Why B.C.’s drug debate needs both compassion and accountability
When politicians talk about “stigma,” they’re often talking past each other.
One side treats stigma like it’s always a weapon. If you remove stigma, you remove shame, and if you remove shame, people will feel safe enough to seek help. In that frame, any moral disapproval attached to drug use becomes the enemy.
The other side leans hard the other way. They talk about cracking down, discouraging use, restoring order. They see stigma as a necessary tool to keep dangerous behaviour in check and to send a clear message to kids: this is not normal and not safe.
Both sides are half right. Which means both sides are half wrong.
If we want policy that actually saves lives, we have to stop swinging between extremes and deal with a basic distinction most of our debates ignore:
Stigma aimed at people drives them underground.
Stigma aimed at harmful behaviour can help pull a society back from the edge.
That’s the core of “De-stigmatizing Stigma” – the latest conversation on Non-partisan Hacks. This post pulls out the main ideas and pushes them a step further.
The fight over stigma in B.C.’s drug debate
The word “stigma” has become a flashpoint in B.C. politics, especially around the toxic drug crisis and questions of decriminalization, treatment, and public safety.
You can hear it in the Legislature.
On one side, you have MLAs arguing that stigmatizing drug use doesn’t prevent it – that shame is a barrier to treatment, that people who use drugs need compassion, not condemnation. The logic is simple: if we attach moral disgust to drug use, people will hide, lie, and die alone.
On the other side, you have MLAs arguing that we need to clearly discourage drug use, especially for youth. That we should be able to say, plainly, that hard drugs are dangerous, addictive, and can destroy lives. They worry that if we scrub away all stigma, we normalize behaviours that are objectively harmful.
Bill M 213 – the Drug Use Prevention Education in Schools Act – is one example of this tension on paper. Among other things, the bill would require that school curriculum:
- explicitly discourages drug use
- focuses on negative health, social, and legal consequences
- “promotes stigma against drug use as a deterrent”
You can see the problem. That last phrase doesn’t distinguish between stigmatizing behaviour and stigmatizing people. Critics hear it as a call to shame vulnerable kids and families. Supporters hear it as an overdue course correction in a culture that’s become squeamish about saying “this is bad for you.”
The truth is, both instincts are understandable. We should discourage kids from using dangerous substances. We should also avoid shaming people who are already struggling with addiction.
The bill, as drafted, leans heavily on deterrence and almost not at all on support. That is fixable.
Imagine a version of the same law that keeps the firm line on risk, but makes three shifts:
- It explicitly says the goal is to discourage harmful drug use while promoting understanding and empathy for people struggling with addiction.
- It swaps “promotes stigma against drug use” for “promotes social disapproval of harmful drug-use behaviours rather than stigmatization of individuals.”
- It adds teeth on the support side: mandated access to trained counsellors, clear referral paths to local health and social services, and resources for parents on how to talk with their kids.
Same core message: hard drugs are dangerous, and we don’t want you using them.
Very different moral posture: if you are struggling, you are not the enemy. You are someone we want to help.
That’s the balance we keep missing.
We’ve done this before – and it worked
This is not a new problem. Public health has been wrestling with the stigma question for decades. The key difference: when it works, the stigma is aimed squarely at the activity, not at the person.
Take cigarette smoking.
In the 1960s, nearly half of Canadian adults smoked. Cigarettes were in TV ads, on billboards, on airplanes. Doctors appeared in ads. Hockey Night in Canada had cigarette sponsors. Smoking signalled sophistication.
Then the science caught up.
The Royal College of Physicians in the UK confirmed the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1962. The U.S. Surgeon General followed in 1964. Canada couldn’t pretend it didn’t know.
But information alone didn’t flip the culture. People didn’t see one report and toss out their smokes.
So public health leaders turned to culture and policy together:
- 1972: TV and radio cigarette ads banned.
- 1989: Health warnings on cigarette packages.
- 1997: Smoking banned on domestic flights.
- 2000s onward: Graphic photo warnings of blackened lungs, rotting teeth, sick kids exposed to secondhand smoke.
At the same time, they built exits:
- Quit lines.
- Nicotine patches and gum.
- Smoke-free workplaces.
- Physicians trained to help people quit without humiliation.
Smoking didn’t become illegal. It became embarrassing. Inconvenient. The opposite of glamorous. You had to step outside in the rain, away from your friends, and sometimes hear, “You’re still smoking?”
The result: smoking rates cratered. From roughly half the adult population down to around 11 percent today, and about 4 percent among teens.
We didn’t do that by hating smokers. We did it by pulling the shine off smoking and surrounding smokers with lifelines.
The stigma landed on the act – not the person.
Other cases where stigma helped
Smoking isn’t the only example.
Drinking and driving
There was a time when drunk driving was almost a joke. “One for the road.” “I drive better after a few.” It took relentless campaigns from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, coupled with tougher laws, to flip that script. Today, impaired driving isn’t funny; it’s shameful. Not because we decided people with alcohol problems are worthless, but because we decided getting behind the wheel impaired is beneath us.
