The ethical drug-dealers of Vancouver
Eris Nyx, one of the store’s managers, looked on from the cash point. She runs the shop with Jeremy Kalicum, who was in the back office weighing and packaging cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. “The fact that we’re not in jail is unbelievable,” said Eris. “I think about that every day.” Their shop was the culmination of a long experiment: how flagrantly could they traffic clean drugs without going to jail? At one of [DULF’s] early events, in the summer of 2021, they gave away free drugs in a police-station car park. Officers allowed the event to carry on. A sympathetic city councillor spoke to the gathered crowd about the need for a safer supply.
“Safe supply has to be as easy as calling your guy and getting the thing you want for the price you’re willing to pay,” said Phoenix, who is a regular at the shop and asked only to be identified by her first name. The drug store run by the Drug User Liberation Front [DULF] – as Eris and Jeremy have named their initiative – has been running for a year. No customer has yet died of an overdose. In 2015, Eris was working at a bike-repair shop when she heard that staff at a nearby homeless shelter made twice her wage. She quit to pick up shifts there instead. The next year [2016], the province of British Columbia, where Vancouver is located, declared a public health emergency. People were dying in large numbers from street drugs tainted with fentanyl, which mimicked the effects of heroin at a fraction of the price but could be fatal even at small doses. Eris observed the drug’s prevalence amongst the shelter’s residents: “You’d have ten overdoses on your shift,” she said. Nearly a thousand people died of overdoses in the province that year, often by contaminated street drugs. Within five years, more than twice as many were dying annually. Media attention felt important to [DULF ]in the beginning, but it made their work harder. “People look up Drug User Liberation Front, and it’s like, ‘Look at this crazy transexual bitch handing out heroin to the homeless,’” Eris said. The organisation also had trouble opening a bank account. Eris suspects her manner might put people off. “I have a folder in my email called ‘death threats’,” she confided. [DULF’s] focus now is more narrow: prove the model works, and establish its legality in court. It has appealed the health ministry’s rejection of its drug-law exemption request, and is preparing its case. Precedent may be in the group’s favour. After North America’s first supervised injection site, Insite, opened in Vancouver in 2003, it was challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, but survived. Insite, too, had been preceded by an illegal proof of concept. Eris and Jeremy hope that dulf will emulate that path: a criminal enterprise one day, a public-health success the next.
Original Article (The Economist):
The ethical drug-dealers of Vancouver
Artwork Fair Use: Jogi don
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