Vaughn Palmer: Minister's focus in decriminalization and safer supply put her at odds with premier's office

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VICTORIA — New Democrat Judy Darcy was early in her term as B.C.’s first minister of mental health and addiction when the shock of it hit her.

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During a tour of the psychiatric emergency department at Surrey Memorial Hospital, she stepped into the “safe room” — sterile, simple, no sharp edges or objects that patients could harm themselves.

Then, as Darcy tells it in a memoir published this fall, “suddenly I began to weep.”

The new minister had flashed back to something that happened decades earlier, her own mother’s losing battle with mental health and addiction.

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“I saw her being strapped down, an object placed in her mouth so she wouldn’t bite her tongue, electrodes attached to each side of her head as she received the electroconvulsive treatment that was supposed to cure her condition,” writes........

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