Seatbelts
When seatbelts were first introduced, many people resented them. Some literally cut them out of their cars. Over time, laws, crash-test dummy ads, and “Click It or Ticket” campaigns made not buckling up look reckless, not rebellious. Now most people strap in automatically. Not wearing a seatbelt feels stupid, not bold.
Littering
“Don’t be a litterbug” was more than a cute slogan. It attached a negative identity to a careless action. Most people today wouldn’t dream of tossing garbage out the car window, not just because it’s illegal, but because it’s socially pathetic.
Secondhand smoke
Once the risks to others were clear, indoor smoking became framed not just as a personal choice, but as inconsiderate and unsafe to those around you. Again, stigma rooted in care for others.
Racism, harassment, and violence
More recently, stigma has been used to push behaviours like overt racism, workplace harassment, and some forms of public abuse out of the realm of acceptability. The underlying message: we can debate policy all day, but there are ways of treating people that are simply off the table if you want to be taken seriously in public life.
In each case, the pattern is the same:
We named the behaviour as harmful.
We made that behaviour socially and morally unattractive.
We built supports for people trying to change.
We didn’t erase accountability. We didn’t erase compassion. We held them together.
A useful analogy: speeding and young drivers
Everyone knows teenagers are going to test limits behind the wheel. They drive too fast. They chase the feeling.
We don’t respond by normalizing speeding. We don’t hand them racing helmets and performance tires and call it “meeting them where they’re at.”
We stigmatize the behaviour.
We show the wrecks. We show grieving families. We run “Speed kills” campaigns. We design licensing systems that restrict new drivers and make it clear that speeding is dangerous, not daring.
At the same time, we don’t permanently shame every kid who gets a speeding ticket. We give training, graduated licensing, better road design, airbags, seatbelts – tools to survive their own learning curve.
That’s balanced policy in miniature:
Be realistic that risk-taking happens.
Be compassionate when people crash.
Never confuse compassion with permission.
Redefining stigma: S.T.I.G.M.A.
If “stigma” has become so loaded that people can’t hear each other, we need a better frame. One way to rebuild it:
Support
Through
Integrity
Grace
Mercy
Accountability
Support
Real support starts from the assumption that people aren’t disposable. You keep doors open. You build treatment beds, outreach teams, peer-led recovery programs. You make it possible for people to ask for help without being written off.
Through
You don’t pretend this is clean or quick. You walk through relapse, grief, anger, and frustration. You keep showing up, even when progress is messy.
Integrity
You tell the truth about harm. You don’t downplay the risks of fentanyl, meth, or whatever else is in the street supply. You don’t pretend that complete normalization is safe. Compassion that denies reality becomes complicity.
Grace
You see the human being, not just the file or the stereotype. You listen before you lecture. You recognize trauma, poverty, mental illness, and all the reasons people end up where they are.
Mercy
You respond to pain with empathy, not reflex punishment. You treat addiction as something to recover from, not something to hide in shame. You remember that “there but for the grace of God go I” is not a cliché; it’s a recognition of shared vulnerability.
Accountability
You draw lines. You name behaviours that are not acceptable – dealing toxic drugs, using in ways that put others at direct risk, destroying public spaces, endangering kids. You enforce boundaries, but you do it in ways that still leave room for people to come back.
That combination is what’s missing when debates collapse into slogans like “end stigma” on one side and “get tough” on the other.
What this looks like in policy
Translating this into real-world action isn’t complicated, but it does require spine on both fronts.
Examples:
- School curriculum that clearly discourages drug use, shows real consequences, and at the same time teaches coping skills, mental health literacy, and how to seek help.
- Public campaigns that do for hard drugs what we did for cigarettes and impaired driving: blunt, honest, unvarnished. No glamour, no ambiguity.
- Expanded treatment and recovery options – detox beds, long-term programs, peer support, housing that isn’t a revolving door back to the street.
- Police and courts set up to divert people with addictions into treatment where possible, rather than defaulting to jail or doing nothing.
- Laws framed with both halves in view: yes, deter harmful behaviour; yes, protect kids; and yes, clearly commit not to shame people out of seeking help.
Compassion without boundaries leads to chaos.
Boundaries without compassion lead to cruelty.
We don’t need either. We need both.
Bringing it back to B.C.
Back to the Legislature.
One side overemphasizes compassion and underplays harm. The other overemphasizes deterrence and says almost nothing about support.
If the “no stigma” crowd talked more honestly about the real dangers of today’s street drugs, they’d be harder to caricature as naive.
If the “get tough” crowd talked concretely about treatment, housing, and recovery pathways, they’d be harder to caricature as cruel.
Remove stigma from the person.
Keep it firmly on the harm.
That’s the middle path most people intuitively want but rarely hear articulated.
For more, listen to the full episode “De-stigmatizing Stigma” on the Non-partisan Hacks podcast, wherever you get your podcasts or at nonpartisanhacks.com.