2025/09/11 by Sameer Imtiaz, Sami Aftab Abdul, Huan Jiang +7 · 1 voice
Medicine · #HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk #Opioid Use Disorder Treatment #Poisoning and overdose treatments
paper · doi:10.1111/dar.70036
openalex publication_date 2025/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
INTRODUCTION: Canada is in the midst of a crisis featuring drug poisonings. Decriminalisation of personal possession of select illegal drugs was implemented in British Columbia, Canada on 31 January 2023 as one element of a public health response to reduce drug-related harms. We evaluated the short-term impacts of decriminalisation on paramedic responses to opioid poisonings and drug poisoning deaths to detect if there were early signals of change. METHODS: We sourced population-based monthly counts of drug poisonings from the provincial emergency services provider and coroners service to compute total and sex-specific age-standardised rates per 100,000 (January 2015-December 2023 [97 months pre-decriminalisation and 11 months post-decriminalisation]). Generalised additive models in an interrupted time series design were used to evaluate the short-term impacts of decriminalisation on rates of paramedic responses to opioid poisonings and drug poisoning deaths. RESULTS: Decriminalisation was not associated with an immediate effect (β [95% confidence interval; CI] -0.078 [-0.318, 0.163]) or trend change (β [95% CI] -0.022 [-0.082, 0.037]) in the total rate of paramedic responses to opioid poisonings, nor was it associated with an immediate effect (β [95% CI] -0.165 [-0.477, 0.147]) or trend change (β [95% CI] -0.010 [-0.082, 0.062]) in the total rate of drug poisoning deaths. These findings were consistent after stratification by sex. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Decriminalisation of select illegal drugs was not associated with significant changes in drug poisonings in the first 11 months of its implementation. However, the direction of effects was encouraging from a public health standpoint.