CDSA exemption was amended at the request of the province to include 15m from playgrounds, splash pads and skateparks.
The law that was paused after it was introduced in October was not that amendment. The law that was paused was a provincial law with some overlap with that amendment, including the playground ban, but it went much further. The amendment enacted in September remains intact.
To put it plainly: Brad West is spreading disinformation when he tells a TV audience, unchecked by the hosts, that people can use drugs in playgrounds.
Claim 3: How do I know that harm reduction proponents would oppose any legislation brought in? Because this legislation was very modest. It only said you can’t use drugs within 15m of a children’s playground. Is that draconian?
No, it isn’t draconian, and that’s why nobody made a big deal of it when the Health Canada amendment was enacted. That’s why the Health Canada amendment isn’t being litigated. That’s why people are still banned from using drugs in parks.
This claim is pretty blatantly lying by omission. The law sounds “modest” when you only look at section 3(1)(a) and ignore the rest of the five-page law. I’ve already outlined the arguments against it, but I’ll reiterate briefly: it's about police power to displace suspected drug users from nearly anywhere.
The almost funny thing about the law is that the BC government’s framing of decriminalization has been emphasizing “decriminalizing people who use drugs.” And that’s great. But by adding these broad police authorities, the result is to decriminalize the drugs while criminalizing the people.
The question isn’t about regulating where people can use drugs. It’s about how it’s done and how broad the bans are.
Claim 4: Fentanyl is so deadly that even coming into contact with a child can kill the child.
There is this “fact” that goes around a lot that just touching fentanyl, or breathing air near fentanyl, can cause you to die of an overdose.
Search “police officer overdose” on YouTube, and you’ll be served video after video of bodycam or CCTV footage of cops “overdosing” from existing near fentanyl.
One positive thing to come out of this phenomenon is a perfect, 10/10 research paper title: ‘Can touch this: training to correct police officer beliefs about overdose from incidental contact with fentanyl.’
What the officers typically describe as their overdose experience is more akin, healthcare experts say, to a panic attack. The fact is, we’ve known the fentanyl exposure overdose story to be untrue for years. The American Academy of Clinical Toxicology and American College of Medical Toxicology issued a joint report in 2017, “asserting the risk of fentanyl overdose via incidental transdermal exposure is very low, and it would take 200 min of breathing fentanyl at the highest airborne concentrations to yield a therapeutic dose, but not a potentially fatal one,” according to the study linked above.
If you want to be charitable, you could say he was talking about kids maybe potentially picking up discarded drugs off the ground and ingesting it. That isn’t what he was saying, but that could certainly be a concern. It seems highly unlikely; I don't know who's leaving their drugs lying around. But nobody wants that risk.
The point is moot in this particular discussion, however, when using drugs near playgrounds remains illegal. But it’s a persistent myth that stigmatizes drugs and drug users and could prompt a person not to offer help to a person in medical distress if they believe the person has used fentanyl, and it needs to be countered.
Claim 5: Legalization.
I’m going to be a bit nitpicky here. He likely meant decriminalization, but he mentions the province going “this route of legalization,” and this ain’t that. To be quite honest, even “decriminalization” is a strong word for a policy that removes criminal penalties for the possession of what some people would consume before noon.
Claim 6: Whatever happened to the four pillars? People always used to talk about harm reduction as one of the four pillars, alongside enforcement, treatment and prevention. Why were those things not in place before we went ahead with decriminalization? Where’s the treatment? The prevention? The enforcement? Safe supply clearly hasn’t worked.
The “we’ve gone all in on harm reduction and forgotten about the other pillars!” argument is one that’s been bandied about for a while now, and to repeat myself again: it’s plainly untrue.
Steele goes even further to say that we seem to be expanding access to safe supply, when the opposite was actually true for much of last year.
Safe supply “hasn’t worked” because safe supply hasn’t meaningfully been tried.
I can’t really speak to the prevention side of things; that hasn’t been an area that I’ve looked much into, so I’ll mainly look at the other two pillars.
The BC government, last year, all but abandoned the language of harm reduction in its monthly statements on unregulated drug deaths, favouring instead talking about treatment and recovery.
It’s true (though decreasingly so) that people who want to get into treatment face long waits to do so. And if you want to skip the line, it costs a small fortune. But treatment has never taken a back seat to harm reduction. I went into this in detail last year, so I won’t get too deep into this today. But in the 2023 budget, government spending on prescribed safer supply was a tenth ($68 million) of what it spent on various treatments ($586 million on recovery, plus another $85.5 million on opioid agonist therapy and injectable opioid agonist therapy).
Safe supply spending is, and always has been, spare change compared to treatment.
What’s more, the recovery industry itself is far from perfect. It can be incredibly useful to some people, but it’s so unregulated that effectively anyone could open a treatment centre and charge tens of thousands of dollars per month for a person to stay at a nice mansion for 30 days before being thrown back out into the world with little support. Never mind the increased risk of death after leaving treatment, particularly if it’s involuntary, or the risk of abuse at treatment facilities and in the AA community.
As for enforcement, police have continued their drug busts seemingly unabated, including raiding mushroom dispensaries and raiding the office of a compassion club that was providing tested heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine to a small group of participants — essentially doing the life-saving work that the government has refused, and continues to refuse, to do.
That’s despite studies showing drug seizures are associated with higher rates of death.
Claim 7: There’s no safe way to do drugs.
People have been using drugs safely for millennia, including in the last 100 years, despite a global war on drugs that has sought by all means to make it unsafe.
I don’t know if West is a coffee or tea guy or if he drinks alcohol or enjoys a joint here and there, but if he does, he’s likely doing drugs safely. And it’s safe in part because it’s regulated and because it’s not so marginalized that he has to do it in hiding.
Even without those safety guards, though, millions of people around the world regularly use illicit drugs safely as well. Most people who use drugs don’t form a substance use disorder, and the vast majority don’t overdose, let alone die, or get infection from injections. It’s the criminalization that makes drug use as unsafe as it often is.
Claim 8: It’s not about pushing people back into the shadows.
This is the final claim, and it’s fortunately a simple one to address. If it wasn’t about pushing people back into the shadows, the law wouldn’t cover just about all public spaces.