“I have never lived in such a magical neighbourhood full of people who give a damn,” Archondous, a Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) board member, told Filter. “I can sit and talk to a stranger for 15 minutes and leave feeling better than I did before.”

Grassroots community-led initiatives, from VANDU to the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), give Archondous hope. In a hostile political environment, as communities across BC held rallies and vigils for the 10th anniversary of the public health emergency, any source of hope is vital.

“I was someone who was a complete nihilist,” he said. “I’m still agnostic, but I feel that there is a love inherent in humans that is something holy.”

DTES activism has led to a number of progressive drug policies in British Columbia. But many were only implemented as half-measures.

On April 14, 2016, British Columbia declared the overdose crisis a public health emergency. Fatal overdose nearly doubled that year, to 997 deaths compared to 528 deaths in 2015. For the first time in decades, the average life expectancy at birth declined. Over the past 10 years, more than 18,000 people in BC have died of overdose.

“It was the establishment of unsanctioned sites by people like Ann Livingston in the Downtown Eastside … that really pushed [the province],” said Bernie Paulie, a researcher with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and professor of nursing at the University of Victoria.

In 2016, Livingston and others organized an unsanctioned overdose prevention center (OPC) and invited then-minister of health Terry Lake to see it. Not long after, Lake announced that the province would authorize OPC for the first time. 

In 2023, when BC overdose deaths peaked at 2,590, the narrative turned against harm reduction and housing-first policies. Archondous remembers when he saw the political tide really change in Vancouver: the 2022 mayoral election of Ken Sim and the newly formed ABC Vancouver, a political party that campaigned with the support of the Vancouver Police Union and capitalized on fearmongering about homelessness.

Since then, Vancouver has lost multiple OPC, including the Thomas Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site, women’s drop-in center SisterSquare and the space DULF provided for its membership.

“We’ve seen, over the last three years especially, a quite dedicated misinformation campaign.”

DTES activism has led to a number of progressive drug policies established by the provincial government. But many were only implemented as half-measures, falling far short of what the community knew was needed. The results were then used to fuel a political backlash against harm reduction.

The province’s historic drug decriminalization pilot was limited to just a combined 2.5 grams of a handful of substances. The pilot was then rolled back amid complaints about public drug use, blaming decrim rather than skyrocketing housing prices.

Safer supply was restricted to a medical model, rather than a community-led one. At the program’s peak in 2023, pharmaceutical street-supply alternatives like hydromorphone were prescribed to just 5,189 people, few of whom were in rural areas. Meanwhile, an estimated 191,000 people were at risk of overdose—the majority of whom weren’t diagnosed with opioid use disorder, and weren’t eligible for a prescription.

The program was curbed following anecdotal claims about “diversion” and the prescriptions being accessed by minors. The government knew that prescribed hydromorphone’s role in the unregulated drug supply was negligible. But that didn’t matter.

“We’ve seen, over the last three years especially, a quite dedicated misinformation campaign—really misinterpreting what harm reduction services are and what they do,” DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, told Filter. “We’ve also seen narratives really focused on abstinence-based treatment … everyone should have access to voluntary, not-for-profit, high-quality treatment when they want it. But it does not actually replace the need for policy reform.”

Since 2023, governments across Canada have defunded, scaled back or outright cancelled harm reduction policies—from OPC to safer supply to decriminalization to drug-checking.

“[It’s] one of the most important court cases of this decade.”

In October 2023 conservative politicians took aim at DULF, which had been providing community-led safe supply to the 47 members of its compassion club.

“[It’s] one of the most important court cases of this decade,” Larkin said of the constitutional challenge to the charges brought against DULF founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx. “It has incredible potential to shift how we understand our laws are working and how they are not working to support the ability to provide life-saving services.”

Sanctioned safer supply programs have repeatedly been shown to have positive effects on participants. Reports by BC’s own coroners service and top public health official have since called for non-prescriber models. But both were dismissed out of hand by the minister of mental health and addictions.

“I think, as communities, we have to tell them that evidence matters,” Paulie said. “That evidence-based solutions matter.”

In 2024, the BC Centre for Disease Control estimated that harm reduction initiatives like safer supply, OPC and the province’s take-home naloxone program prevented around 82 percent of potential deaths.

Larkin said that drug policy has also been increasingly shaped by what’s happening across the United States border. With Canada’s publicly funded health care system often failing to cover treatment and other services related to substance use disorder, private-sector treatment is gaining ground. And fabricated claims of fentanyl entering the US through Canada led to billions of dollars invested in the Canada Border Services Agency, to combat what both US and Canadian governments know to be a false narrative. Larkin also cited rising transphobia and xenophobia as factors that are intersecting with and influencing drug policy across the continent.

“We’re hearing the same arguments, and all of it is blaming down towards people who have been failed by the system,” they said. “Rather than looking up at the government that caused the problem in the first place.”

Image via Dustin Godfrey

The post “Blaming Down”: A Decade of Overdose Crisis in British Columbia appeared first on Filter.

Its discussion largely centers on the climate crisis, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and medical assistance in dying. The report also has significant implications for housing and drug policies, however—areas where Canada’s government was interrogated and criticized in the preceding UNHRC meeting.

The report, released in mid-March, stems from the UNHRC’s review of Canada’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—the first such review since 2015.

The right to life obliges governments not only to avoid policies that actively cause death. They must also implement policies that will actively prevent death.

The dispute over the right to life honed in on the Canadian government’s beliefs about what kinds of obligations it creates. Where the Canadian government sees it as a negative right, the UNHRC has long held that it is a positive right with positive obligations.

In other words, the right to life obliges governments not only to avoid policies that actively cause death. They must also implement policies that will actively prevent death.

In recent years, the federal government argued to the Federal Court of Appeal that a lawsuit filed by children on the basis that climate inaction threatens their right to life should be thrown out, because the lawsuit claims positive rights. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t create positive rights, the government argued.

UNHRC member Hélène Tigroudja took aim at that line of reasoning. The right to life as originally conceived in the 1960s may only have created negative obligations. But she said the position of the UNHRC hasn’t been stuck in the 1960s.

“This is not a theoretical or doctrinal issue. It’s a fundamental issue, and the COVID-19 pandemic, financial crisis, climate change, have taught us a rude lesson, which is that states obligations evolve and need to evolve and that the interpretation of the covenant is not set in stone,” she told the UNHRC meeting.

Tigroudja also voiced specific concerns about recent developments in Canadian drug policy, and their impact on the right to liberty and security of the person.

The report notes that Canada’s position still hasn’t changed, even as the country has recognized the existential climate threat.

“The committee is concerned about the state party’s position according to which the right to life does not, or would not, create positive obligations,” the report states.

Tigroudja also voiced specific concerns about recent developments in Canadian drug policy, and their impact on the right to liberty and security of the person, which is also protected in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“The recent high commission’s report on drugs and prisons shows that the criminal response and criminalization merely exacerbates discrimination, vulnerability, and exclusion of individuals who use drugs and does not reduce their usage in any way,” Tigroudja said.

