At the end of the day, this is a philosophical question. It's a very difficult thing. I appreciate that different individuals have different beliefs on this issue. I happen to come at it from a different perspective; I happen to think that safe injection sites actually save lives.
In Vancouver right now we have an absolute crisis with fentanyl. The irony of it is that we have a crisis with fentanyl because we tried to deal with addiction by changing how we dealt with oxycodone addictions. The composition of oxycodone changed to make it impossible to snort. You couldn't grind it up. We have an opiate crisis. This shows the intersection between health and the criminal justice system. We have a health crisis because opiates have been far more overprescribed in Canada than in any other country in the world. We are heavily embedded in the opiate prescription business as a way of dealing with pain.
If you go to Vancouver right now, we've had 700 deaths. We have street people walking the streets, patrolling the streets with the antidote Narcan to save people's lives. There are going to be addicts. History has shown us this. We've had prohibition. There are going to be addicts. It's whether you think the way to deal with an addict is with the criminal justice system. I would say it is not. Is it with the health system, or is it is with a combination of the two? In Vancouver, we try a combination of the two.
Until the fentanyl crisis we were doing better than we've done for years, in my submission. Many more addicts are being seen as a health problem rather than a criminal justice problem. In other words, the court system is no longer the first place they go. It's the place they go later on. We could talk about this for a long time. I don't generally agree with the proposition that funding safe injection sites or legalizing marijuana is going to create more of these problems.
Regulation of alcohol works better than prohibition. I think history has shown that. I think the regulation of marijuana, which is already widely available, is going to deal with the problem better. Having a source of marijuana that is regulated is far better than having it in the hands of organized crime.