A private member’s bill introduced in the Senate that seeks to decriminalize hard drugs on the grounds that substance use disorder is a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue is taking the wrong approach, says a retired physician with extensive experience treating drug users. “Taking drugs is not fundamentally a medical problem. It has medical consequences but is not in itself a medical problem, so to treat it as if it were a health problem and far from anything else is false,” said Anthony Daniels, who for 15 years worked to help drug users in Birmingham, England, both inside and outside of prison. “The problems of drug-taking are not caused by their illegality. … People coming into prison who were drug addicts, you found they were criminals before they took drugs, not afterwards. In other words, whatever attracted them to drugs attracted them to crime. … They …