She also raised concerns about the rise of involuntary detention for people who use drugs, which has seen expansions in British Columbia., Alberta and Manitoba, and asked whether the government intended to replace criminalization with harm reduction.

The UNHRC report recommends that Canada develop its drug policy into a public health and human rights approach, rather than a criminal one.

A Justice Department official responded that the government has a variety of harm reduction measures in place, and a Manitoba government official defended its recent “protective care” legislation.

The UNHRC report recommends that Canada develop its drug policy into a public health and human rights approach, rather than a criminal one. And it urges the country to give people the ability to enforce the UNHRC’s interpretations and decisions on human rights law within the legislative and judicial system.

In a press release from a coalition of human rights groups, Beeta Senedjani, community policy and network coordinator for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, welcomed the report’s findings.

“We strongly support the committee’s call for Canada to take ‘all necessary steps’ to address these concerns through effective mechanisms across federal, provincial, and territorial governments, and to ensure access to remedies through domestic courts,” she said.

“We also endorse the call for Canada to establish a national mechanism to monitor implementation and to ensure that individuals can seek enforcement of the committee’s decisions.”

Michèle Biss, executive director of the National Right to Housing Network, said Canada’s self-perception as a strong proponent for human rights isn’t in keeping with reality.  

“We have a far more limited understanding of human rights,” she told Filter. “We tend to treat human rights as largely symbolic and not as something very concrete, certainly in the context of economic and social rights.”  

When it comes to the right to housing, the government’s resistance to a positive rights framework may be because it would create a legal obligation for the government to provide housing, rather than tinkering with tax incentives and hoping the market will solve it.

The report comes at a time when Canadian drug policy has been in a years-long backslide.

Similarly, with drug policy, it could create obligations to expand policies like safe supply, re-implement decriminalization and more.

The report comes at a time when Canadian drug policy has been in a years-long backslide, with jurisdictions dropping decriminalization and curbing safe supply based on spurious claims. Even policies with mountains of research backing them up, such as overdose prevention centers and harm reduction supply exchanges, have been dropped or limited.

More recently, Ontario and Alberta have moved to end what remains of their supervised consumption sites.

People who use drugs have seen varying degrees of success in preserving harm reduction in the courts.

More than a decade ago, Canada’s first supervised consumption site and an early study showing the promise of safe supply were both saved from the then-Conservative federal government’s decision to end the programs.

More recently, a BC court temporarily saved a decriminalization pilot project from provincial legislation, only for the federal government to step in and cancel it. The Federal Court sided with the federal government in that case.

Today, Drug User Liberation Front co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum are awaiting final arguments in a case to determine the constitutionality of their drug trafficking convictions for running an unsanctioned compassion club selling tested heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine to its few dozen members.

“Homelessness was mentioned specifically in the context of the drug toxicity crisis … We’re happy to see the UNHRC note that intersection and also push Canada to do better.”

With housing, Biss noted that the government has taken a more active role in the past, and had a positive impact on past housing crises.

“There’s a whole history in the context of housing, where in the 1960s [and] the 1970s, Canada took a much more proactive approach to housing, and the federal government in particular hada more active role, particularly in providing social housing,” she said.

Since then, the federal government had effectively abandoned public housing construction—until recently. The federal government introduced a housing strategy in 2017, and implemented right-to-housing legislation in 2019. That came with a number of requirements for the housing minister, including maintaining a housing strategy and setting targets for ending homelessness.

The government is currently reviewing that housing strategy. Though drug policy has regressed, Biss said she’s still hopeful that a more positive-rights-based approach to housing could emerge. 

Housing and drug policy are deeply interlinked, she added, particularly in the overlap of who experiences homelessness and those who feel the biggest impact of the drug toxicity crisis—something the UNHRC also recognized.

“Homelessness was mentioned specifically in the context of the drug toxicity crisis,” Biss said. “We’re conscious that there is a deep connection between these two issues, and we’re happy to see the UN Human Rights Committee note that intersection and also push Canada to do better to adopt positive measures.”

Photograph from 2017 UNHRC session by UN Geneva via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

The post Canadian Drug Policy Must Actively Uphold the Right to Life: UN Report appeared first on Filter.

In February 2025, the provincial government announced that it would no longer allow new patients in its medicalized safer supply program to receive take-home doses, and would also transition existing patients away from take-homes.    

“[W]e need to know that medications, like prescribed alternatives, are being used by the person they’re intended for,” said Health Minister Josie Osborne, in seeking to justify making harm reduction less accessible.

But that same month, BC’s Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General noted in budget preparation documents that hydromorphone—the opioid that makes up the vast majority of safe supply prescriptions—accounted for just 0.3 percent of drugs seized by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) by weight in 2023. 

Rather than publicize the evidence to correct loud claims of safe supply diversion flooding communities, the BC government opted to sit on the information.

The documents, publicly unavailable until summer 2025, were among dozens of records submitted as evidence in the trial of Drug User Liberation Front co-founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx, who were convicted in November.  

Rather than publicize the evidence early in 2025 to correct loud claims of safe supply diversion flooding communities, the BC government opted to sit on the information and retreat from safe supply as a policy.

Neither the Ministry of Health nor the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General responded to Filter’s requests for comment by publication time.

“It’s shocking to me, the abrupt change in public policy without that information being publicly available,” Dr. Ryan Herriot, a family doctor, addiction medicine specialist and Doctors for Safer Drug Policy co-founder, told Filter.

He called the 0.3 percent figure “lower even than I would have imagined.”

But even that figure may substantially overestimate the market presence of safe supply hydromorphone. 

Herriot said it’s unclear if the VPD is distinguishing between actual hydromorphone pills and counterfeits. And the figure doesn’t distinguish between safe supply prescriptions and pain prescriptions—which, Herriot noted, make up the overwhelming majority of hydromorphone patients.

“It definitely speaks to policy being driven by electioneering, vote-mongering, as opposed to following the evidence.”

At its peak in March 2023, just 4,946 patients were prescribed opioids under BC’s prescribed safer supply program, according to BC Centre for Disease Control data. That number dropped to 4,212 by December that year, and continued to decline to 2,893 as of October 2025.

By comparison, the province’s 2024 Prescription Drug Atlas counts just under 99,500 patients receiving hydromorphone in 2023, not including prescriptions for hospital in-patients, or opioid agonist therapy or safe supply patients.

Herriot said the BC government’s move toward allowing only witnessed safe supply dosing amounts to “discourse-based policymaking as opposed to evidence-based policymaking.”

“It definitely speaks to policy being driven by electioneering, vote-mongering, that kind of thing, as opposed to following the evidence,” he said. “It also speaks to this kind of general unwillingness to defend their own policies when they’re perhaps viewed as controversial by some people.”

Rather than educating people on the program, Herriot added, the province left an information vacuum for others to fill with misleading narratives.

Since 2022, pushers of Canada’s moral panic over harm reduction policies have depicted safe-supply drugs flooding communities. In 2023, National Post writer Adam Zivo went so far as to claim, based entirely on anecdotes, that safe-supply diversion was “fueling a new opioid crisis.”

That claim gained traction in early 2024, when two small cities’ Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments mentioned safe supply in press releases about drug busts.

