TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE DRUG WAR RIGHT FUCKING NOW

A Report from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

For over a hundred years, Vancouver has been ground zero for the drug war.

North America’s first needle exchange program started in Vancouver. The city was also home to the continent’s first supervised injection site. Fentanyl first hit the streets in Vancouver, as did benzodope.

I could go on, but I think my point is clear. What happens in Vancouver tends to spread to the rest of Canada.

I’ve always considered Vancouver a sort of crystal ball, providing a glimpse into the future of the drug war.

Recently, I spent several days conducting interviews on East Hastings street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a.k.a. Skid Row. I used to live on the street in Vancouver, and I’ve spent a lot of time on Hastings street over the years. As a long-time proponent of the decriminalization of all drugs, I wanted to investigate the current state of the drug war.

I interviewed a whole bunch people on the street, most of whom were addicts. I also interviewed some veteran drug war activists, including Neil Magnusson and David Malmo-Levine.

Eventually, someone recommended that I connect with the fine folks of VANDU (Vancouver Area Network for Drug Users), who were very generous with their time. I also interviewed someone from a drop-in centre for street-level sex workers, and learned that some DTES residents believe that a serial killer is currently on the loose.

What I found was shocking, and I’m writing today with a great sense of urgency. I pray to God that someone out there listens to what I have to say, because this is a matter of life and death. People are dying, and a lot more people will die if things continue on their current trajectory.

I encourage my readers to take some time to watch some of the interviews that I did, because no one knows what’s going on better than the people on the street.

We need to start listening to the voices of the people on the street NOW. It really is a matter of life and death.

1. Hard drug use is completely open on the Downtown East Side

You can’t walk down East Hastings without seeing a whole ton of people shooting up and smoking crack.

It is completely open. No one is worried about cops. If you go down to East Hastings, you will find no shortage of people willing to let you film them shooting up or smoking crack. You could go blow crack smoke into a cop’s face on East Hastings, and you wouldn’t get arrested. They wouldn’t even confiscate your crack.

Many of us have long advocated for the decriminalization of hard drugs, so I guess we got what we wanted.

Hooray.

2. More people are dying from drug overdoses than ever before.

According to a February 2022 statement from B.C.’s chief coroner, drug overdoses have increased over 400 percent over the past seven years. The official death toll from overdoses for 2021 was 2,224, up from 1,767 in 2020, but some people I spoke to believed that the actual death toll is much higher. According to a recent New York Times article, over 115,000 people died from drug overdoses in Canada and the U.S. in 2021 alone.

The coroner went on to state: “It is long past time to end the chaos and devastation in our communities resulting from the flourishing illicit drug market, and to ensure, on an urgent basis, access across the province to a safe, reliable regulated drug supply.”

Which brings us to our next point.

3. The government is dispensing opiates from vending machines.

I’d heard about these drug-dispensing machines, but I never thought that I’d see one with my own eyes. If you want to see proof, you can watch the video below (start watching at 24:45).

There is an injection site called OPS (Overdose Prevention Site), located right on Hastings in the heart of Skid Row. One of the workers there was happy to show me the drug dispensing machine, which links biometric data to a government ID issued to drug users. As of March 2021, the government had issued over 12 thousand people Adderall and Dilaudid, meant to replace methamphetamine and fentanyl, respectively.

It’s worth nothing that drug user advocacy groups such as the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) are not happy with the free government drugs. The fact is that Adderall and Dilaudid aren’t strong enough to keep hardcore addicts from craving street drugs. DULF considers the government’s version of “safe supply” to be an insincere half-measure taken in bad faith.

But it may only be a matter of time before DULF gets what it wants, however - free fentanyl for anyone who wants it, without a prescription. The province is currently running several pilot programs which are a step in that direction.

Just two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Vancouver’s Crosstown Clinic is now providing drug users with fentanyl, saying:

“It is the latest and perhaps most radical step in a city that has consistently been at the leading edge of experiments in “harm reduction,” an approach to reducing deaths and severe illness from illicit drugs by making the drugs safer for people who use them.”

Let’s get one thing straight - I’m all for safe supply. I’m all for harm reduction. I used to volunteer for the Drug User Advocacy League in Ottawa, and I know that safe supply does indeed save lives. We were supporters of Ottawa’s Managed Opiate Program, which started after several drug-addicted sex workers were murdered. Our reasoning went like this - if those women had had access to free drugs, they wouldn’t have been working the streets, and wouldn’t have been killed.

There’s a reason why discussions around safe supply can get very emotional, because this really is a matter of life and death. But we need to ensure that the cure doesn’t end up being worse than the disease. Are these “harm reduction” programs actually working? Is harm really being reduced? Or is the situation actually just getting worse?

People need to realize – a line has been crossed. Corporations are getting paid to produce these drugs, taxpayers are paying for it, and people are dying in greater numbers now than they ever were before. Is harm really being reduced? According to what metrics?

We need to step back, take a deep breath, and really think about what we’re doing as a society. If the government allows pharmaceutical companies to profit off of the opiate crisis, what do you think is going to happen?

4. COVID is not a problem on the Downtown Eastside, and never was.

I asked a bunch of people if they knew anyone who had died of COVID, and everyone said no. On the other hand, almost everyone said they knew multiple people who had died from drug overdoses. One person I spoke to had lost nineteen friends. Take a minute to listen to what he has to say.

5. AIDS doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.

Interestingly AIDS doesn’t seem to be a problem on Hastings either. Not one person I talked to said anything at all about AIDS or HIV until I brought it up.

