BC United calls for investigation into Vancouver harm reduction program
Posted September 29, 2023 10:47 pm.
BC United is calling for an investigation into how the provincial government funds a harm reduction program in Vancouver, which buys and tests illegal drugs for its members, but the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) says the party is wrong about how they’re paying for it.
In Budget Estimates, Minister Whiteside denied the NDP government was working on policy with respect to illicit drug compassion clubs. We now know the NDP has been funding DULF – an organization which traffics hard drugs purchased on the dark web under the compassion club model. pic.twitter.com/vBcnkY7ePA
— Elenore Sturko (@elenoresturko) September 29, 2023
“Our primary concern is that we have public funding and public taxpayer support going to an organization that has publicly stated that they use cryptocurrency to buy illicit drugs from the dark web, and traffic them in Vancouver,” BC United MLA Elenore Sturko said.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether or not the public funds were actually converted to crypto to be used for the purchase of drugs or not. The bottom line is this government is providing support — financial support from the public purse — to support an organization that has bought drugs from the dark web.”
BC United is saying this taxpayer funding is coming from the BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), but DULF’s leaders say the party has the wrong idea. The organization has been buying and testing illicit drugs off the dark web for over a year, and giving them to 52 people as part of a study.
“All funds that we use to buy illicit narcotics come from crowdsourced funding,” DULF Co-Founder Eris Nyx told CityNews.
“Our program which sells tested, regulated narcotics – is one of the few successful responses to drug toxicity deaths in our community,” she added. “Public funding from Vancouver Coastal Health is used on the development, implementation, and delivery of drug checking services, training and overdose prevention recognition and response, and harm reduction equipment.”
DULF’s early findings suggest that its members have reduced drug use, overdose risk, buying from the black market and, and no one has died.
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Nyx says the early findings also suggest that — within DULF’s study group — there was a 32 per cent decrease in overdoses requiring naloxone administration and a 35 per cent reduction in all overdoses.
Vancouver Coastal Health gave $200,000 to DULF last year, and states that funding it provides “to partners for overdose prevention does not go through the BCCSU.”
“The position of BC. United is anti-scientific, it is not backed by evidence, and currently, we’re in a public health crisis — what we should be listening to is scientific evidence and not demagoguery,” said Nyx.
https://twitter.com/DULFBC/status/1706393208283074884
Meanwhile, in a statement to CityNews, B.C.’s Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Jennifer Whiteside, says DULF’s contract with Vancouver Coastal Health is “explicitly for drug checking, overdose prevention training, and harm reduction services.”
“It is extremely disappointing that a partner organization has engaged in illegal activities. I have directed Vancouver Coastal Health [to] review the funding relationship with this organization,” she said.
The BCCSU adds that it supports an evaluation of DULF’s compassion club program, a review they say would include “data collection and qualitative interviews with program participants.”
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where DULF operates, has a toxic drug death rate significantly higher than the rest of the province according to BC Centre for Disease Control data.
