If half a dozen deaths in Toronto last week were likely attributable to fatal opioid-related overdoses, how many do you think would have died if those drugs were legal?

Fewer? I don’t see the logic in that.

Easier access to drugs and no criminal liability wouldn’t discourage use, surely. And we’re not talking here about a mild mind-bending substance such as pot, which is to become decriminalized in Canada next year. Still stupid – dumb-downing of the populace … but it is the consensus will of the nation – because we seem to be just fine with the stupefying effect of “recreational” marijuana and hash despite all the evidence of young lives going off the rails when teenagers toked to the gills lose interest in school and sports and healthy activities.

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Should Toronto decriminalize all drugs? They city’s medical health officer ready to consider it

There is a domino effect to falling in thrall with drugs. If you haven’t experienced that reality in your own family, then you’re lucky, that’s all. Or maybe the people you love aren’t part of that sub-sect physiologically and psychologically susceptible to addiction. Most users – 90 per cent, according to the literature – will never be addicted, but 10 per cent strikes me as a really high casualty demographic, no pun intended, and the legalization argument gives those lost souls short shrift.

But it has made gazillions for the rehab industry.

Anyway, the subject isn’t dope. It’s exceedingly harmful psychoactive substances such as fentanyl and heroin and methamphetamines, the “hillbilly” version of H, which has seized America in its meth lab grip with heroin deaths tripling nationally since 2010.

Harm reduction is a fine philosophy. I wish it were that easy. All that money spent on law enforcement and court procedures redirected to “safe” consumption and drug education and health services. Empty out the jails in one fell swoop, turn the addled addicts loose on their own compulsions. Turn also a blind eye to the damage done on users and by users – upon their families, their neighbourhoods, their communities.

Go ahead and have the discussion, as Toronto’s medical officer of health urged at media briefing, the city reeling from some 80 overdose cases in hospital emergency in the last week of July. For most residents, that spate of drug wreckage had zero impact. Not so for front-line medical staff, including nurses who are often subjected to violence from the drug-crazed, and cops working at ground zero of the crisis, and neighbourhoods such as mine swamped by drug crime.

At a bar patio a hundred yards from where I live, a gunman shot five people last week, leaving one dead and four wounded. Probably gangbanger related. And what business do you think street gangs are involved in?

None of that goes away with safe consumption sites – of which there should be many more beyond the three supervised injection sites approved by city council. As long as every community bears its fair share and not just mine, which is already overrun with missions and shelters that turn out their bleary-eyed occupants – so many clearly mentally ill – every morning, leaving them to fare as best they can on the streets. Because everybody has to be somewhere and on occasion that somewhere is in a drug-induced stupor beneath my back steps.

We’ve lost the “war on drugs” and now some want to make a tawdry peace with it, advocating for total decriminalization because public policy and law enforcement have proven disastrously ineffective.

Let’s talk about it, at least, perhaps rethink it, encouraged Dr. Eileen De Villa and board of health chair Councillor Joe Mihevc. “It’s clear that our current approach to drugs in this city and this country doesn’t seem to be having the desired impact,” De Villa observed.

Well, city officials can discuss it all they want, but drug legislation is a federal matter and decriminalizing all those toxic substances would be a bridge too far even for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That approach may have had positive results in Portugal, often cited as a shining example of wise, evidence-based drug policy, where use is addressed as a medical issue under 2001 reforms. And it’s true, if you cherry-pick statistical data. But that same data shows a 40-per-cent increase in homicides related to drugs, even as overdose deaths have plunged. (Also, contrary to myth, drugs are still not legal in Portugal; those caught with drugs are hauled before a “commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction,” can be fined, placed in a compulsory treatment program and have their passport confiscated. But they won’t have a criminal record.)

As a municipal example, Oslo—Europe’s death overdose capital—monitors trafficking in the city’s go-to drug district around the docks and central train station, but police have essentially adopted a no-arrest policy for the area. And it’s become a dangerous, crime-infested neighbourhood seeping its miseries outward. Ugly, sordid, a pustule of addiction, junkies like zombies.

This is the crucial flaw—and fallacy—in the drug decriminalization movement: Users still die, first-timers and junkies. The criminal underbelly of trafficking hasn’t been remotely marginalized. Neighbourhoods deluged by drugs are shot to hell.

In southern Ontario, the OxyContin frenzy isn’t being driven by prescriptions; the narcotic is a dealer’s nirvana.

I’ve no enthusiasm for tossing users behind bars. Criminal records are a terrible burden. Users are more to be pitied than punished—and yes, helped in all ways possible. But there has to be some disincentive. Because it’s not just about self-harm and how to save their lives. It’s about the community’s pulse too, the body politic of the city and country in which we live, from the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver to the fringes of Moss Park in Toronto.

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Mostly, I think, it’s about discouraging young people from going down that road before they become hollow-eyed wretches, panhandling—or selling their bodies—because they need, need, need.

Removing even the frayed leash of illegality is so irrationally and illogically the wrong message for society to send.

I’ll catch you when you fall, but I won’t lure you to the edge. That’s junk-health.