Canada: The war over safe drug supply in Vancouver

Two activists gave away untainted heroin, cocaine and meth . They say they saved lives. The federal government says they’re drug traffickers.

Eris Nyx has always been rebellious. Growing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto in the mid-2000s, she spent much of her adolescence using drugs, getting into trouble with police and crashing at friends’ houses. Her transgender identity wasn’t accepted at home, and after high school she moved away for good, heading to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a bike mechanic for a while, before finding a job as an attendant at a homeless shelter on the city’s Downtown Eastside, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood with one of Canada’s highest rates of injection drug use.

The neighbourhood was then in the early stages of an overdose crisis that would soon become a state of indefinite emergency. In 2015, around the time Nyx began working at the shelter, overdoses claimed nearly 500 British Columbians. The next year, when the province declared a public-health emergency, 800 people died; a year after that, nearly 1,300. Most of the casualties were due to fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid dealers were cutting into heroin and pressing into fake oxycontin pills. Drug users could no longer be certain what was in their supply, nor how powerful it would be. On the Downtown Eastside, where people were dying at a rate more than 25 times the national average, the overdose crisis felt like a massacre. Nyx was surrounded by death.

The provincial government responded with more funding for recovery and treatment programs and made it easier to open overdose prevention sites, where people could use drugs in a supervised setting. To Nyx, all of this fell short. Recovery programs could take years to work, if they ever did. Overdose prevention was good, but it didn’t address the underlying problem: a poisoned product. Nyx believed the key was to provide users with safe supply—a legal, untainted and regulated supply of drugs traditionally bought on the illicit market. Nyx also believed that anyone using drugs, even recreationally, deserved the same consumer rights as users of legal substances like alcohol, a product clearly labelled with information about potency and quantity.

In 2018, Nyx founded the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War. Its goal was to create a peer-to-peer narcotics shop for clean drugs, and its image was transgressive. Its logo was a multi-headed creature with a syringe and pill bottle, surrounded by the faux-Latin phrase illegitimi non carborundum, or “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This punk-rock attitude was in contrast to more established groups, like the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, founded in 1998. It too was committed to the principles of harm reduction, which aim to mitigate the negative consequences of drug use, like overdoses, rather than promoting abstinence above all else. Its founders had also been involved in illegal activism. But VANDU had long since earned a seat at the table with the city’s political and decision-making class. Nyx’s coalition, on the other hand, put forth a list of implausible demands to government: pardon everyone imprisoned on drug charges, repeal the Controlled Drugs and Substance Act and defund the police.