“The Law is too Grey”: Liminal Legality and Moral Injury in Encounters with Drug Law Enforcement

Overdose mortality and the legitimacy crisis facing policing have propelled momentum for drug law reform. Yet, resulting reforms and associated protections are often functionally undermined by enforcement practices and the legal environment faced by people who use drugs. To explore this tension, we conducted a community-based study in Ontario, Canada. Our findings show that people’s experiences of policing at overdose events reflect a legal regime characterized by their ambiguous legal status and uncertain protections. We argue that the resulting state of liminal legality is enacted in large part through police discretion and the uneven distribution of enforcement practices across spaces and populations; individuals compensate for this legal environment by mobilizing their knowledge of legal risks. Together, these expressions of law and drug enforcement generate substantial moral injury among people who use drugs.

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