Who is Vancouver cleaning up for?
Asmi Toor (she/her) // Contributor
Rachel Lu (she/her) // Visuals
When B.C. announced it was rolling back its drug decriminalization pilot, the decision was framed as a ‘correction.’ This was due to non-users feeling ‘unsafe’ when it comes to open drug use. Vancouver—especially the Downtown East side (DTES)—had become ‘uncomfortable’ to look at: an unpalatable scene to the average non-user. However, the pilot project was never meant to solve the overdose crisis overnight; it was a harm reduction measure, like an acknowledgment that punishing people for possession does not stop drug use or save lives. It was meant to provide immediate relief to the overdose crisis, not address the root causes of addiction.
The DTES has been treated as an ongoing exception zone: a place where policies are tested, tightened and enforced more aggressively than other parts of Vancouver. When decriminalization began, the neighbourhood became a symbol for the policy; photos and videos of people using drugs outdoors circulated online and on the news, detached from any context. What those images fail to show was why people were there in the first place.
People may resort to using drugs in public because they do not have access to a safe or private space. They use drugs outside because they are unhoused, underhoused or living in single room occupancy hotels where privacy barely exists. They use drugs near others because using them alone is dangerous. None of this is new. What changed was not the behaviour, but the tolerance.
The rollback of decriminalization feels less like a response to evidence and more like a response to superficial embarrassment. Vancouver is preparing to host the world for the FIFA World Cup; of course, the DTES does not fit the postcard image. Open drug use is politically and capitalistically inconvenient so the solution is to push the problem out of sight.
If possession becomes criminal again, drug users will not magically stop using. Instead of working on opening more safe consumption sites, where drugs can be tested for fentanyl—which is a central cause for deaths in DTES—the province decides to refuse to renew the decriminalization pilot. Consequently, drug users will only be punished for using them openly.
Criminalization does not reduce harm; it rearranges it. It makes suffering quieter and easier for people to ignore. I believe that the general population consists of mostly good people: good, but ignorant. If it’s not happening in my backyard, why should I care? It is a common notion nowadays. If the good citizens keep staying ignorant and silent, then how different are they from those in power?
There is a persistent belief that the DTES is the way it is because of drugs; that if drug use disappeared, the neighbourhood would somehow fix itself. This narrative is comforting to the government because it lets them off the hook. It ignores the fact that the DTES was shaped by policy long before toxic drugs entered the picture: by disinvestment, by the loss of affordable housing, by deinstitutionalization without community support and by a labour market that leaves people behind the moment they fall out of line.
Drugs did not create poverty. Poverty creates the conditions where drug use becomes both relief and risk. And because of the lack of safe consumption sites, these drugs are purchased from black markets or random strangers on dingy roads where people can’t gauge if what they’re buying is safe to consume or if it’s mixed with high doses of fentanyl, or cut with other unknown toxic substances.
The lack of empathy toward unhoused people in the DTES often rests on a moral shortcut: that they did this to themselves. But, addiction does not occur in a vacuum; it intersects with trauma, violence, disability, racism, mental illness and economic exclusion. Treating drug use as the root cause instead of a symptom allows policymakers to keep choosing enforcement over care.
Increased policing does not produce stability. It produces records, warrants, fines and incarceration. It makes housing applications harder and it makes employment nearly impossible. It entrenches people deeper into survival mode. When poverty itself essentially becomes criminalized, escape routes disappear.
What’s more striking about the rollback is the lack of a voice drug users themselves had in the conversation. Decisions are made about them, not with them. The question is never whether criminalization works; it’s whether the privileged feel more comfortable. You cannot go on stripping housing, healthcare and dignity from a population and then act shocked when suffering becomes visible.
If overdose deaths rise in the coming months, it will not be because decriminalization failed. It will be because the province chose appearance over evidence; it decided that discomfort was more urgent than people trying to survive.
The DTES is not a cautionary tale about drugs. It is a mirror reflecting what happens when capitalism decides people are disposable. Rolling back decriminalization does not correct a mistake; it repeats one and opens doors for more to come.
And, the cost will be counted in deaths quietly and out of sight, exactly where the people in power prefer them.