When Policy Meets the Pavement: What I Saw During B.C.’s Decriminalization Pilot

I didn’t learn about B.C.’s drug crisis from policy papers.

I learned it from sidewalks.

I learned it from bodies slumpEternal pdoorways.
From people shaking, gasping, disappearing.
From moments when I honestly didn’t know if someone was still alive.

And that — in my lifetime — was new.

I grew up in a world where addiction existed, yes. But not like this. Not with this scale. Not with this visibility. Not with this silence around human collapse.

So when the B.C. government announced it was ending its drug decriminalization pilot, part of me understood the political reasoning. But another part of me felt something much heavier:

Grief. And anger. And truth.

Because what failed wasn’t compassion.
What failed was commitment.

Decriminalization was never meant to stand alone. It was supposed to be part of a health-based system — with housing, safe supply, treatment, trauma support, and dignity. Instead, it was dropped into a society already hollowed out by housing scarcity, poverty, colonial trauma, and isolation.

We didn’t give people a bridge.
We removed a charge and called it progress.

And then we watched people die anyway.

Former Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart said the policy was set up to fail. I believe him. Because what I witnessed wasn’t a community being healed — it was a crisis being tolerated.

People weren’t suddenly safe because they weren’t criminalized.
They were still poisoned.
Still homeless.
Still alone.

And the public was left to absorb the trauma of watching human beings disappear in real time.

This is the part politicians never speak about:

When a society witnesses repeated overdoses, repeated collapse, repeated death — something breaks in all of us. Not just in the person using drugs. But in the witnesses. In the neighbours. In the children walking past. In the elders who don’t recognize their own streets anymore.

We were asked to normalize something no human should have to normalize.

And now, instead of fixing what was missing, the government is walking away from the experiment entirely.

That worries me.

Because the lesson shouldn’t be: “Decriminalization doesn’t work.”

The lesson should be: “Abandonment doesn’t work.”

Addiction is not a moral failure. It is a wound.
A wound shaped by housing loss, colonial history, poverty, mental health, family breakdown, and systemic neglect.

No law — criminal or decriminal — can heal that by itself.

What I fear most is that ending this pilot will make it easier to return to blame. Easier to return to punishment. Easier to forget the faces.

But I can’t forget them.

I can’t forget the bodies I wasn’t sure were still alive.
I can’t forget the silence after the ambulances.
I can’t forget how normal it started to feel — and how wrong that was.

This crisis is not about drugs.

It is about dignity.

And until our policies are built around protecting human dignity first — we will keep repeating the same tragedy with different headlines.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

But I know this:

We cannot heal a society by looking away from its most broken people.

And we cannot call something a failure when we never truly gave it what it needed to succeed.