Disrupting the Blame Game for Good

All week, my plan for today was to write a tame, encouraging piece about overcoming othering, based on a great new video from the Frameworks Institute. 

But this morning, as I was driving to pick up my daughter, I had this very cool podcast on about attention span from a historian’s perspective, and I was replaying in my head some comments I gave yesterday for an upcoming news article about our recent homeless enumeration report. I decided I wanted to get back to my ranting roots for an essay on the long history of using drugs and drug laws to other and criminalize groups who are politically inconvenient. 

LFG.

When we look at the way cities today are treating people living in encampments, it’s easy to think this is a new, complex challenge. But it’s not new. Not really. There’s a long history of governments using criminal laws, bylaws, and public safety narratives to displace people who are seen as politically inconvenient, socially undesirable, or just no longer “welcome” in certain places. 

Encampments are just the latest chapter in a longer story. 

For some of you, this is old news. For the rest of you, buckle up.

A (Brief) Historical Primer on Drug Policy
The Canadian Drug Policy Coalition has a solid summary of how drug laws in this country have never really been about drugs or health — they’ve been about control. It draws from Busted by Dr. Susan Boyd, and it’s a crash course on how “drug policy” has always been a political tool.

It started in the 1500s, when European colonizers introduced alcohol to Indigenous communities, with devastating consequences. By the late 1800s, white Christian reformers decided the problem wasn’t colonization, it was Indigenous people drinking. So they banned alcohol sales to anyone labelled a "Status Indian" and called it moral progress.

Meanwhile, everyone — white folks included — was using what we now call “drugs”: opium, coca, cannabis. You could buy opium over the counter for cramps or coughs. Cocaine was in wine and cough drops. Cannabis was taken for insomnia and anxiety. No one was calling it a crisis.

But then in the U.S., once Chinese labourers finished building the railroads, they were no longer seen as essential, just foreign, threatening, and expendable. Politicians wanted them out of cities, but couldn’t just say that out loud. So instead, they criminalized smoking opium — the method most associated with Chinese culture. White people drinking opium tonics? Mostly overlooked. Because it wasn’t about the drug. It was a legal excuse to target, blame, and displace.

And Canadian politicians and moral reformers were taking notes.

By the early 1900s, growing anti-Asian sentiment in Canada collided with rising Christian purity politics. Opium was rebranded, not as medicine, but as a foreign contaminant brought by dangerous outsiders. Chinese men were cast as corrupting figures, threatening white middle-class morality. 

Never mind that Britain had built a global empire off the opium trade. Never mind that white Canadians had been using the same substances for decades. This wasn’t about safety. It was about power. As usual.

Fast forward to the 1960s and 70s. The U.S. is in the middle of the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests, and massive political upheaval. The Black Panthers are feeding kids, organizing clinics, demanding housing, and making it very clear they’re not waiting politely for justice to trickle down.

So what did the Nixon administration do?

They didn’t just go after the movement — they went after the story being told. They needed a way to discredit, surveil, and lock up the people organizing for change.
Enter: the War on Drugs.

It wasn’t subtle. Years later, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, came right out and said the quiet part out loud:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Let that sink in. It wasn’t about saving lives. It was about dismantling political threats and using drug laws to do it.

To be clear, drug addiction can cause real harm. To individuals, to families, to communities. No one’s denying that. But the devastation we’re seeing today isn’t just about addiction. It’s about policy. When we criminalize drug use, we drive it underground. We strip away any hope of regulation or safety. We create the conditions for a toxic, unpredictable drug supply and then shake our heads somberly when people “succumb to their addiction.” Criminalization didn’t stop the crisis. It fueled it.

Present Day
And now, here we are — 2025 — still living inside that same playbook.

Today, it’s people living in encampments who are cast as the threat. When we see them as people priced out of housing, pushed out of the rental market, and failed by a shredded social safety net, then it’s clearly a government problem. A policy failure. A collective shame. As John Ehrlichman might say, a political enemy.

But that kind of framing demands action. Investment. Accountability.

So instead, the narrative shifts. Again.

The moment someone living in a tent becomes “a drug user,” “a dealer,” “a threat to public safety,” the sympathy dries up. 

Criminalization is the shortcut.

By blaming individuals, we get to pretend the system isn’t broken. We get to hold onto the illusion that it couldn’t happen to us. That we’re safe. That we’re different. That they did something we would never do.

That lie is the point.

It protects governments. It protects comfort. And it lets the rest of us look away — as bylaw officers seize people’s tents, as cops clear parks, as headlines label human beings a “public safety risk.”

But let’s be honest: encampments aren’t the problem. They’re the evidence.

Evidence that housing is out of reach. That social assistance rates are a cruel joke. That healthcare is underfunded. That colonialism never ended. That austerity is policy violence.

Instead of facing it, governments are scapegoating.

Provincially in Ontario, we’ve got Bill 6, a piece of legislation that pretends to be about safer parks, but really just cements this shift from “people priced out of housing living in tents” to “drug dealer takeover of parks” into law. Whether it was done to appease the mayors calling for action or not, it’s about spin, not safety.
 
And it works — in part — because we’re an easy sell. We want to believe that people living in encampments did something wrong, made a bad choice, went too far. We want proof that it can’t happen to us. That there’s something they did that we can simply choose not to do, and in doing so, protect ourselves from the same fate.

So if you’re reading this, and you’ve ever felt that little voice inside say, “Well, they must have done something to end up there” — that’s not your intuition talking. That’s a story you were sold.

Let’s stop selling it.
Let’s stop swallowing it.
Let’s stop criminalizing survival and start demanding system change: like more supportive housing, livable social assistance rates, and tenant protections, for starters.

Let’s disrupt the blame game. For good.