NDP leadership candidate Jagmeet Singh’s recent promise that, as prime minister, he would move quickly to drop criminal penalties for possession or purchase of small amounts of all drugs will no doubt seem radical to many.

Broad-based decriminalization would be a stark reversal after decades of increasingly punitive policies. And this would certainly add a layer of complication to the already-complicated task of legalizing marijuana, which Ottawa and the provinces are struggling to do by next summer. The Trudeau government’s current position on decriminalization is understandable: Ottawa already has its hands full with pot.

But Singh’s idea, while politically bold (none of his New Democratic rivals would go so far), reflects a view that is relatively uncontroversial among public health experts.

The United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Red Cross, the Canadian Public Health Association, the medical health officers of British Columbia, Vancouver, Toronto, not to mention many front-line health workers – they all agree: treating drug users like criminals is a costly, dangerous mistake. And as Canada’s epidemic of opioid overdoses deepens, this chorus is growing louder and more urgent.

It’s time Ottawa listened.

In Canada, as elsewhere, the long tradition of criminalizing drug use has backfired. If the goal of the war on drugs has been to reduce the use of psychoactive substances and the harm these drugs cause, to improve public health and public safety, then it has been an abject failure.

If on the other hand the goal has been to drive up the cost of policing, contribute to a national crisis of court delays, compound racial and class inequities and unnecessarily criminalize and deepen the suffering of people living with physical and mental illness, then it has been a great success.

The Trudeau government seems mostly to understand this. Many of the arguments it has used to sell its welcome pot legislation clearly apply, too, to decriminalizing possession of all drugs.

Consider, for instance, that fewer than half of the tens of thousands of people arrested annually for drug-related crimes are convicted, which suggests a vast waste of police resources. And those who are convicted end up with criminal records that can affect jobs, foreign travel, even citizenship - punishments that, in most cases, far outweigh the crime and which drastically increase the likelihood of future, more serious criminality.

Consider, too, that those subject to such disproportionate punishments are disproportionately people of colour, Indigenous people and people living in poverty. The U.S. example has made clear that getting tough on drug offences is a recipe neither for justice nor for public safety, but for their opposites.

The war on drugs has also had the opposite of its intended effect on public health. The evidence suggests prohibitions, on pot and other drugs, do little to affect the rate of use. Instead, by stigmatizing drug users, they discourage those who are addicted from seeking the help they need and make it less likely that such help will be on offer. A punitive approach to drug users has been shown to lead to needless overdoses and higher rates of needle-transmitted diseases.

The benefits of decriminalization are not merely theoretical. Some 25 countries, and many sub-national jurisdictions, have decriminalized drugs to various degrees. Portugal, which has gone the furthest, is also often cited as the most successful. In the 16 years since that country stopped meting out criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs, the rate of use has remained the same. Meanwhile, overdose deaths have been reduced by around 80 per cent and the rate of HIV infection through intravenous drug use has become among the lowest in Europe.

This is not the work of decriminalization alone. The Portuguese government funneled savings from reduced prosecutions into harm-reduction programs, such as therapy for users. This is the model Jagmeet Singh said he would seek to reproduce in Canada – and with good reason. He is not talking about selling heroin and cocaine in LCBO-like stores, but merely ceasing to treat the use and purchase of small amounts of hard drugs as a matter for the justice system when it is more properly a matter for the health system.

As part of its response to Canada’s growing opioid epidemic, the Trudeau government has rightly approved a number of safe-injection sites, including three in Toronto. These are effectively zones of decriminalization, in which users are given access to sterile equipment as well as to medical treatment and counselling, without the threat of arrest.

Safe-injection sites save lives. But each approval is slow and controversial, in no small part because of the stigma created by our current approach to drug policy. As a result, such sites remain few and far between and too many drug users continue to suffer and die needlessly, hiding from the state that should be their best hope for healing. As the Portuguese model demonstrates, the harm-reduction philosophy that Ottawa is belatedly beginning to adopt is most effective when paired with decriminalization.

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Singh’s idea is just that – an idea, not a policy. The past year of pot debate has been a loud reminder that details and implementation are hard and they matter. That will be truer still for a more ambitious approach.

Nonetheless, most people who have examined the issue closely agree that a more ambitious approach is necessary. More than 2,400 people died last year as the result of overdoses on opioids alone. That number is likely to rise this year. The temptation will be strong to put this big, inevitably controversial idea off for another day, but the urgency of our drug problem and the inadequacy of our current solutions cannot be denied.

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