While the police didn’t indicate whether or how they differentiated between genuine hydromorphone and counterfeits, or between safe-supply and other hydromorphone prescriptions, the media largely parroted their talking points.

The diversion that does happen, Herriot noted, is overwhelmingly among peers. “It’s probably best characterized as a form of mutual aid.”

The narrative advanced further a year later, when a leaked BC Ministry of Health presentation referenced a “significant portion” of safe supply being diverted and trafficked, both nationally and internationally. As Herriot pointed out, there doesn’t appear to have been any definition of what counted as “significant.”

The diversion that does happen, Herriot noted, is overwhelmingly among peers—that is, one person with a prescription sharing with someone they personally know.

“It’s probably best characterized as a form of mutual aid,” he said. “There’s very little evidence—in fact, none I’m aware of—of harm being caused to anyone, first of all; and secondly, of this phenomenon of ‘contagion.’ There’s no evidence that people are to a significant degree selling or passing on tablets to opioid-naive individuals.”

Counter to Zivo’s claims of a “new opioid crisis,” BC Centre on Disease Control statistics have shown declining rates of new opioid use disorders among almost all age groups over nearly a decade, with particularly pronounced declines among those aged 19–34.

“A policy response should be proportionate to the scale of the problem, and … we just don’t really have good evidence that there is a significant problem,” Herriot said.

Top officials in the BC government had attempted for a moment to push back on the moral panic, with provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry calling in February 2024 for safe supply to be expanded beyond a medical model.

But the governing BC NDP, an ostensibly center-left party, quickly caved to the pressure around diversion after the Ministry of Health presentation leaked in early 2025—making its anti-safe supply move despite the evidence we now know it had.

That was part of a series of regressions the party made from harm reduction, with the province also backing away from its decriminalization pilot project, curbing low-barrier access to basic harm reduction supplies and cutting funding for the Drug User Liberation Front. 

DULF co-founders Kalicum and Nyx are currently pursuing a legal challenge to the constitutionality of their charges.

Photograph (detail) of April 2025 rally in Vancouver by Dustin Godfrey

Correction, February 21: This article has been edited to correct the name of Doctors for Safer Drug Policy, which was originally misstated.

The post Documents Show BC Knew Safe-Supply Diversion Was Negligible appeared first on Filter.

The January 26 hearing was for a constitutional challenge to the criminal convictions of Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum, for operating an unsanctioned Vancouver compassion club selling tested heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine to 47 members.

Eric Costen, who has held various senior roles with Health Canada, didn’t willingly attend—he had to be subpoenaed to appear.

In seeking to have the convictions quashed, DULF’s lawyers are looking to show that policy and politics meant the group had no choice but to operate a compassion club without government authorization, in order to save lives on a scale that the prescriber safe supply model could not. The government claims that there was a genuine potential pathway to authorization.

DULF’s lawyer highlighted how experts have pressed for a non-prescriber safe supply model. He contrasted this with government statements that appeared to completely dismiss the idea.

Nyx and Kalicum were found guilty of drug trafficking in November, though the judge had criticisms of law enforcement and other authorities for their role in the matter. The two launched their constitutional challenge to the convictions later that month.

DULF lawyer Tim Dickson spent much of Costen’s time on the stand highlighting how numerous experts have pressed for a non-prescriber safe supply model. He contrasted this with federal government statements that appeared to completely dismiss the idea.

Dickson’s line of questioning also contextualized the denial of DULF’s 2021 application to Health Canada to operate the compassion club—which was rejected—within a political environment that had turned against harm reduction.

For much of his testimony, Costen struggled to recall details of his work with Health Canada.

When asked about a February 2019 white paper by the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) calling for compassion clubs, Costen struggled to say when he was aware of it or to supply details.

Asked if he understood that the proposed model wouldn’t involve a prescriber, he said, “Honestly, unless I took the time to read the whole paper, I don’t know if I could say with absolute confidence what I understood and didn’t understand in the moment.”

“Did you have an understanding of what’s going on in this courtroom?” the judge inquired. “Did you do anything to refresh your memory in order to testify meaningfully today?”

That drew the ire of Justice Catherine Murray. Half an hour into Costen’s testimony, she cut in to ask if he had prepared before his appearance.

“Did you have an understanding of what’s going on in this courtroom?” she inquired. “Did you do anything to refresh your memory in order to testify meaningfully today? … It just seems like there’s nothing of substance that’s been said so far.”

Murray asked if the testimony should stand down to give Costen time to prepare, but Dickson continued, asking about conversations Costen had with BCCSU Executive Director Cheyenne Johnson.

Johnson had testified the previous week that she and others had regular conversations with Costen about the issue, and that Costen provided guidance on a four-year effort to get a non-prescriber safe supply model approved.

Johnson noted a number of issues that ultimately put an end to those efforts, according to the Globe and Mail, including regulatory hurdles to accessing pharmaceutical heroin, funding and the political environment.

But Costen appeared to have little memory of his meetings with Johnson, only offering vague generalities on the topics they covered.

“You’re one of the head people dealing with the toxic drug crisis. If something just went a little bit outside your box to your neighbouring group of bureaucrats … would you just stop paying attention?”

Costen similarly cited regulatory hurdles to accessing heroin as a reason the effort failed, but when asked by Dickson about those hurdles, Costen claimed to have little understanding of the processes involved.

The regulations around approving drug production fall under the Food and Drugs Act, and Costen’s work fell under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. But Murray had little patience for this excuse from a senior official such as Costen, who worked as associate assistant deputy minister on controlled substances and more recently as associate deputy minister in Health Canada.

“You’re one of the head people in our country dealing with controlled substances and the toxic drug crisis,” she said. “So if something just went a little bit outside your box to your neighbouring group of bureaucrats dealing with it, would you just stop paying attention?”  

Dickson came to his point about the regulatory hurdles later that morning by noting that they were created—and could be amended—by the government itself, to which Costen agreed.

The same was true, Dickson argued, for challenges with funding. Another concern was that the federal Substance Use and Addictions Program (SUAP) that funded safe supply pilots was set to sunset after five years.

“Funding not being available … that is a result of the budget priorities set by the prime minister and finance minister,” Dickson said.

But Dickson suggested to Costen that this was a manufactured deadline that the federal government could have extended—and he cited statements from then-Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks in a parliamentary committee that suggested the pilots would be extended beyond their expiry date.

“Funding not being available … that is a result of the budget priorities set by the prime minister and finance minister,” Dickson said.

Pointing to numerous statements by the government—including from Costen himself—Dickson appeared to argue that while the government could have resolved those challenges for non-medical safe supply, it had no interest in doing so.

That’s despite the advocacy of a slew of experts, including the Canadian Civil Society Advancing Safe Supply Working Group, which submitted policy recommendations to Health Canada in February 2023.

Nick Boyce, a policy analyst with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition who was part of the working group, followed up a year later after receiving no response to the recommendations—a timeline Costen agreed was “deeply, deeply unfortunate, and I don’t think it reflects well on any of us involved.”

