Going soft on evidence and due process: Canada adopts US style harm maximization

A highly charged field: Mapping energies, currents and desires for reform in Canadian expert responses to drug law

While many experts consider major changes to legal approaches to drug use necessary, achieving such change has proven to be difficult. The political process is often seen as integral to bringing about change, largely due to orthodox understandings of the ‘nature’ of law, in which law is made by parliaments and capable of revision in only limited instances. In recent years, theorists such as Bruno Latour (2009, 2013), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2015) and Serge Gutwirth (2015) have taken a more expansive view of the nature of law and its effects. According to these theorists, law also emerges from outside the political process, including through various practices such as those of professionals working within legal systems, and those engaged in resistance, navigation and subversion (Seear, 2020). This article explores these processes using Karen Barad's (2015) work on lightning. As we will explain, Barad presents lightning as a ‘queer’, non-linear, uncertain and indeterminate phenomenon, using it to understand causation in new ways. Along with Barad's ideas, the article draws on interview data (N = 35) collected for two research projects in Canada. These interviews were conducted with senior drug use-related policy makers, service providers, advocates and lawyers based in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada. The interviews explore how key Canadian experts view drug law, debates about law and policy and whether they support reform. We also explore how these experts navigate the criminalisation of drugs and whether any insights can be drawn from their practices, including their attempts to navigate, subvert or change the law. First we consider experts’ concern about current prohibitionist legal frameworks, finding it widespread, along with appetite for change. Second, we examine experts’ accounts of strategies used for working around or challenging punitive frameworks. We find that change, like lightning, is complicated and messy; simplistic approaches to changes are not always possible, and may in fact make matters worse. There are multiple, unpredictable effects in engaging and resisting law, and thus difficulty in tackling criminalisation in any clear and simple way. Practices and processes of responding to and resisting drug-use criminalisation can thus be understood in terms that reflect the ‘queer’, indeterminate, unpredictable and multidirectional nature of Barad's lightning. In concluding, we note that this way of understanding legal processes and resistance has implications for the future of Canadian drug policy, including debates about whether it is possible to work within a framework of overarching criminalisation.

Opportunities to learn and barriers to change: crack cocaine use in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver

In 2004, a team comprised of researchers and service providers launched the Safer Crack Use, Outreach, Research and Education (SCORE) project in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The project was aimed at developing a better understanding of the harms associated with crack cocaine smoking and determining the feasibility of introducing specific harm reduction strategies. Specifically, in partnership with the community, we constructed and distributed kits that contained harm reduction materials. We were particularly interested in understanding what people thought of these kits and how the kits contents were used. To obtain this information, we conducted 27 interviews with women and men who used crack cocaine and received safer crack kits. Four broad themes were generated from the data: 1) the context of crack use practices; 2) learning/transmission of harm reducon education; 3) changing practice; 4) barriers to change. This project suggests that harm reduction education is most successful when it is informed by current practices with crack use. In addition it is most effectively delivered through informal interactions with people who use crack and includes repeated demonstrations of harm reduction equipment by peers and outreach workers. This paper also suggests that barriers to harm reduction are systemic: lack of safe housing and private space shape crack use practices.