Earlier in January, a B.C. psychologist who carried out a major study examining addiction and criminality said the government chose to ignore decades of addiction research when launching the drug decriminalization pilot. Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist from Simon Fraser University, had opposed the decriminalization plan, and was part of a longitudinal study evaluating addiction, homelessness, housing and the justice system.
“We were looking at everyone who was diagnosed with an addiction, involved with courts or corrections and experiencing other kinds of hardship,” he said in an interview with Global News. The research involved $40 million in funding and produced dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers. The results of the study showed that stable housing is one of the strongest predictors of recovery, not decriminalization alone. “When people are offered the opportunity to re-assimilate into healthy communities, they rise to that challenge,” Somers said.
Moreover, Somers also said that the B.C. government ordered the destruction of the research data before the decriminalization program was launched. He also added that then-housing minister David Eby was personally briefed on the findings in 2021, roughly a week before the deletion order was issued. Somers believes the government had already decided to pursue decriminalization and viewed his research as politically inconvenient.
According to the B.C. Ministry of Health, the data were deleted due to the expiration of a data-sharing agreement and not because of decriminalization. However, Somers disagreed, arguing the research could have helped the government avert its present situation, and maintained that ignoring the evidence led to poorer outcomes.
“In my view there’s no question that the results that are now apparent to a great many British Columbians, a lack of success, in fact in some cases a worsening of our addiction crisis, that had we had the opportunity to pursue the work that we had had approved and funded, we would have been able to draw attention to some unintended consequences much much earlier,” Somers said.
