The Communist Party of British Columbia has long fought for policies that save lives, including the decriminalization of illicit substances; the creation of a regulated, accessible safe supply; the development of voluntary on-demand, low-barrier treatment; drug education; nationalization of addiction services and the pharmaceutical industry; and the protection and expansion of genuine harm-reduction services. These demands are rooted in the material reality that substance use and addiction are products of capitalist exploitation, precarity, and the systematic immiseration of the working class.
We reaffirm this struggle for scientifically grounded substance-use policy in the face of the January 14, 2026, announcement by the Government of British Columbia ending the decriminalization pilot project and choosing not to seek renewal of the federal exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. This decision represents a direct attack on the working class, who are disproportionately exposed to workplace injury, chronic pain, mental-health strain, poverty, and housing insecurity under capitalism.
The Province’s decision not to pursue renewal is the culmination of a pilot that was systematically undermined from its inception. Less than a year into the pilot project, the exemption was amended, confining decriminalization to private residences, further marginalizing unhoused people who use drugs and increasing the risk of fatal overdoses by pushing people away from safer, public overdose-prevention services. Compounding this deliberate undermining, the Province failed to mount a meaningful public education campaign. Decriminalization was left vulnerable to deliberate misrepresentation, predatory media narratives, and right-wing political campaigns that framed a public-health intervention as a social disorder, setting the stage for its political abandonment.
The end of decriminalization is not grounded in the project’s outcomes. Rather, it prioritizes political expediency over the evidence of public-health authorities. Ending decriminalization is a return to a failed model in which enforcement is applied to a medical need, increasing the deadly stigma that drives people to use alone.
The end of decriminalization is an attempt to deflect from the government’s failure to address the root systemic drivers of the crisis, including poverty and unaffordable housing; lack of access to mental-health supports; the absence of low-barrier, on-demand treatment; and dangerous treatment and detox wait times. These conditions are not accidental but are the direct outcomes of austerity and neoliberal policy imposed on the working class. Ending decriminalization scapegoats a necessary pillar of public-health addictions policy to justify broader austerity measures.
Over 16,000 people have died from overdose in BC since 2016. Workers in trades, equipment, operation, and transport, have historically been overrepresented in these deaths, accounting for about one in five of the deaths by overdose over the past three years. In BC, overdose is the leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 59, surpassing homicides, suicides, and accidents.
The Communist Party of British Columbia recognizes substance use and the tragic overdose crisis as a public-health emergency. Decriminalization is a foundational pillar of a compassionate, evidence-based response to toxic drug deaths. To move forward, we categorically reject this return to the criminalization of individuals and reaffirm that substance use is a health issue, not a criminal one. We challenge the stigma that the end of decriminalization so dangerously reinforces.
Provincial Committee
Communist Party of BC