Former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe recently criticized B.C.’s drug policies, saying the province’s approach to the ongoing toxic drug crisis is not evidence based.
Lapointe, who was B.C.’s longest-standing chief coroner and held the position for 13 years before retiring in 2024, was speaking as part of a new, ongoing webinar series, “Perspectives on 10 Years in Crisis,” hosted by the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition.
In April B.C. will have been under a public health emergency for a decade. During that time more than 18,800 British Columbians have lost their lives after being poisoned by unregulated drugs.
During her time in office, Lapointe called three death review panels, which brought together a wide range of experts and asked them to come up with recommendations for how to prevent future deaths.
The experts included health professionals specializing in addiction, members of different ministries, police, pharmacists, people with lived experience, WorkSafeBC, deputy ministers and more from across Canada, but with a provincial focus.
The province declined to implement most of the recommendations, and deaths continued to rise until 2023, when a record high of 2,589 British Columbians lost their lives. Deaths have been decreasing since then but still remain high. In the first 10 months of 2025, 1,538 people died due to toxic drugs, according to the most recent information available from the BC Coroners Service.
Lapointe said B.C.’s response to the ongoing crisis, which has focused on building treatment and recovery beds, is not evidence based.
The thing is, the science points toward harm reduction and related strategies as the most effective. But those strategies are not politically popular, so getting them implemented is an uphill battle. It’s the same all over the country.
Harm reduction is good. What BC did though is deeply incomplete and caused more harm than it reduced.
That song is probably one of the few times that I very much disagree with him, and the band
Science is not the problem. Scientist are not the problem. Science is simply finding out what is, how is. It’s simply gathering knowledge, nothing more.
It’s the politicians who implement that knowledge, almost always for their own personal gains.
Politicians are the problem
It’s not that hard to do. Nevermind the fact that it’s the right thing to do.
The only reason politicians don’t do it is because they might not get elected again … and that’s a shitty reason at best. At worst it’s a sign that our social democracy is well on its way to failing.
The whole point of seeking reelection is the stated benefit and drawback of democracy. In this case you want this politician to go against their constituency on this issue because the action you want them to take is different from the one the constituency wants them to take.
Would you be OK if a politician goes against your wishes or would you vote them in again despite it.
For wealth taxes, the majority support it but the wealthy do not and claim that there is an economic reason and evidence not to. So basing solely on democracy and not evidence, should there be a wealth tax or not? In this case, would someone who supports wealth taxes be willing to re-elect a politician that does not implement a wealth tax?
The same goes for all issues.
The problem is the people not politicians. If people thought differently, this would not be a problem because the action you want to have happen would have been taken.
If action is to be taken on evidence rather than popular will, then why have democracy? We should have politicians do the right thing, irrespective if they got power by democracy, monarchy, or technocracy.
That’s the best thing about representative and not direct democracy: you can do the right thing, e.g. pass correct legislation or policies even if it’s not popular. Instead they do the opposite. Maybe some day the majority of Canadians will come to grips with how our democracy is mostly just a thinly veiled oligopoly. As a BCer it’s probably further away for us than the other provinces.