This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: People in Vancouver experienced an increase in police drug seizures during the first year of British Columbia's drug decriminalization pilot project, according to a Simon Fraser University study. During the pilot, police in B.C. were not meant to arrest or charge people for possessing drugs for personal consumption, a threshold defined as 2.5 grams (0.1 ounces).
One of the goals of decriminalization was to reduce interactions between police and people who use drugs, says Kanna Hayashi, co-author of the study. "Instead, our study found a significant upward trend of police drug seizures without making an arrest," says Hayashi, professor of health sciences and St. Paul's Hospital Chair in Substance Use Research.
Although police officially reported that Vancouver police officers conducted zero possession seizures below 2.5 grams between February and October 2023, experts say their data—based on self-reports from people who use drugs—allow a different picture to emerge. Hayashi says the published police-reported statistics account only for events in which police officers documented an interaction as related to drug possession and that may or may not have involved an arrest. "Our data may overlap with the police-reported data but likely capture events that did not make it into police records as well.
Each dataset is incomplete on its own but offers deeper insights when viewed together," she says. The three-year decriminalization pilot ended in January 2026. Published in the journal BMC Public Health, the survey-based study analyzed data from 490 participants in the long-running Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study (VIDUS) between March 2022 and February 2024.
Before the decriminalization pilot began Jan. 31, 2023, the quarterly prevalence of police drug seizures without arrest, regardless of the quantity of drugs possessed, ranged from 0.8% to 2.1% of individuals. During the pilot, it rose to between 1.1% and 4.1%. The study also found participants who reported having drugs seized by police without arrest were three times more likely to experience a nonfatal overdose.
"In a toxic drug-supply crisis, losing a drug supply can have serious consequences," Hayashi says. "People may feel they need to replace those drugs immediately. If you're rushing to get new drugs from an unknown source and then rushing to use them to avoid withdrawal symptoms, it may increase the risk of overdose." The findings align with concerns long raised by people with lived experience of drug use, says Scotty Archondous, a researcher-member at Police Oversight with Evidence and Research (P.O.W.E.R.).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