Costen claimed that this statement didn’t mean the government was uninterested in a non-medical safe supply model. Murray again seemed skeptical.

Health Canada responded to Boyce’s follow-up email with a statement from Costen, which said the government was “not considering non-medical models to prescribed alternatives.”

Costen claimed that this statement didn’t mean the government was uninterested in a non-medical safe supply model—saying Health Canada “remains very interested in a non-medical model,” but that “we’ve yet to find a path to fully see it realized,” and that the SUAP funding was fully earmarked for other projects at the time.

Murray again seemed skeptical: “Is that what you say paragraph five says? It says, ‘While Health Canada is not considering non-medical models.’ You were actually saying, ‘We’re really interested, but there’s a lot of work to do’?” 

Costen responded that was the case.

Dickson pointed to other comments by Saks in parliamentary committees, which appeared to deny that the federal government was looking into non-medical models, as Conservatives pressed her on private companies looking to capitalize on safe supply.

Saks said it was “the market’s choice” if it wanted to speculate on a legal, regulated drug supply, but “we are fully committed to a prescriber model.”

This, Dickson noted, came amid increasing political hostility to safe supply. He suggested that the government’s politics made approval of non-medical safe supply effectively impossible.

“The elected government is very interested in where the public is at when it sets its policies, and those policies do evolve,” Costen responded. “I would say in this case, the government would be guided more by evidence, and that the shape of this policy is informed by the evidence.”

DULF’s constitutional challenge is expected to run intermittently into July.

Photograph of a Vancouver rally in April 2025 by Dustin Godfrey

The post DULF Challenge: Health Canada Official Flounders on the Stand appeared first on Filter.

It’s doing so under the guise of “increasing access” to treatment, phrasing described by one opponent as “Orwellian.”

“It’s a classic example of governments using words to not mean what they actually mean—in fact, it kind of means the opposite,” Dr. Ryan Herriot, an addiction medicine specialist and co-founder of Doctors for Safer Drug Policy, told Filter.

As of December, doctors can force long-acting buprenorphine on youth admitted involuntarily at their parents’ request.

In one announcement on December 5, the BC New Democratic Party government said it was clarifying in guidelines that health care workers can force long-acting buprenorphine on youth at their parents’ request.

Dr. Daniel Vigo, the BC government’s advisor on psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders, said in a press conference that there were previously different interpretations of what the province’s Mental Health Act permitted around forced medications.

But as of December, he said, the official interpretation of the government is that doctors can force long-acting buprenorphine on youth when they are admitted involuntarily at the request of their parents.

“It’s considered voluntary if the parents request it and the kid meets criteria,” he said.

Vigo summed up those criteria as a child deemed to have developed a dependence on opioids and to be at risk of death or brain damage.

Previously, on November 24, the BC government had announced a bill to exclude health workers who impose involuntary treatment on patients from legal liability and to remove the Mental Health Act’s phrasing around “deemed consent,” which has been facing a constitutional challenge.

That amendment bill passed the legislature the following week, and is now law. Arguments on the constitutional challenge have ended, but a decision is still pending. It remains up in the air how the legislation will impact the court case.  

“I think it’s shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster for substance use care in this province. I don’t know how else to put it.”

Prior to the amendment, the Mental Health Act stipulated that “treatment authorized by the director is deemed to be given with the consent” of patients admitted involuntarily.

Typically, if a person is considered incapable of consenting to treatment, then a family member or personal supporter would make the decision instead. The “deemed consent” provision in the Mental Health Act effectively circumvented that.

But while the new bill erased the language around “deemed consent,” it didn’t remove the substance of the act that allows forced treatment.

“I think it’s shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster for substance use care in this province,” Herriot said of the two announcements. “I don’t know how else to put it.”

“We have scads of research on involuntary treatment for substance use disorders, and we know that this is not an effective intervention, or at least there’s no evidence that it’s an effective intervention,” he continued. Many experts condemn involuntary treatment on ethical grounds alone.

The BC NDP government has previously attempted to introduce involuntary substance use disorder treatment for youth, before backing down in the face of significant pressure.

Asked in the December 5 press conference what led to the province deciding to push ahead after previous hesitancy, BC Premier David Eby said he’s following Vigo’s research.

“In their announcements, I’ve heard what I would personally call moral panic.”

But Thea Sheridan-Jonah, co-chair of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, said she didn’t hear evidence presented for involuntary treatment.

“In their announcements, I’ve heard more what I would personally call moral panic,” Sheridan-Jonah told Filter.

On the contrary, Herriot said, there’s “significant research” showing the harms of forced treatment, including increased risk of overdose after discharge, as well as the trauma it causes patients.

“If you talk to the patients themselves who have been through this kind of thing, particularly for substance use disorder, the absolute trauma of this, and the breakdown of future trust in health care, health care interventions and professionals is difficult to quantify, but it’s significant,” Herriot said.

In fact, Vigo himself has recently published academic literature to this end.

A 2021 study in which Vigo is listed as a co-author asked patients who have undergone forced treatment what it should look like, and those patients said involuntary treatment was inappropriate for substance use.

“Not only is that youth’s trust broken with the health care system, but it’s also broken with the adults in their life who they’ve tried to trust.”

Sheridan-Jonah said she’s concerned about the long-term impacts of forced treatment on that breakdown in trust, as it leaves people less likely to seek medical help when they need it. That breakdown in trust, she noted, can extend to parents or other caregivers who have tried to support the person but also put them into forced treatment.

“So not only is that youth’s trust broken with the health care system, but it’s also broken with the adults in their life who they’ve tried to trust with their care,” Sheridan-Jonah said.

Eby described the use of long-acting buprenorphine, which is sold under the brand name Sublocade and can be effective for about a month after each dose, as giving patients a “window of clarity” to develop longer-term treatment plans because it reduces the ability of a person to get high on opioids.

And Vigo suggested using Sublocade could reduce their time being held involuntarily, as they could continue their treatment in the community.

But Sheridan-Jonah called that a “nefarious” line of reasoning, when resources for youth in the community are still scarce. She said she’s worried youth could have Sublocade forced on them, then be left in the community with little support.

Buprenorphine typically requires some amount of detoxification before being administered. But Herriot said that is changing, and there are ways through microdosing to introduce buprenorphine into the system slowly to avoid withdrawal. That is an off-label use, however, and it’s not clear that would be the standard of practice, meaning the policy could lead to more youth being forced to suffer through withdrawal.

Writing about the policy in the Mainlander, BC harm reduction worker Heather Tunold described a recent three-day withdrawal experience as “torture.”

“I have never wished for death, but in that window I imagined it as a reprieve. And that was with community, support, and love around me—conditions many young people will not have if this is forced on them,” Tunold wrote.

Herriot said he’s also concerned Sublocade could lead to people using street drugs in more chaotic and hazardous ways.

Because it blocks the high of opioids to a certain degree—but not entirely—he said he’s seen people overestimate the amount they need to take to break the Sublocade barrier. That only becomes more risky as the Sublocade leaves the person’s system, Herriot added.

