Chief medical officer calls for decriminalization of all drugs for personal use
[Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health] Dr. Eileen de Villa is also recommending Ottawa convene a task force made up of people who use drugs, alongside experts in policy, health care, human rights, mental health and criminal justice experts “to explore options for the legal regulation of all drugs in Canada.”
She is urging the city’s board of health to call on the federal government to decriminalize possession of drugs for personal use, while scaling up “prevention, harm reduction and treatment services.” The basic idea is to move away from treating individual drug use as a crime and viewing it more as a symptom of broader social failures, including a lack of housing and mental health and addiction services, or seeing it first as a health issue. It is an approach supported by more than 60 per cent of the general population Drug use, as outlined in the report, stems from a range of issues, including “genetic, biological and social factors including trauma,” and criminalization forces people to do drugs in unsafe environments, saddles them with criminal records and places a huge financial burden on society through as much as $2 billion in annual costs associated with courts, policing and the justice system.
Original Article (The Star):
Chief medical officer calls for decriminalization of all drugs for personal use
Artwork Fair Use: Gary Halvorson
