The coroner isn’t ready to say why the death toll is down, but it coincides with retrenching on decriminalization
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VICTORIA — Deaths from toxic drugs have dropped by a third in B.C. over the past year, a period that coincides with NDP government curbs on open drug use, safer supply and decriminalization.
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“In April 2026, 119 people in B.C. lost their lives to suspected unregulated drug toxicity according to preliminary data,” Chief Coroner Dr. Jatinder Baidwan reported last week. The reported death toll for the same month last year was 174.
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Baidwan’s report didn’t draw any conclusions about the reasons for the decline. He also cautioned “that data from the report is preliminary and subject to change as additional toxicological results are received and investigations conclude.”
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However, these latest statistics fall at the end of a period when the New Democrats executed a series of reversals on the harm-reduction policies they had adopted in response to the toxic drug crisis.
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In 2024, they worked with the federal government to (as they put it) recriminalize open drug use in most public spaces in B.C.
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In 2025, the government began insisting on witnessed consumption of safer supply drugs in B.C., ending the open air drug markets that sprang up outside pharmacies where the drugs were dispensed.
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Then, at the outset of this year, the government allowed the three-year experiment with decriminalization to expire altogether, branding it as a mistake and a failure.
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In each case, Premier David Eby himself acknowledged the backdown and the reasons for it.
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“I absolutely accept the critique that these authorities are needed and have been needed for a while,” Eby told reporters in curbing open drug use two years ago. “That should have been in place, it should have been there. Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, the police needed those authorities.”
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He conceded that the New Democrats had been too concerned about “removing the stigma” on drug use. They also relied too much on the existing law against public intoxication to prevent the worst excesses.
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On safer supply, when a leaked PowerPoint presentation from the health ministry confirmed that the critics of safer supply were right, Eby threw in the towel and restricted access to the drugs.
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“It is essential that these programs are structured in a way that prevents unintended consequences, including the illegal redistribution of prescribed substances,” the premier told the legislature in February 2025. “That’s why we’re moving to witnessed ingestion.”
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Then late last year, the premier said B.C. had no intention of asking the federal government to renew Health Canada’s exemption for the province’s three-year experiment with decriminalization of illicit drugs.
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“I was wrong on decriminalization and the effect that it would have,” Eby conceded in a November speech to the Urban Development Institute. “What it became was a permissive structure — that it was OK to use drugs anywhere.”
