Drug Overdoses and Liberalization

Comparing British Columbia with Japan

source https://familyvoice.org.au/news/drug-injecting-rooms-what-could-possibly-go-wrong

Alex Berenson has a substack where he points out how bad British Columbia’s opioid liberalization has been for health compared to other Canadian provinces that haven’t done so

Yet again, the better we get at "harm reduction," the more people overdose and die

He ended that article as follows:

What no one in the harm reduction community will admit is that societies can control drug use. They can’t eliminate it entirely, but they can make it more or less acceptable by highlighting its harms and making users legally responsible. Rates of drunk driving and tobacco smoking have plunged in the United States, thanks to stigmatization, increased taxes, and police enforcement against impaired drivers.

…

But every effort at harm reduction - even if well-intentioned - sends the opposite message, that the danger of opioids and cocaine can be managed and are not inherent to the substances themselves.

British Columbia’s experience proves the opposite.

How many deaths will it take for the harm reducers to admit the truth?

That made me wonder how things are in British Columbia compared to Japan where recreational drug use (other than nicotine and alcohol) is heavily stigmatized both legally and socially.

So I did a quick check by doing searches for drug overdose hospitalization statistics - deaths was harder to find Japanese data for. There are obvious differences in counting that will require some slight adjustments to the figures for a real comparison but…

In 2022 Japan had 10,682 people who were transported to emergency rooms for suspected drug overdoses for a population of ~120Million

In 2022 in BC, the paramedics responded to a total of 33,654 overdose/poisoning patient events for a population ~5.5Million (OK maybe not all went to hospital, but so what? we’re doing quick and crude here)

Table (image because substack sucks for tables)

BC’s population is about 5% of Japan’s. BC’s overdoses in 2022 are about 3 times as large. If you normalize those values to a per 100,000 population BC experiences overdose rates at around 70 times those of Japan.

To put it another way. If Japan had BC’s overdose rate then it would see about three quarters of a million events instead of ten thousand.

If BC had Japan’s rate it would see under 500/year. That’s a fraction over one per day as opposed to 92.

Banning recreational drug use and coming down very hard on those caught, as Japan does along with a lot of SE Asia, really does cut down on overdoses.

I’m generally speaking a libertarian. In theory I believe people should have the right to inject, swallow whatever they want without the government getting in the way, but when it comes to opioids and the like I have to say I can see the sense in having government prohibition with strict enforcement.