The Liberal Party of Canada has voted in favour of removing criminal penalties for the personal possession of drugs. It's one of a number of policies that the party selected as priorities at a convention in Halifax on Saturday (April 21). Members also voted in favour of universal pharmacare, decriminalizing consensual sex work, and expanding medicare to cover mental-health issues. A total of 15 policies were selected to become official party priorities. However, a policy's status as a party priority does not mean that party leaders have to include it in the document where it really counts: the party's campaign platform for the next federal election. [continues 495 words]
An unusual aspect of Canada's soon-to-be-legal cannabis market is that the activists who led the legalization movement may find themselves excluded from the industry for which their efforts paved the way. Vancouver activists like Jodie and Marc Emery and dispensary pioneer Don Briere, for example, have criminal records for possessing and selling marijuana. Now those criminal records could be used against them in federal and provincial licensing systems that are under development to decide who gets to cultivate and sell recreational cannabis. [continues 769 words]
Decades after Canada abandoned the field, the B.C. Centre on Substance Use is investigating the benefits of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin In 2011, Gerald Thomas was invited to an Indigenous community in a remote area of British Columbia. Working for the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., he was one of a small team of scientists who observed 12 people take ayahuasca, an Amazonian mixture that induces vivid visual and auditory hallucinations as well as deep emotional and intellectual reflection. [continues 2903 words]
Vancouver has a history pioneering harm-reduction programs. In 2003, it opened North America's first supervised-injection facility, Insite. In 2014, it moved a prescription-heroin program beyond the confines of an academic study. Now B.C. will launch its most radical drug program yet. It's a plan that one of the province's top doctors says could be a partial solution to the province's opioid crisis. Tentatively scheduled to begin in March 2018, Vancouver will dispense hydromorphone-a synthetic opioid similar to heroin-in a way that, if all goes according to plan, will not require a doctor's visit and possibly not even a prescription for the powerful drug. [continues 729 words]
Complaints about marijuana dispensaries have increased each year since the City of Vancouver implemented a licensing regimen in 2015. But even after three years of consecutive growth, the number remains relatively small. In 2015, there were 30 complaints, according to data supplied by the city. Then 84 in 2016 and 112 in 2017 (up to December 6). For comparison's sake, so far in 2017 the city has received 348 complaints about other business categories (excluding illegal housing suites and short-term rentals like those on Airbnb). Meanwhile, this year there have been 5,529 complaints about potholes and 7,734 about streetlight outages. [continues 366 words]
There is no silver bullet for North America's fentanyl crisis, according to the architect of Portugal's drug-policy framework, widely considered the most progressive in the world. "It is a difficult problem," Dr. Joao Goulao told the Straight by phone. "I have no magical insight for it." Illicit drugs are on track to kill more than 1,500 people in B.C. this year, up from an annual average of 204 deaths recorded between 2001 and 2010. So far in 2017, the B.C. Coroners Service has detected fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, in 78 percent of drug fatalities. [continues 727 words]
At her office in the Downtown Eastside, Lorna Bird argued that Canada's drug laws actually hurt people a lot more than the drugs themselves. "I lost two daughters to the war on drugs," she told the Georgia Straight. The first one died of AIDS in 1994. Bird explained that at the time, Vancouver needle-exchange programs operated with a strict one-for-one requirement. That forced intravenous drug users to share dirty needles, spreading HIV. In 2008, another daughter died of an overdose. Bird maintained that if she had been able to purchase drugs legally, from a supply that was regulated and, therefore, clean, she would still be alive today. [continues 374 words]
With Canada now well on its way to legal recreational marijuana, what is there left for activists to protest at Vancouver's annual 4/20 event? Plenty, according to organizers of the massive gathering, which is scheduled to happen this Thursday (April 20) at Sunset Beach in the city's West End. In a telephone interview, Canada's most prominent advocate for marijuana reform, Jodie Emery, was highly critical of legislation the Liberal government tabled in Parliament on April 13. "It is prohibition 2.0," she told the Georgia Straight. "It is not legalization. It is a continuation of the kind of criminalization that we've seen before, with the introduction of even harsher laws that will victimize even more peaceful Canadians." [continues 677 words]
The leader of the B.C. Green party has said that the fentanyl crisis is a reason for Canada to have a national debate about legalizing drugs, including heroin. "This is a very important discussion that we need to have," Andrew Weaver told the Straight. "If you want to deal with organized crime in the drug area, legalization is the way forward. But we're not ready for that here in Canada yet." Weaver is the MLA for Oak Bay- Gordon Head and a distinguished climate scientist. He explained that although studies show that there are benefits to legalizing drugs for both individual addicts and society as a whole-improving people's physical health and reducing crime, for example-the general public requires more time and education to better understand those issues and the controversial policies to which they relate. [continues 236 words]
On Tuesday (February 21), exactly 914 feathers will hang from the trees in Oppenheimer Park. They will symbolize the 914 people who died of an illicit-drug overdose in B.C. in 2016. The feathers will be carved out of wood and as many as possible will bear the name of somebody who died after taking drugs. The Vancouver demonstration is part of a national day of action that is so far planned for seven cities across Canada. In B.C., events are also planned for Victoria and Nanaimo. [continues 559 words]
