In December, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin (TL), a neighborhood which has long been home to some of the most disenfranchised people in the city. At a news conference with police officers lined up behind her, Breed, a Democrat, unleashed a “tough on crime” tirade that was positively Reaganesque. “Without evidence, officials frame unhoused people as dangerous to housed people, particularly their children,” stated the California ACLU in its October 2021 report, The Legal War Against Unhoused People. “They are condemned as a threat to public safety, and a form of blight that needs to be swept up, disappeared, and excluded from places where housed people gather.”

Nurses and volunteers watch over drug users at the Toronto's first pop-up supervised drug-use site. In the month since the site started operating in a gritty east-end park with the tacit approval of police and city officials, volunteers have stopped 27 overdoses. The activists behind the site, who call themselves the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance, say it's a desperately needed response to the rising wave of opioid overdose deaths caused by the increasing presence of fentanyl in other street drugs. The mayor and city officials do not want it to become a permanent fixture in the park.

Une forte majorité de la population française pense que la politique de répression n’est pas « efficace pour lutter contre la consommation de drogues », et se dit favorable « à l’organisation d’un débat sur la politique des drogues », selon un sondage. L’étude a été commandée par le Collectif pour une nouvelle politique des drogues (CNPD), qui regroupe 19 organisations. Qu’ils travaillent sur le terrain avec les usagers, sur la réduction des risques ou dans les domaines de la police ou de la justice, les membres du CNPD partagent depuis des décennies ce même constat : « La politique de répression, mise en place après la promulgation de la loi instaurant la pénalisation de l’usage de drogues en France, dite loi de 1970, est inefficace. Ni la consommation de stupéfiants ni le trafic n’ont baissé. »

A Vancouver physician is prescribing fentanyl to patients with opioid-use disorder in the latest effort by the medical community to curb overdose deaths caused by a toxic supply of illicit drugs. The pilot project began in July with eight patients who sought treatment for illicit-drug use but have not benefited from existing oral or injectable substitution therapies such as methadone, buprenorphine (Suboxone) or hydromorphone. Each patient gets a fentanyl patch – commonly used to treat chronic pain for conditions such as cancer – that is applied to the skin and changed every two days by a nurse. To address misuse, the patches are signed and dated, and a transparent film is applied to prevent tampering.

The government’s focus on jailing drug users while providing only little funding to help users get healthy again is not effective in combating drug abuse in Indonesia and amounts to “a waste of money”, a study finds. The policy study from Rumah Cemara, a community-based organization helping drug users and people living with HIV/AIDS, proposes an increase in spending on health treatment for drug users from 0.3 percent of the total antidrug budget to 10 percent by 2020. Dubbed 10 by 20, such a policy would be more effective in reducing drug abuse, the researchers believe. Ingrid Irawati Atmosukarto, a researcher with Intuisi Inc. and Rumah Cemara, said the government currently allocated only Rp 6.5 billion of the total “war on drugs” budget of Rp 1.9 trillion to health programs.

Scotland has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and the numbers are continuing to rise at an alarming speed. Both the Scottish government and the UK government are holding summits in Glasgow this week to discuss how they can tackle the drugs death crisis. Plans for drug consumption rooms to get addicts off the streets have been called a "distraction" by the UK government minister for crime. Glasgow's plan for a special facility to allow users to take their own drugs under medical supervision are backed by the Scottish government. But drug legislation is reserved to the Westminster government. (See also: Bring ex-addicts on board to tackle drug deaths crisis, say experts)

Western European harm reduction presents an interesting paradox. On the one hand, the widespread availability of effective harm reduction programs is laudable. Drug-related disease rates are low. Overdose rates are low. A variety of treatment options, from abstinence to methadone to prescription heroin, are available in many areas at no cost. Integrated care models⁠—ones that recognize the complex stew of social, economic, psychological and familial circumstances that contribute to problematic drug use⁠—are common. Gone are the days of begging for funding scraps to support a meager staff. But these far-reaching successes have come at a price. (See also:Where have all the activists gone?)

Roughly 66 times every single day in British Columbia, someone calls 911 for a suspected drug overdose. And 66 times every day, an operator answers one of those calls, assesses the situation, and dispatches firefighters or paramedics (never police). And then those professionals rush out and, nearly 66 times every single day, they save a person’s life. “When BCEHS [BC Emergency Health Services] paramedics respond to a potential overdose patient, the patient has a 99 percent chance of survival,” reads an email from Shannon Miller, a spokesperson for the agency. If Vancouver is so great with harm reduction, why are overdose numbers there so high? An analysis of relevant data can help explain.

Ontario is undoubtedly in the midst of an opioid overdose crisis. From January to September 2018, an incredible 1,031 Ontarians died of an overdose. The number of deaths in the province is second only to the 1,155 deaths in British Columbia, dubbed the “ground zero” of the overdose epidemic in North America. Yet with no signs of the crisis slowing down, the Ontario government announced in April that they would abruptly halt funding for several safe injection sites — an unprecedented and dangerous step backwards in curtailing the public health emergency.