As people gathered in Vancouver’s Victory Square on April 14 to mark nine years since British Columbia declared the overdose crisis a public health emergency, an ambulance blaring its siren sped by. It may not have been a moment of silence, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) president Dave Hamm told the crowd, but it was a “pointed moment.”
From Victory Square everyone marched westward for a teach-in at Canada Place, which houses the Vancouver offices for senior elected officials in government. The rally was organized by VANDU, the Surrey Union of Drug Users (SUDU) and the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War.
Among those who addressed the crowd was SUDU Board Member Dave Webb. He joined the union because people kept saying that it will take time to address the crisis.
“I don’t want it to ‘take time.’ There’s too many people gone already,” Webb told Filter. “If my friends were addicted to romaine lettuce, chances are they wouldn’t be dead. Because as soon as there’s a tainted batch of romaine … what does the government do? They go around, they gather up all of that, and they get rid of it.”
But even with a product this badly in need of regulation, Webb and everyone else are still waiting for the province to adequately respond.
“The government is not really trying,” he said. “It’s probably better for them that we’re gone, because then there’s not a blight on the side of the road.”
Between 2016 and 2024, BC recorded 16,350 overdose deaths. Speakers at the rally noted that overdose began noticeably rising in 2014, which was also when law enforcement began reporting fentanyl in the unregulated supply.
That year the province recorded 370 overdose deaths. That increased to 529 in 2015, and 997 in 2016. Since 2016, more than 49,000 people across Canada have died of opioid-involved overdose.
In 2024, the death count began to decrease. However, the disparity between deaths among Indigenous people and deaths among other people in the province was the highest it’s ever been. First Nations people were 6.7 times more likely to die of overdose in 2024; for First Nations women, the rate was 11.6 times higher. First Nations people comprise about 3.4 percent of the population in BC, yet comprised 19 percent of overdose deaths in 2024.
Over the past nine years, the provincial government has scaled up certain harm reduction measures that people who use drugs have been calling for, after ignoring those calls for years or decades.
In addition to trialling a limited decriminalization pilot, BC has increased access to naloxone, overdose prevention sites and a safer supply of regulated drugs, though none of them to the level that’s actually needed.
And more recently, much of the province’s harm reduction policies have been reversed or scaled back, or otherwise targeted by right-wing backlash.
Multiple programs that increased distribution of harm reduction supplies, including by mail and through vending machines, were canceled in 2024.
The decrim pilot was effectively shuttered halfway through the three-year trial period, despite the fact that its personal-possession threshold was too low to functionally decriminalize to begin with.
The Drug User Liberation Front, which operated an unsanctioned compassion club providing a safe supply of tested heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine to its 43 members, was defunded and raided by police.
Involuntary treatment gained ground, despite no evidence of any benefits and clear evidence of its harms. And the province ended take-home safe supply.
“They’re wasting lives, they’re wasting time, and they’re wasting money,” Webb said. “All it is is just fear-mongering and trying to get elected.”
Photographs via Dustin Godfrey