The BC drug experiment Eby had to cancel

In January 2023, British Columbia became the only province where possessing heroin, fentanyl, meth, or crack was legal in public, under a federal exemption the NDP requested.^⁠[1]

Sixteen months later the government asked for it back. Public drug use had spread through parks, beaches, bus stops, and hospital rooms, and in April 2024 Eby requested recriminalization of drug use in public spaces.^⁠[2] Ottawa agreed within two weeks.^⁠[3]

Hospital staff had already seen where it was heading. A leaked Northern Health memo told nurses at the Quesnel hospital not to search belongings, not to confiscate drugs, and not to call police over drug use in patient rooms.^⁠[4]

The decade's ledger

Since the public health emergency was declared in April 2016, more than 18,000 British Columbians have died of toxic drugs, the bulk of them on the NDP's watch.^⁠[5]

Deaths did not fall when decriminalization began. They climbed from 2,294 in 2021 and 2,390 in 2022 to a record 2,590 in 2023, the pilot's first year.^⁠[5] They fell to 1,826 in 2025, the first year under 2,000 since 2020.^⁠[6]

That is real progress and worth naming. It also took nine years of declared emergency to claw back to a toll that was once unthinkable. And the province's own final report to Health Canada shows paramedic-attended overdoses up 64%, to 6,845, between November 2025 and January 2026.^⁠[7]

Safer supply, same arc

In February 2025 the government ended take-home safer supply for new patients, citing diversion of the very drugs it was prescribing.^⁠[8] By December 30 every patient in the program was on witnessed dosing. No more take-home doses for anyone.^⁠[9]

The decriminalization exemption itself expired at the end of January 2026, unrenewed. Eby's own verdict on the experiment: it "didn't work."^⁠[1]⁠[5]

Decriminalization was sold as a bridge to treatment. The same report says the number of people on opioid agonist treatment "appears to have peaked in 2023 and has been in decline."^⁠[7]

Meanwhile, on the street

London Drugs closed its Downtown Eastside store on February 1, 2026, citing safety and operating losses, and says its prices across the chain run about 3% higher to absorb theft and vandalism.^⁠[10]

None of this happened in a vacuum. While Eby was attorney general, Vancouver police counted about 1,555 unprovoked stranger attacks in a single year, more than four a day.^⁠[11] The expert review his government commissioned into repeat offending came back in 2022 with 28 recommendations for a system that was failing victims.^⁠[12]

Credit the reversals; they were the right calls. But look at what they add up to: a government conceding, one program at a time, that it ran an ideological experiment on ordinary streets and measured the damage afterwards. "Didn't work" belongs on the ballot, not just at the press conference.