The newspaper’s front page showed Albert Desjardans walking into a police station and politely asking to be arrested.
It was August 7th, 1923 and despite The Telegraph-Journal describing him a “competent office worker” who was “treated well by his office” and “one of the best workers there,” his use of opium-based painkillers found in most pharmacies had become overwhelming, and the only option for help was jail.
“Will that be enough?” asked the judge as they handed Desjardans a six month jail sentence.
“Yes, that will do” he replied, thanking the court for imprisoning him.
In the 1920s during Prohibition, when alcohol was banned in Canada, newspapers dedicated lakes of ink and forests of trees to publishing dramatic horror stories warning of Asian-Canadian “dope peddlers” hooking a young generation on opium and cocaine.
Despite the ample newspaper coverage, it is distinctly less than clear such a situation ever existed at all in New Brunswick.
That province’s real drug dealers were far different from the newspaper’s stereotypes. They were more likely to be white men in white coats: doctors and pharmacists.
Much like how New Brunswick newspapers carried tales of opium dealers, just over the border in Maine newspapers published horror stories of vast amounts of legal Canadian drugs being smuggled in by doctors.
Arrest records back up these allegations. In 1922 two doctors from New Brunswick were arrested in Aroostook County, Maine with a massive quantity of morphine. In 1924 the Telegraph-Journal reported the arrests of two Saint John doctors for importing and distributing opium to Maine. In 1929 another Saint John doctor was arrested in Bangor with 600 morphine tablets.
This isn’t to imply that all of New Brunswick’s doctors were corrupt — the vast majority followed professional ethics. Even so, medical practices then differed considerably from today, and many doctors freely gave prescriptions for extremely potent and addictive painkillers.
One didn’t necessarily even need a prescription to get powerful drugs. For example paregoric, an extremely potent and addictive opium-based painkiller was just as easy to buy in a pharmacy as iodine.
While the media was busy being outraged over foreign opium dealers there’s little evidence even existed, New Brunswickers were quietly becoming addicted to perfectly legal drugs.
There were few supports available to people who found themselves addicted. The Federal government was harshly criminalizing drugs, and those who wanted to help the situation in New Brunswick found themselves without options.
Correspondence in 1922 between the Federal Deputy Minister of Health John Amyet and New Brunswick’s Minister of Health Dr. William F. Roberts –who actually founded the first ever Department of Health in the whole British Empire, and almost single-handedly saved New Brunswick from the Spanish Flu in 1919– is revealing.
Dr. Roberts wrote Amyet trying to find help for a Sussex man named Joseph Morris who had been shot, and then developed a morphine addiction while recovering from his injury.
Amyet replied that hospitals would not allow drug addicts “owing to the fact that they are very noisy,” and suggested “it would be in the interest of Mr. Morris and of the community if he were committed to the county jail.”
Dr. Roberts angrily wrote back: “the poor creature is sentenced to jail for Goodness knows how many times and for what?; for being the victim of a preventable curable disease provided common sense methods were followed.”
Amyet replied curtly: “drug addicts breed drug addicts.”
Dr. Roberts apologetically wrote to the Mayor of Sussex about the Federal response: “If Mr. Amyet knew the status of the ordinary county jail in New Brunswick, I am sure he never would have made the suggestion.”
The following year the Federal government passed a harsh new law requiring drug users to be jailed.
Dr. Roberts responded by drafting a New Brunswick law requiring treatment by medical professionals for drug users.
In his proposed law, police officers were to bring drug users to doctors, and together the officers and doctors would work with the patient to find a treatment plan. If this effort were to fail, drug users could be placed in involuntary detention in new rehab facilities instead of jails.
He even went so far as to label addiction not a “habit” but a “disease.”
That would be his Bill’s undoing.
Dr. Roberts was roundly mocked for this suggestion across Canada, by Medical professionals and politicians alike. The Chairman of Manitoba’s Board of Health suggested “throw him into jail until “cured.” ”
The medical consensus today is that addiction is indeed a disease. It appears that Dr. Roberts was too far ahead of his time: his Bill was not passed.
Dr. Roberts’ Liberal government was defeated in the 1926 election, and he even lost his seat — something which is usually attributed to public anger over him ordering milk to be pasteurized.
The new Conservative government was headed by Premier John Baxter, the man who had written the original law making liquor illegal. It was not expected that Baxter would touch Prohibition, but in a shock move made without any warning or consultation whatsoever, he abruptly legalized alcohol in 1927.
That same year, the province’s new Attorney General John Baxter (rather unconventionally, he chose to occupy both key roles himself) clashed with the RCMP, ordering that “the Federal Government should be relieved of the enforcement of the [Federal Opium and Narcotic Drug] Act so far as minor cases are concerned.”
He was frustrated that the RCMP, a Federal police force, were harassing “the small street peddler, the individual addict, opium smoker, etc.” and filling up prisons with people who were otherwise harmless.
Baxter had ended Prohibition not because he liked booze himself –he was a lifelong non-drinker– but because of the astronomical costs of enforcing the laws banning it. Likewise, the court cases and imprisonments of drug users and small-time dealers were costing the Province vast sums of money.
The RCMP was furious to learn they were now expected to only arrest importers of large amounts of illegal drugs, and would have to inform local police and the Department of Health before arresting an individual drug user or someone possessing small quantities of drugs.
It is difficult to tell the impact of effectively decriminalizing possession and use of all drugs, as there were few numbers either before or after to compare. However, it is certain fewer people went to prison, and costs to the Province fell. Crime rates also dropped dramatically. It would not be for nearly fifty years, in the 1970s, when we would again see mass arrests on drug charges in New Brunswick.
