Decriminalisation or police mission creep? Critical appraisal of law enforcement involvement in British Columbia, Canada’s decriminalisation framework

Police budgets have long relied on drug prohibition enforcement as justification for their share of public resources and authority. This commentary argues that the central involvement of police in the development of the framework and its subsequent implementation has resulted in forms of carceral net-widening and mission creep that risk sustaining criminalization and prohibition-related harms, as well as importing or “smuggling” carceral and drug war logics into health spheres (Chiarello, 2023).

However, as a growing movement advocates for drug war logics to be abandoned in the face of an ongoing public health emergency, the expansion of police scope of practice and extreme deference to the policy preferences of policing institutions has instead deepened. The substantial gap between the reputation management strategies employed by policing bodies, and the on-the-ground harms resulting from police practices as experienced by drug users should provide caution to other jurisdictions considering law enforcement involvement in their decriminalization frameworks. This is something drug users in Portugal have long cautioned about in regard to the decriminalization model in place there, which shifted incarceration for possession to administrative penalties and/or coerced drug treatment in many cases, rather than the complete removal of drug use from harmful carceral logics (Levy, 2018).

As BC contends with a decriminalization framework in flux, we encourage the removal of police from the governance of drug use, possession, sharing and procurement, rather than furtherembedding law enforcement and criminalization into public policies that could otherwise be congruent with the advancement of drug user health.