Canada's British Columbia Ends Failed Experiment in Hard Drug Legalization

The Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) has ended its experiment with legalizing hard drugs, and the consensus among both public officials and citizens is that the program was a complete failure.

“This pilot was designed as a time-limited trial with ongoing monitoring built in so we could understand what was working, what wasn’t and where changes were needed. However, the pilot hasn’t delivered the results that we hoped for,” BC health minister Josie Osborne said on January 14 when announcing the impending end of the program.

BC legalized possession of up to 2.5 grams of nearly all drugs, including “hard” drugs like heroin, in 2023. Osborne announced the end of the program on January 14, 2026.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) managed to get a thumbs-down review of the legalization effort from an actual heroin user, a Vancouver activist named Garth Mullins who said he was an enthusiastic proponent of the legalization experiment when it began, but has been disappointed by the results.

“I was first arrested for drug possession when I was 19, and it changes your life. That time served inside can add up for a lot of people. They do a lifetime jolt in a series of three‑month bits. The idea behind decriminalization was one simple thing: to stop all of us from going to jail again and again and again,” he said.

Mullins said that in practice, the program left junkies on the streets, which annoyed the general public. AFP mentioned one of the breaking points was an incident in 2024 where “a person was filmed smoking what appeared to be a narcotic inside a Tim Hortons, the popular coffee shop chain frequented by families across the country.”

Early advocates predicted drug users would find their way into rehab clinics if they were not arrested for possession, but in practice that did not happen on the scale that was promised to BC voters.

In her press conference announcing the end of the legalization experiment, Osborne claimed it was “difficult, if not even possible” to determine if more opioid addicts sought treatment under the program. That seems like an odd thing to say, since the number of people enrolled in treatment programs should be hard data her office has access to. It is most likely the case that she was reluctant to admit that enrollment decreased during the trial run.

The BBC pointed out that overdose deaths “increased slightly by 5.8%” during the first year of the legalization experiment, and remained elevated in 2025. Roughly the same thing happened when the U.S. state of Oregon attempted a similar experiment between 2020 and 2024.

Some critics said the problem was that BC did not follow up on legalization with other social welfare programs that were supposed to help drug addicts, such as treatment for their addictions, education programs, and low-cost housing. Others, like Vancouver police chief Steven Rai, simply concluded that “it just wasn’t working.”

Few of these critics seemed willing to make the obvious point that drug addicts are not usually good about following the fine points of any law, even one that legalized their habits within a few broad restrictions, such as not smoking narcotics in a family restaurant.

Mullins was the most forthright of the critics quoted by AFP in saying that legalizing hard drugs was filling the streets of BC with dangerous addicts who made families nervous, without doing all that much to alleviate the anxieties of hard drug users.

“We need something where everybody feels safe, right? If people who are walking with their kids don’t feel safe, that’s a problem for me,” he said.

Both Canadian and American media outlets were noticeably reluctant to quote any actual critics of the drug legalization program when writing its epitaph – they spoke only to supporters who were disappointed by the results, not people who thought legalization was a mistake to begin with, and almost all of those dismayed supporters claimed drug legalization was a failure only because the government didn’t spend more money on it. 

The small amount of input from skeptics shared by the press was generally characterized as “political attacks” on the high-minded legalization initiative, which was the brainchild of left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) officials.

Back in 2024, when the failure of the legalization program was already obvious, the BBC dared to quote former Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart observing that the junkies who weren’t getting arrested were dying in his streets, and Mayor Brad West of the idyllic town of Port Coquitlam complaining about junkies picking fights at children’s birthday parties, emboldened to a dangerous degree by confidence that they would not face arrest.

West said the courts were “out of touch with where the public is.”

“This focus on ‘irreparable harm’ to a certain group ignores the harm that occurs to others by allowing rampant public drug use,” he argued.

Smaller media outlets were more willing to talk with vindicated Conservative critics of the legalization push. 

“After months of rising public concern, the government is now conceding what families, front-line workers, and communities have been warning for years: the NDP’s risky experiment with drug decriminalization has negatively impacted our downtowns, communities and schools,” BC Conservative Claire Rattee told the Daily Hive in January.

Rattee shrewdly called out Osborne for claiming not to know if the number of users entering treatment programs had risen or fallen during the legalization trial run.

“The NDP defended the approach until the consequences became impossible to ignore,” she said. “After three years of disorder and chaos, the NDP government cannot even provide the number of people who were directed to treatment options.”

Writing at City Journal in August, Canadian Center for Responsible Drug Policy director Adam Zivo argued that drug legalization proponents in the U.S. and Canada claimed to be following the example of a relatively successful decriminalization initiative in Portugal from 2001, but they “failed to grasp” why that program succeeded.

In short, it was because Portugal still arrests drug users, but it relies on expert commissions of doctors, social workers, and lawyers to decide how each case will handled – and repeat offenders still face stiff sanctions, including devastating fines, unless they “voluntarily” enter strict rehabilitation programs.

“This form of decriminalization is far less radical than its North American proponents assume. In effect, Portugal created an alternative justice system that coercively diverts addicts into rehab instead of jail. That users are not criminally charged does not mean they are not held accountable. Further, the country still criminalizes the public consumption and trafficking of illicit drugs,” he explained.

Zivo also pointed out that Portugal’s legal experiment did eventually fail – it just took longer. The 2008 worldwide financial crisis disrupted funding for drug treatment, the remaining funds were captured by “ideological nonprofits” of the sort that promote “harm reduction” by giving clean crack pipes to addicts, and the expert “dissuasion commissions” lost their focus on pushing addicts into serious rehab programs. By 2023, Portugal was back to experiencing record-high overdose deaths, because its decriminalization program had come to resemble the failures in British Columbia and Oregon.