Photograph via PxHere/Public Domain

The post BC Government Doubles Down on Forced Drug Treatment appeared first on Filter.

“You’re just trying to do the best you can to respond, and saving people’s lives, but it’s like you’re trying to bail out a boat with a thimble,” Kalicum told the BC Supreme Court on November 24.

Kalicum was the first witness to take the stand, in a hearing set to determine whether recent drug convictions against himself and Eris Nyx, co-founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), should be thrown out.

The two are pursuing a constitutional challenge, claiming the charges violate Sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protect the right to life, liberty and security of the person, and guard against discrimination based on, among other things, disability.

The charges came after the compassion club they operated with DULF, providing tested drugs to protect members from the adulterated street supply, was raided in 2023—just seven years after Kalicum had stepped into the harm reduction world. 

“They weren’t stopping the overdoses … It’s a red-light emergency.”

In early November, Kalicum and Nyx were convicted of three counts each of possession for the purpose of trafficking of heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine.

Kalicum’s November 24 testimony started off with a focus on his trajectory from graduating high school in 2014 to the charges laid against him in 2023.

He was driven by his family’s experience with the drug toxicity crisis, having seen his brother struggle. It was he who provided care to his brother when he overdosed, as they waited for paramedics.

Kalicum got a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology with the aim of becoming a medical doctor. But as he saw the crisis unfolding, he made a turn towards public health to pursue population-level solutions.

What he was seeing in practice wasn’t enough.

“They weren’t stopping the overdoses,” he told the court. “The overdoses were continuing to rise. There is no amount of overdose prevention sites or drug checking that you can do that can keep up with the rate that this crisis is progressing.”  

“Responding to 10, 12 overdoses a day at these sites, … walking home after a shift and finding dead bodies in alleys, seeing dead bodies in alleys, you realize that this is so bad,” Kalicum added. “It’s a red-light emergency.”

DULF lawyer Tim Dickson laid out three basic points, outling the framework for their case.

The hearing had begun with DULF lawyer Tim Dickson outlining the framework for their case that Nyx’s and Kalicum’s charges violated the constitution.

He laid out three basic points: that DULF’s compassion club was effective at reducing overdoses, deaths and a suite of other harms of prohibition; that prohibiting possession for the purpose of trafficking in this case renders the compassion club illegal, violating DULF members’ rights; and that there was no practically available safety valve in the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA).

Dickson lingered on the last point.

Section 56(1) of the CDSA is intended to act as a sort of safety valve—it allows exemptions to the legislation to ensure enforcement of the law doesn’t defeat the stated purpose of public safety and health.

It’s the section under which overdose prevention sites and drug checking services have been able to operate, and the section that enabled BC’s “decriminalization” pilot project.

But those examples are all related to blocking simple possession charges.

The DULF case stands out, as the exemption they sought from Health Canada was for possession for the purpose of trafficking. But that wasn’t realistically available to Nyx and Kalicum, Dickson argues.

“The court will hear that, while DULF hoped in the future to be able to distribute drugs from licit sources, illicit sources were the only option then available to it.”

DULF had tried getting safe-supply drugs from legal sources but found only a void, so turned to the illegal market.

But Health Canada was adamant that it wouldn’t entertain an application to sell drugs obtained from the illicit market, even as DULF argued there were no other options.

In fact, Health Canada was not considering any kind of de-medicalized safe supply program at all.

An expert advisory group urged Health Canada to implement a de-medicalized model, but when that group followed up with Health Canada, they were told it wasn’t an option.

What’s more, Section 56(1) only gave reprieve within the CDSA—it wouldn’t have lifted onerous regulations that the Food and Drugs Act would put on manufacturers supplying a legally sanctioned compassion club.

Fair Price Pharma founder Martin Schechter is expected to testify to that end, based on his company’s attempts at getting a licence to produce pharmaceutical heroin.

Dickson said in the hearing that while those regulations are plainly important for the pharmaceutical industry, “the court will need to consider the impact of these requirements in a harm reduction context.”  

“DULF was compelled to obtain drugs for its non-medicalized compassion club from illicit sources over the dark web,” he continued. “The court will hear that, while DULF hoped in the future to be able to distribute drugs from licit sources, illicit sources were the only option then available to it.”

The hearing is expected to run several weeks, potentially requiring sessions to be scheduled into January.

Photograph of Jeremy Kalicum outside the court in early November by Dustin Godfrey

The post DULF’s Constitutional Challenge to Compassion-Club Charges Begins appeared first on Filter.

Justice Catherine Murray pointed to the fact that none of the club’s 47 members overdosed on the supply in the first year of operations, citing a local public health official in calling it a promising sign of the model’s efficacy.

But the compassion club was nonetheless illegal by the letter of the law, Murray found. She convicted Drug User Liberation Front founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx of three counts each of possession for the purpose of trafficking. They could ultimately face prison time.

Still, in handing down the verdict, Murray made comments sympathetic to Nyx and Kalicum—and her implied criticisms of law enforcement and politicians teed the pair up for their pending constitutional challenge.

After Murray’s statement, lawyer Tim Dickson confirmed that the defense would be filing arguments that the charges violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Their challenge is set to be heard from November 24.

The Vancouver Police Department first arrested Nyx and Kalicum on October 25, 2023, after what Murray called a “maelstrom of activity” following an Economist article that September.

While Sturko appeared to take the verdict as an affirmation of the law, some of Murray’s comments may provide fuel for the constitutional challenge.

“The drug section of VPD, which was previously aware of DULF and the compassion club, but claims to not have been aware of the DULF site, commenced an investigation,” Murray said.

“Backbench politicians voiced concern about the government funding an organization that was sourcing drugs on the dark web,” she added.

That comment appeared to refer to, among others, now-independent provincial politician Elenore Sturko, who played a lead role in the moral panic over harm reduction that had begun in earnest a year earlier.

Sturko, who was in the courtroom for the verdict, appeared unfazed by the comment. But as she spoke outside the courthouse to a Global News reporter who has helped to fuel the anti-harm reduction movement, DULF supporters voiced their discontent, laughing as she said she had no animus towards Nyx and Kalicum.

And when other reporters on scene tried to ask questions, Sturko quickly left.

But while Sturko appeared to take the verdict as an affirmation of the law, some of Murray’s comments may provide fuel for the constitutional challenge.

DULF’s lawyers Tim and Stephanie Dickson didn’t stick around after the ruling for comment, but hints at their approach to challenging the constitutionality of the arrests may be found in the group’s other court case.

The Dicksons are also representing DULF in federal court, as the group challenges Health Canada’s 2022 decision to deny it an exemption to operate the compassion club.

Tim Dickson told Filter ahead of a 2024 federal court hearing that DULF was “pleading with Health Canada to become more engaged in solving this problem.”

At an October 2024 press conference (from left to right): Stephanie Dickson, Tim Dickson, Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx

They argue the decision to deny the exemption was political—that Health Canada was not engaging with the evidence behind safe supply, or the potentially life-saving effects of a compassion club.

An analysis founded on that evidentiary base, according to DULF, should lead to a recognition that denying the exemption would violate compassion club members’ Section 7 Charter right to life, liberty and security of the person.

