> Fear of arrest can keep people who use drugs from seeking help, incarceration is associated with increased overdose risk, and Indigenous and racialized communities are disproportionately impacted.
All true, technically. But it's also time to put to rest our stereotype of the overdose victim: a homeless young person, on heroin, living on the street. It's the public face, but not the bulk of the numbers. The median overdose victim is housed, employed, without a criminal record, and in his late 30s.
Most people who use drugs, and most people who fatally overdose, never interact with the police over their drug use, at least in Canada. Speaking anecdotally about my larger social circle, fear of legal consequence isn't even on the radar for the guys who like cocaine on the weekend at the bar. Their blasé attitude to the cops is entirely justified. Prosecutions in Vancouver for cocaine possession are at an all-time-low -- only several hundred per year, mostly of people who interacted with the cops for other reasons. Many tens of thousands of people regularly use cocaine in Vancouver and essentially all of them get away with it. And most of them understand this.
So, how does decriminalization help there? Of course, there are compelling reasons to decriminalize anyway. For people at the intersection of homelessness, drug addiction, etc., such a change might well save their lives. The law gives the police a tool to, in effect, harass the homeless, and publicly visible addicts, and it is racially skewed in practice. Ending that, is a just cause in itself. But don't confuse that with having a meaningful impact on the OD statistics. Even if every single prosecution of possession could be transmuted into an addiction ended and a life saved (a fantastical proposition) it still wouldn't even halve the current overdose rate.