Why isn’t this big news? Shouldn’t we be celebrating?

6. A church providing services to the homeless was recently burned down.

Last month, the beloved Street Church was burned down by an arsonist.

The Street Church had been operating on the front-lines of the drug war since 1993. For years, this community church had provided hot meals, places to sleep, and generally done what they could to assist some of the most vulnerable people in Canada.

This comes in the wake of a string of church burnings in Canada over the course of the past several years. As far as I know, not one person has been charged in connection with any of these crimes.

There’s a lot I could say about this, but I’ve said it elsewhere. For now, I’ll just ask: Who is burning down all these churches and why do they keep getting away with it?

7. The drugs keep getting deadlier

First, it was Fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin. Then they came out with Carfentanyl, which is a hundred times stronger than that. Now they’re mixing both fentanyl and carfentanyl with the strongest benzos available to produce an even stronger product, which is known on the street as benzodope. And guess what? It turns out that when you administer Naloxone to people overdosing on benzodope, it’s really fucking hard to resuscitate them.

It’s almost as if the people making these drugs wanted to kill people.

Which brings us to our next point.

8. In April of 2022, the Vancouver Police Department stopped carrying Naloxone, citing budget constraints.

If you want proof that the city wants drug users to die, need you look any further than this?

According to this article, B.C’s “Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor-General told police forces across the province that it would no longer provide Naloxone kits, nor the training in how to use them, as of April 2020.”

Think about that. They stopped providing Naloxone right at the beginning of COVID. And they actually had the gall to say that this was due to budget constraints.

Think about that. They’re saying that the lives of drug users aren’t worth saving. They don’t see drug users as human beings, but as liabilities, what Yuval Harari calls “useless people”.

According to Kevin, vice-president of VANDU and a long-time community, about 60-70% of people on Hastings believe that the government is deliberately trying to kill them by providing deadly drugs.

Kevin also told me that he personally witnessed a cop preventing someone from administering Naloxone to a Hastings resident who was clearly overdosing.

If that’s not homicide, it’s pretty damn close.

To hear Kevin’s story, you can watch the video below.

9. You can’t get real heroin on Hastings anymore.

According to some people I talked to, it’s possible to get heroin, but it’s not at all common anymore. According to others, what little heroin you can get these isn’t real heroin, by which they meant that it was low-grade. It’s also much more expensive than fentanyl is.

Some speculate that the heroin has dried up since Canada pulled out of Afghanistan. According to this theory, most heroin was coming into Canada on military aircraft.

In any case, the vast majority of opiate users have switched over to fentanyl.

10. The notorious Sahota slumlords are just as powerful as ever.

If you follow mainstream news, you probably heard that the city of Vancouver finally managed to strong-arm the notorious Sahotas into selling the notorious Regent and Balmoral hotels to the city of Vancouver for $1 each. Word on the street is that that’s not actually true.

It’s worth noting that many people have been murdered in these two dilapidated hellholes. Many of the family members of the slain have expressed their wishes that these buildings be torn down. As recently as February, the city announced that it planned to demolish the Balmoral, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

I haven’t been inside either building, but if half of what people say about them are true, they are the most disgusting slums imaginable, and their owners are deplorable scumbags.

So why can’t the government shut them down? Are the Sahotas really that powerful?

Or is the city just using the Sahotas to distance itself from its own fucked-up policies?

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I believe that is happening on the Downtown Eastside is an outward reflection of the spiritual sickness of our society. Canada is an extremely rich country, and it is an abomination that such misery exists here. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a society for letting things get to this point.

There are no easy solutions. Perhaps finding solutions shouldn’t even be our main concern. Perhaps we would do well to focus on preventing people from winding up on the streets in the first place. But doing that will require us to take a long hard look in the mirror.

The misery on full display on East Hastings tells us something about our society, and it’s a tough pill to swallow. But we can’t afford to keep living in denial. This is an emergency. If we don’t address it as a society, a lot of people are going to die.

Usually, articles about the opiate crisis end with the conclusion that “the government should do this” or “the government should do that”. I’m not going to do that.

I don’t think that the government can fix the problem, because the problem is them. Furthermore, I suspect that pharmaceutical companies exert such influence on Canadian drug policy that the government couldn’t fix the problem even if they wanted to. People like Gabor Mate want us to believe that the solution to the opiate crisis is more compassion, tolerance, and welfare programs. I ain’t buying it.

Something else is needed, but I don’t know what it is, because the problem isn’t just drug addiction - it’s the spiritual bankruptcy of our society. What we need is revolution, but mere political revolution won’t cut it. We need a revolution which goes much further, transforming our relationships to ourselves, one another, and the circle of life to which we all belong.

But one thing is clear - the drug war has entered into a new phase. The government now appears to be using drugs as a form of chemical warfare against the poor. The game has changed.

From a government perspective, this isn’t about “harm reduction” at all. This is about counter-insurgency. This is about controlling poor people by making them dependent on the government, and about reducing liabilities on the government balance sheet.

I’ll say it again - pharmaceutical companies plan to make a killing off of the problem that they created by providing hard drugs to addicts and getting taxpayers to foot the bill. Does that sound like a good idea to you?

Today, it’s Vancouver. But if the past twenty-five years are anything to go by, what happens first in Vancouver soon spreads to the rest of Canada, as well as to the U.S.

This is a warning. I think the opiate crisis is about to get a whole lot worse.

Brace Yourself.