Instead, DULF argues, the decision to deny the exemption rested on overblown fears of harm with scant evidence behind them.

Nyx and Kalicum were operating with broad approval from various levels of government, including letters of support from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), the City of Vancouver and even, to some degree, the VPD.

While VCH didn’t provide funding for the compassion club, it described it as “a community-led compassion club model that would provide members with access to safer tested drugs thereby reducing their overdose risk.” And it provided $200,000 for DULF’s overdose prevention site and drug-checking services.

In her decision, Murray appeared to take issue with the police investigation, seeming incredulous of their testimony.

And while the VPD told Nyx and Kalicum that it “could only support what was legal,” according to Murray, Inspector Phil Heard also “voiced support for their reasoning and motivation.”

Murray noted that Heard told the pair, “if there were complaints [about DULF], VPD would investigate.”

But for more than a year as DULF operated, there was no investigation and there were apparently no complaints—until there were.

In her decision, Murray appeared to take issue with the police investigation, seeming incredulous of their testimony.

“In his evidence at trial, Sgt. Mike Cheah, who headed up the VPD investigation, testified that he did not speak with VCH about DULF, even though the funding agreement was mentioned in the Economist article and the media attention focused on it,” Murray wrote.

“Nor did he consider the exemptions granted to DULF by VCH,” she continued. “In fact, Sgt. Cheah claimed to be unaware of the exemptions, despite them being mentioned in the Economist article and being posted on the wall in plain view in the office where the safes were in the DULF site.”

Kalicum outside the court in early November

Murray also pointed out misleading comments by politicians, such as federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, who called it a “disgrace” for the BC New Democratic Party to “give hundreds of thousands in tax dollars to illegal drug dealers in addition to decriminalizing hard drugs.”

“I pause to note that the VCH funding given to DULF was to support the overdose prevention site and the drug checking services,” Murray said, adding that DULF bought the compassion-club drugs “with funds they received from concerned individuals, not with the funds they received from the government.”

Murray’s comments during the trial highlight the degree to which public officials at every level were aware of DULF’s activities long before the arrests. 

“The troubling thing about this prosecution is that everyone knew what was happening. It seems like these two are being hung out to dry,” she said, according to Drug Data Decoded. “As soon as politicians started complaining, all of a sudden VPD—which before was fine—suddenly was not fine.”

By the time of their arrest, the evidence of the compassion club’s efficacy had only grown.

The comments point to a route of appeal similar to the judicial review argument before the federal court—that arresting and charging Nyx and Kalicum was a political decision, rather than one rooted in sound evidence.

And by the time of their arrest, the evidence of the compassion club’s efficacy had only grown, despite Health Canada’s earlier exemption rejection.  

Not only did no one overdose on DULF’s supply, but membership of the compassion club was associated with an overall likelihood of overdose that was lower by half, according to one study. That research wasn’t published until 2024, after the arrests, but DULF had already published preliminary survey data showing that to be the case.

And that finding was complemented by a slew of other benefits, including reduced interactions with police, fewer hospital visits, less exposure to violence, less reliance on the illicit market, reduced drug use and more. More of those findings were bolstered by peer review earlier in 2025.

And as evidence to support DULF mounts—alongside increasing evidence of the harms of drug enforcement and prohibition—Murray’s comments could inform an argument that the police were serving political ends as they broke the Charter’s right to life, liberty and security of the person.

All photographs, including top photograph of April 2025 rally in Vancouver, by Dustin Godfrey

The post “Hung Out to Dry”—DULF Pair Convicted But Plan Challenge appeared first on Filter.

BC had received an exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) to decriminalize possession of up to a cumulative 2.5 grams of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, beginning at the end of January 2023. 

Section 56 of the CDSA allows Health Canada to provide exemptions for medical or scientific purposes, or if it is in the public interest. That provision also paved the way for supervised consumption sites.

But while BC’s decrim program was supposed to last three years, the province began attempting to effectively end it only nine months in.

It started with Bill 34, which severely restricted outdoor drug use. When that was blocked by a temporary court injunction, the province turned to Health Canada to change the CDSA exemption for even more stringent restrictions on public drug use.

The provincial government cited concerns about public safety. But lawyers representing a coalition of 13 drug-user groups and nonprofits argued in court that the move was purely political.

The federal government’s decision to recriminalize drug possession in all BC public spaces was granted on May 7—less than a week after the provincial government applied for the sweeping changes, with no consultation with people who use drugs. 

Lawyer Jack Ruttle said in federal court that Health Canada had a legal obligation to consult Indigenous groups and people who use drugs before making such a drastic change.

That, argued Jack Ruttle, one of three lawyers representing the coalition, stood in stark contrast with the six months Health Canada took to consider initiation of the decrim pilot—and even with the one month the agency took to consider a minor September 2023 amendment that excluded playgrounds, splashpads and skateparks.

Ruttle said in federal court that Health Canada had a legal obligation to consult Indigenous groups and people who use drugs before making such a drastic change.

Instead, lawyers said, officials ignored a May 6 letter from people who use drugs pleading for consultations.

Lawyer Lindsay Frame argued that the province turning to Health Canada to seek even more sweeping restrictions than in Bill 34 amounts to “mischief,” given the earlier court decision that found the government’s first attempt potentially unconstitutional.

Frame pointed to comments by the BC Supreme Court’s then-chief justice Christopher Hinkson in his January 2024 decision to grant a temporary injunction on Bill 34.

Provincial government lawyers had contended opponents of the legislation wanted to allow people to use drugs “nearly wherever they want.” But Hinkson wasn’t convinced, saying the province “can always relegislate in a manner that meets constitutional standards.”

At issue was the broad nature of the legislation. Bill 34 gave police the power to tell people to move along if they merely suspected them of using drugs in parks, beaches and within six metres of doorways and bus stops. These restrictions covered nearly all of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where many people use drugs outside, opponents argued—and such broad discretionary powers for police often result in abuses of power.

But rather than relegislate, the province turned to Health Canada to circumvent the courts, Frame said.

Health Canada’s rush to approve recriminalization was particularly egregious, Frame said, given the heightened risk of death if people are pushed to use drugs alone.

When Health Canada approved the September 2023 amendment to the decrim pilot, she continued, the agency took a balanced approach, consulting people who use drugs and Indigenous groups to ensure the changes weren’t out of line. While the exclusion of parks and beaches was considered then, input on how people who use drugs sometimes shelter in those places saw the idea rejected. 

“We say that makes a lot of sense because there’s a balancing going on,” Frame said.

She noted that at the time, Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry questioned whether there was actually an increase in public drug use that could be attributable to decriminalization, when Metro Vancouver has seen a 32-percent increase in homelessness in recent years.

Henry had balanced any potential issue of increased public drug use against the risk posed by criminalization—that is, people being pushed to use alone in secluded spaces where they are at greater risk of dying from overdoses.

“It’s not clear to us there has been any change in terms of the underlying facts and evidence between the first and the second amendment,” Frame said.

All that had changed, she argued, was public perception and political pressure.

