Criticism of B.C.’s drug policy as the province marks 7 years of the toxic drug crisis

As British Columbia marks seven years since declaring a public health emergency over the toxic drug crisis, community members in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside gathered together to reflect on and highlight a deadly failure in drug policy.

Dozens of people gathered Friday afternoon at Oppenheimer Park to mark the occasion by marching in a parade, singing songs, and eating food together.

“This is a community celebration of resilience in the face of year seven of the overdose crisis,” Eris Nyx, the co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), explained.

“It’s celebrating life, really. It’s about celebrating the fact that some of us have survived this. Yeah, we’re losing a lot of people, but at the same time, it’s like, we need to not reflect on that all the time,” Kali Sedgemore, a peer support worker, told CityNews.

The emergency was declared in the province due to skyrocketing deaths from unregulated illicit toxic drugs, and since then, about 11,000 British Columbians have died.

“Everyone’s dead. That’s the sad reality…The fact is that drug policy is not changing, and the longer you let it languish, the worse this situation is going to get,” Nyx said.

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However, the B.C. government has made some changes over the last several years. In January, the decriminalization of possession of small amounts of illicit drugs started. This was something that public health experts, police, and advocates called for.

But some advocates say decriminalizing drugs doesn’t go far enough, with some saying this has characterized the government’s whole approach.

Drug researcher Mark Haden, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, says B.C. needs to realize prohibition doesn’t work, and it needs to regulate all drugs.

“‘We have realized that drug prohibition doesn’t work. We need to end it and produce a health response to drugs.’ That’s the announcement, and then we’re off to the races. Then we say, okay, ‘how do we regulate different drugs? How are we going to regulate cocaine?’ [It] is probably going to be different from how we regulate opiates,” he said.

“That’s how we need to talk about it, as opposed to what we’re doing now, which is kind of minimalist and small incremental changes that still produce an overdose death crisis.”

In lieu of those big changes, for the past seven months the DULF says it has been buying drugs on the black market, testing them, and then giving them to a small group of club members in protest.

Although it plans to keep expanding this program, Nyx says more has to be done.

“The solution isn’t DULF. DULF is just a game plan. It’s a game plan you can expand easily all across the province,” she said.