In the late 1990s, Sam Sullivan, today the Liberal MLA for Vancouver-False Creek, paid for a 20-year-old sex worker's heroin habit for a period of three weeks. He was a city councillor at the time. The story was front-page news in 2005, when Sullivan made a successful run for mayor. During the campaign, he refused to apologize for helping the girl purchase drugs. "I had become very angry with a society that would let this lovely young woman degrade herself because our morals wouldn't allow us to accept where she was and help her try to move past it without destroying her life in the process," Sullivan told the Vancouver Courier that year. [continues 702 words]
Vancouver's Hedy Fry differs from the prime minister on where the national dialogue on fentanyl should go In 1999, Dr. Hedy Fry flew to Switzerland to learn about how the European country had responded to a surge in drug-overdose deaths. "I travelled around with the police," the Liberal MP for Vancouver Centre recounted in a telephone interview. If they found someone addicted to drugs who was injecting on the street, Fry continued, the police would stop and offer to take the individual to a clinic where there were a doctor and nurses. [continues 921 words]
The founder of two pop-up injection sites won't stay silent during the fentanyl crisis Last Christmas Eve, Sarah Blyth was working the front desk at one of the Downtown Eastside's nonprofit hotels when she heard a call from the alley out back. "There was a person outside and he was dying," the former park board commissioner recounted in an interview last January. "So I went running over with the Narcan kit." It was Blyth's first time injecting somebody with the overdose antidote, and she admitted she was shaken by the experience. [continues 1276 words]
In the rain last Saturday afternoon (November 27), a young First Nations man lay unconscious in a Downtown Eastside alley. The lower half of his body remained inside a tent that volunteers had pitched as an unsanctioned supervised-injection site. It's one of two locations they've made available to drug users in response to the fentanyl crisis and an unprecedented number of drug overdose deaths. "We gave the man four shots of naloxone, mouth-to-mouth, and [chest] compressions, and he came back," recounted Laura Shaver, a volunteer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) who was working at the tent that day. [continues 399 words]
This Christmas, Dianne Tobin will celebrate one year free of heroin. It will be the longest she's remained off the drug in 40 years. "It's been touchy at times, because I went down [in dosage] so fast," she told the Georgia Straight over coffee in the Downtown Eastside. "It was tough at first, going down so much at one time. But it was working for me." Tobin owes her success at getting off street heroin to an unconventional therapy: since the winter of 2011, a doctor has prescribed her diacetylmorphine, or prescription heroin. [continues 940 words]
In another sign that Canada's booming marijuana industry has gone corporate, dozens of companies have registered as paid lobbyists ahead of Ottawa's plan to legalize the drug's recreational use next spring. As of March 19, the federal government's lobbyist registry listed 88 paid positions with interests in marijuana or cannabis. The companies named range from small, independent businesses like Vancouver's Eden Medicinal Society to large corporations, including the Loblaws chain of more than 2,000 supermarkets across Canada. [continues 455 words]
The City of Vancouver has long led the way on harm reduction. For more than a decade now, its two supervised-injection sites have made it the only jurisdiction in North America with facilities where addicts can inject drugs under the watchful care of nurses. But the suburbs that surround Vancouver have taken more cautious and conservative approaches to drugs, declining to host safe-consumption sites of their own. That's finally beginning to change. Fraser Health, the authority responsible for care in communities from Burnaby to Hope in the Fraser Valley, has revealed that it plans to open multiple sites where users can inject heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and other drugs. [continues 445 words]
Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) has initiated a shakeup among community services in the Downtown Eastside. The regional health-care provider has eliminated funding for the Drug User Resource Centre (DURC), which has operated on East Cordova Street across from Oppenheimer Park since 2003. That building, a community centre run by the Portland Hotel Society, has served as a home base for some controversial harm-reduction programs. Those include an alcohol-maintenance program where alcoholics brew their own beer, as well as support groups for crack and meth users. By cutting the DURC'S funding, VCH will save $650,000 a year. [continues 251 words]
This Friday (April 29) is the deadline for illicit marijuana dispensaries to shut their doors or risk steep city fines and other disciplinary measures. The city estimates there are about 80 storefronts selling cannabis that will be affected by the order to close. By the Straight's calculation, that means $10 million to $29 million could be forced back into Vancouver's underground economy every month. "It's an enormous amount," said Jodie Emery, owner of Cannabis Culture and long-time advocate for drug-policy reform. "People have always found a way to find pot, whether it's a corporate-looking storefront or a shady dealer in an alleyway. Which would the government prefer we have? By saying 'We want to shut down these shops', it's saying the government prefers the alternative, and the alternative is shady street-level dealing." [continues 365 words]
Since 2003, the Drug Users Resource Centre (DURC) has operated as a low-barrier drop-in centre for Downtown Eastside residents who face extreme marginalization for mental-health and addiction issues. The building at East Cordova and Dunlevy run by the Portland Hotel Society sees roughly 1,000 clients a day. But that's about to end or, at the very least, may undergo major changes. Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) has eliminated the centre's annual operating budget of $650,000. Portland Hotel Society interim executive director Eamonn O'laocha confirmed the news to the Straight. [continues 288 words]