Health Canada’s rush to approve the decision to recriminalize possession in public spaces was particularly egregious, Frame said, given the heightened risk of death if people are pushed to use drugs alone.

Justice Meaghan Conroy appeared to find BC government lawyer de Lima’s arguments dubious.

Provincial government lawyer Fernando de Lima, however, sought to argue against the idea that decriminalization could reduce overdose deaths. He noted that the pilot was always just one of a number of tools to address a multi-faceted issue, including a variety of harm reduction measures and treatment.

Despite decriminalization, drug toxicity deaths had increased to their highest point ever in 2023, de Lima said, and the 2023 total wouldn’t have been available to Hinkson in January 2024, impairing his ability to make a decision based on all the facts. 

By the time of Hinkson’s decision, data had been made public for the first 10 months of 2023.

Justice Meaghan Conroy appeared to find de Lima’s arguments dubious.

“Would you acknowledge it’s very hard to draw causation from that in any way?” she asked him. “Is it uncontroversial to say that it’s less risky for folks to use not alone?”

De Lima responded by pointing to the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act, which protects people who call 911 for an overdose from simple possession charges.

But Conroy pressed him multiple times on the matter, saying the question was about people being pushed to use alone due to criminalization. 

De Lima conceded there was “probably … a residual possibility that would occur.”

But prosecution services both provincially and federally have been given directions not to pursue charges in cases that only involve simple possession of drugs, he maintained. 

Others, however, have noted that charges are not the only cause of fear among people who use drugs. Drug seizures by police are associated with increases in overdoses, and some have pointed to the violence that can take place following drug seizures and other related harms.

On the matter of drug seizures and arrests, lawyers for the coalition noted that the decriminalization pilot was a success. Frame pointed to a 96-percent drop in drug seizures and a 77-percent drop in simple possession charges.

Yet federal government lawyer Adrienne Copithorne argued that the original decrim exemption did not set a new standard to which people have a constitutional right.

Adding more restrictions to the exemption only reverts closer to the CDSA status quo, Copithorne said, and the coalition hasn’t challenged the constitutionality of that legislation. She noted the court found section 4(1) of the CDSA, which criminalizes simple possession, to be compliant with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and said many of the coalition’s arguments have been against criminalization broadly.

Coalition lawyers also noted the ticking clock, when the pilot is due to expire in January 2026.

Judicial reviews of administrative decisions are typically sent back to the decision-maker—in this case, Health Canada—for reconsideration. But the coalition’s lawyers argued that the judge should instead simply cancel the May 7 decision.

Frame argued that even if the matter were sent back to the agency, the effect should be to revert back to the conditions under the first amendment, because that would be the status quo prior to a faulty decision.

Coalition lawyers also noted the ticking clock, when the pilot is due to expire in January 2026. But it is not clear when the judge will come to a decision.

A federal court judge heard a comparable case in March 2024, concerning an exemption application for a compassion club operated by the Drug User Liberation Front, but no decision has yet come out of that.

Photograph by Katrin Bolovtsova via Pexels

The post Drug-User Groups Fight BC Recriminalization in Court appeared first on Filter.

The Conservative Party’s platform itself was antagonistic towards harm reduction and people who use drugs. The party campaigned on a “tough-on-crime” agenda, which sought to limit or end harm reduction programs, characterized safe consumption sites as “drug dens,” and pushed for a life sentence for trafficking just 40 milligrams of fentanyl.

While many conservative personalities and politicians have shaped this political discourse over the last few years, newly elected Vancouver Island-area MP Aaron Gunn was an early and influential factor. 

In Canada’s first-past-the-post system, with three major parties, races are often won with well under a majority of the vote, and Gunn’s election was no different, with 39 percent supporting him on April 28.

Gunn benefited from the collapse of the center-left New Democratic Party, which had held the riding since it was created in 2015.

Gunn’s work after leaving the BC Liberals—in both politics and media—helped lay the ground for his own electoral success and wider political shifts. 

“To see Aaron Gunn finding a home in [Pierre] Poilievre’s Conservative Party is no surprise to me at all,” Garth Mullins, author of the new bestselling memoir Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs and a member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, told Filter.

Gunn is a YouTuber who was disqualified from the leadership race for the right-wing BC Liberal Party in 2021 over social media comments on gender diversity and systemic racism, which he called “a myth.”

But his work after leaving the BC Liberals—in both politics and media—helped lay the ground for his own electoral success and wider political shifts. 

Gunn went on to produce the documentary-style video Vancouver Is Dying, which today has over 4.5 million views. The film blamed decriminalization and safe supply for perceived increases in crime and public drug use—disregarding the key drivers of growing inequality and homelessness.

Upon its October 2022 release, Vancouver is Dying was immediately promoted by billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson—through his political organization Pacific Prosperity Network, founded to help conservative municipal and provincial politicians get elected.

And it may have played a significant role in the right-wing A Better City (ABC) Vancouver slate sweeping that month’s city council election. That local party includes a former Vancouver Police Department media relations officer, and received a convention-defying endorsement from the Vancouver Police Union, whose president prominently features in Vancouver Is Dying.

Gunn also played a role in rebuilding the provincial BC Conservatives, who piggybacked on the momentum of Poilievre’s Conservatives by aligning their branding with the otherwise unaffiliated federal party.

Common Sense BC, a group launched by Gunn to effectively replace the BC Liberals, worked to elect a group of aligned political actors to the BC Conservatives’ board in 2022. Some of them have stayed with the party, including a Vancouver Is Dying executive producer who is widely credited with building its all-but-successful 2024 provincial election campaign.

Gunn continued pushing “tough-on-crime” and anti-harm reduction videos, including the Vancouver Is Dying follow-up Canada Is Dying.

While the BC Conservatives did not win that election, they did replace Gunn’s former party (by then renamed BC United) as the British Columbia’s dominant right-wing force.

But Gunn had moved on to federal politics by then. In October 2023, he announced his candidacy for the North Island-Powell River riding, with an aim to turn the seat Conservative.

Even before then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole could take a run at the 2021 federal election, Gunn had been pushing for Poilievre to replace him. And after the Conservatives lost that election, Gunn celebrated Poilievre’s victory in the party’s subsequent leadership race.

That was less than a month before Vancouver Is Dying was released, and Gunn’s public adoration of Poilievre only continued. His YouTube channel is populated with videos such as “New Vancouver Mayor Goes Hard Left; Picks Fights With Pierre Poilievre,” “Pierre Poilievre CALLS OUT Trudeau’s LOVE AFFAIR with Communist China,” and “Pierre Poilievre’s Riveting Defence of Free Speech.”

At the same time, Gunn continued pushing “tough-on-crime” and anti-harm reduction videos, including the Vancouver Is Dying follow-up Canada Is Dying. He published one video erroneously suggesting that legal, “for-profit cocaine” was coming to BC, another touting the “Alberta model” of drug policy and—just days before the latest federal election was called—another titled “The Deadliest Scandal in Canadian History,” referring to “failed” drug policies.  

Gunn is prominent among several media personalities who have successfully pushed an anti-harm reduction agenda in Canada. Their narrative has bled from fringe media into right-wing publications like the National Post and on into more mainstream publications.

