World’s Most Progressive Drug Experiment Spawns Furious Backlash

Few major cities have been more relaxed about drugs than Vancouver, where the marijuana industry thrived long before Canada legalized cannabis and shopfronts blare advertisements for LSD and magic mushrooms.

It’s also at the forefront of “harm reduction” policies — those aimed at reducing drugs’ dangers without moral judgments or demands that users quit. Vancouver opened Canada’s first methadone treatment program for opiate addiction in 1959, one of North America’s first official needle exchanges three decades later, and the continent’s first officially sanctioned supervised drug consumption site for heroin in 2003.

But those past tools failed to stop the death toll from ...