And this narrative has helped catalyze policy shifts locally, provincially and federally.

Messages like Poilievre’s campaign ad, “Everything feels broken in Canada,” echoed Vancouver Is Dying in substance and style.

After the 2022 success of ABC Vancouver, local police received a significant boost to their budget, and have increased policing of marginalized populations under a controversy-ridden campaign with dubiously approved funding; the city immediately ramped up sweeps of unhoused people and has moved to curb supportive housing and harm reduction.

Since winning the 2024 provincial election, meanwhile, the BC New Democratic Party government has continued its trend of consistently folding to political attacks against harm reduction programs—including safe supply, decriminalization and provision of other harm reduction supplies—and has expanded involuntary treatment. 

Many of those attacks came from the BC Conservatives, or from politicians who would eventually ditch the BC United for the BC Conservatives.

And nationally, the government has engaged in a ramped-up drug war, partly in response to Trump’s trade war, but also in alignment with a rightward shift in the public drug-policy discourse.

Centrist parties, such as the BC New Democratic Party and the federal Liberal Party, managed to limit electoral advances by provincial and federal conservative parties in 2024 and 2025. But reduced to minority governments, they now need to rely on other parties to pass legislation.

Mullins said one reason for the advances of conservatives—particularly the federal Conservative Party—has been their appeals to working class politics.

Their faux working class veneer, Mullins said, has included politics that throw people who use drugs under the bus—in particular messages like Poilievre’s campaign ad, “Everything feels broken in Canada,” which echoed Vancouver Is Dying in substance and style.

“When Poilievre says ‘everything in Canada feels broken,’ that feels true to me—a lot of things in Canada are broken,” Mullins said.

He pointed in particular to a growing affordability crisis, paired with rising inequality in Canada.

“[Poilievre] starts by talking about that in a way that the NDP really doesn’t. But that’s the bait. And then comes the switch. The switch is: ‘Well, we have to blame drug users. We have to blame trans kids. We have to blame immigrants,’” Mullins said.

“The NDP spent decades distancing itself from the working class, trying to ‘clean itself up.’ … That left the ground open for blue-collar cosplayers like Poilievre and the Conservatives, and Aaron Gunn was able to benefit as well.”

“Instead of putting the blame where it really is: the Galen Westons, the big real estate developers, governments from the Liberals and the Tories that have been de-regulating capitalism for the past several decades and allowing it to just asset-strip the country and the planet.”

Weston is the billionaire whose family’s holding company, George Weston Ltd., controls Loblaw, Canada’s largest food retailer, among other assets. Weston has been an avatar for inequality in the country—particularly as food prices skyrocketed during a recent period of high inflation.

Mullins said the traditionally left-wing New Democratic Party takes a share of the blame for the Conservatives’ ability to appeal to the working class.

“The NDP spent the last several decades distancing itself from the working class, from unions, from socialism, from labor politics, trying to ‘clean itself up’ and make itself look like this neutral centrist party,” he said.

“That left the ground open for blue-collar cosplayers like Poilievre and the Conservatives, and Aaron Gunn was able to benefit from that as well.”

Photograph by Erik Mclean via Pexels

The post How New MP Aaron Gunn Helped Turn Canada Against Harm Reduction appeared first on Filter.

While renovations are being completed on a permanent space, the treatment is currently being housed in Surrey Pretrial Centre’s solitary confinement unit, as local media reported.

It’s not clear how the treatment will be run in the segregation unit, nor how much time detainees will get to spend with others.

“Nobody thinks it’s a good idea.”

But the move has drawn objections from people who use drugs in BC, who say solitary confinement—officially termed “administrative segregation”—would, for many people, exacerbate the mental health conditions that often co-occur with substance use disorders.

“Nobody thinks it’s a good idea,” Dave Webb, a board member with the Surrey Union of Drug Users, told Filter.

“How is putting somebody in segregation good for somebody who’s already mentally unstable?” he asked. “I thought in treatment we were supposed to reconnect with our loved ones and family and friends to break the cycle. But if we’re putting somebody in segregation, how is that going to work?”

In voluntary treatment, patients will often have access to peers and counseling. Webb noted that a solitary unit likely isn’t equipped for that kind of socialization.

“In segregation, you’re going to be there with your own thoughts. And that’s probably the worst thing that you can have at that period of time,” he said.

Webb has questions about how people will be treated, including during withdrawal from benzodiazepines, which can require medical expertise, in the solitary confinement unit.

He also wants to know how they will be treated after they are released—whether people will simply be returned to the same conditions they were living in that drove their mental health and substance use issues in the first place. 

“You can’t just treat somebody, then throw them to the wolves again, because they’re right back where they started from,” he said.

Filter reached out to the BC public safety and health ministries for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

“Ideally, we’d have voluntary treatment because, as we know, involuntary treatment doesn’t work.”

Experts agree that involuntary treatment, whether coerced or forced, is ineffective and often harmful, even before the impact of potential segregation is factored in.

“Ideally, we’d have voluntary treatment because, as we know, involuntary treatment doesn’t work,” Webb said. “If you force someone to go and they’re not ready, it’s not going to work. As soon as they get out, they’re going to go back to their old ways.” 

You’re more likely to fatally overdose after attending treatment, he noted. “You’ve got way better odds when you’re voluntarily trying to get better yourself.”

Webb called the provincial government’s April announcement rushing the implementation of involuntary treatment beds a “knee-jerk reaction.” He noted that it came the same day police announced that a man accused of attacking a tourist in Stanley Park, Vancouver, was released on bail.

Political discourse around bail has grown in recent years, with conservative politicians and police suggesting that Canada’s rules amount to a “catch-and-release” system, or a revolving door for repeat offenders.

That includes the BC NDP, which has called for the federal government to introduce stricter bail conditions.

Webb said he is concerned that implementing involuntary treatment in remand centers is a way to circumvent the right of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime to not be incarcerated.

The Ontario Court of Appeal specifically noted that “those with mental illness should not be placed in administrative segregation.”

Though the BC Mental Health Act is currently subject of a constitutional challenge, the legislation provides the ability to detain a person indefinitely, raising yet more questions about how the treatment will be conducted in segregation units.

While there hasn’t been a court case over BC’s provincial segregation, courts decided in two separate 2019 cases that indefinite segregation in federal prisons was unconstitutional.

In fact, the Ontario Court of Appeal specifically noted that “those with mental illness should not be placed in administrative segregation” in a case brought by the Ontario-based Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

That case ended with a finding that administrative segregation in federal prisons for longer than 15 days violated Section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

The other case brought against federal administrative segregation, brought by the BC Civil Liberties Association, was successful in the BC Court of Appeal, which found indefinite segregation violated the liberty and security of the person guaranteed under Section 7 of the Charter.

The court noted that “prolonged and indefinite segregation inflicts harm on inmates subject to it and ultimately undermines the goal of institutional security.”

Photograph by Édouard Hue via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0

The post BC Involuntary Treatment Taking Place in a Solitary Confinement Unit appeared first on Filter.