Scotty Archondous, a resident of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), is frustrated by the way his neighborhood is portrayed in the media. Public figures like former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell, who in 2025 was hired by the British Columbia provincial government to study the DTES, talk about people who use drugs “laying on the sidewalk” as others step over them. But the typical DTES resident, Archondous said, is the person saying Hi to you in the mornings and “giving you the last of what they have.” That’s the community he recognizes.
“I have never lived in such a magical neighbourhood full of people who give a damn,” Archondous, a Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) board member, told Filter. “I can sit and talk to a stranger for 15 minutes and leave feeling better than I did before.”
Grassroots community-led initiatives, from VANDU to the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), give Archondous hope. In a hostile political environment, as communities across BC held rallies and vigils for the 10th anniversary of the public health emergency, any source of hope is vital.
“I was someone who was a complete nihilist,” he said. “I’m still agnostic, but I feel that there is a love inherent in humans that is something holy.”
DTES activism has led to a number of progressive drug policies in British Columbia. But many were only implemented as half-measures.
On April 14, 2016, British Columbia declared the overdose crisis a public health emergency. Fatal overdose nearly doubled that year, to 997 deaths compared to 528 deaths in 2015. For the first time in decades, the average life expectancy at birth declined. Over the past 10 years, more than 18,000 people in BC have died of overdose.
“It was the establishment of unsanctioned sites by people like Ann Livingston in the Downtown Eastside … that really pushed [the province],” said Bernie Paulie, a researcher with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and professor of nursing at the University of Victoria.
In 2016, Livingston and others organized an unsanctioned overdose prevention center (OPC) and invited then-minister of health Terry Lake to see it. Not long after, Lake announced that the province would authorize OPC for the first time.
In 2023, when BC overdose deaths peaked at 2,590, the narrative turned against harm reduction and housing-first policies. Archondous remembers when he saw the political tide really change in Vancouver: the 2022 mayoral election of Ken Sim and the newly formed ABC Vancouver, a political party that campaigned with the support of the Vancouver Police Union and capitalized on fearmongering about homelessness.
Since then, Vancouver has lost multiple OPC, including the Thomas Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site, women’s drop-in center SisterSquare and the space DULF provided for its membership.
“We’ve seen, over the last three years especially, a quite dedicated misinformation campaign.”
DTES activism has led to a number of progressive drug policies established by the provincial government. But many were only implemented as half-measures, falling far short of what the community knew was needed. The results were then used to fuel a political backlash against harm reduction.
The province’s historic drug decriminalization pilot was limited to just a combined 2.5 grams of a handful of substances. The pilot was then rolled back amid complaints about public drug use, blaming decrim rather than skyrocketing housing prices.
Safer supply was restricted to a medical model, rather than a community-led one. At the program’s peak in 2023, pharmaceutical street-supply alternatives like hydromorphone were prescribed to just 5,189 people, few of whom were in rural areas. Meanwhile, an estimated 191,000 people were at risk of overdose—the majority of whom weren’t diagnosed with opioid use disorder, and weren’t eligible for a prescription.
The program was curbed following anecdotal claims about “diversion” and the prescriptions being accessed by minors. The government knew that prescribed hydromorphone’s role in the unregulated drug supply was negligible. But that didn’t matter.
“We’ve seen, over the last three years especially, a quite dedicated misinformation campaign—really misinterpreting what harm reduction services are and what they do,” DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, told Filter. “We’ve also seen narratives really focused on abstinence-based treatment … everyone should have access to voluntary, not-for-profit, high-quality treatment when they want it. But it does not actually replace the need for policy reform.”
Since 2023, governments across Canada have defunded, scaled back or outright cancelled harm reduction policies—from OPC to safer supply to decriminalization to drug-checking.
“[It’s] one of the most important court cases of this decade.”
In October 2023 conservative politicians took aim at DULF, which had been providing community-led safe supply to the 47 members of its compassion club.
“[It’s] one of the most important court cases of this decade,” Larkin said of the constitutional challenge to the charges brought against DULF founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx. “It has incredible potential to shift how we understand our laws are working and how they are not working to support the ability to provide life-saving services.”
Sanctioned safer supply programs have repeatedly been shown to have positive effects on participants. Reports by BC’s own coroners service and top public health official have since called for non-prescriber models. But both were dismissed out of hand by the minister of mental health and addictions.
“I think, as communities, we have to tell them that evidence matters,” Paulie said. “That evidence-based solutions matter.”
In 2024, the BC Centre for Disease Control estimated that harm reduction initiatives like safer supply, OPC and the province’s take-home naloxone program prevented around 82 percent of potential deaths.
Larkin said that drug policy has also been increasingly shaped by what’s happening across the United States border. With Canada’s publicly funded health care system often failing to cover treatment and other services related to substance use disorder, private-sector treatment is gaining ground. And fabricated claims of fentanyl entering the US through Canada led to billions of dollars invested in the Canada Border Services Agency, to combat what both US and Canadian governments know to be a false narrative. Larkin also cited rising transphobia and xenophobia as factors that are intersecting with and influencing drug policy across the continent.
“We’re hearing the same arguments, and all of it is blaming down towards people who have been failed by the system,” they said. “Rather than looking up at the government that caused the problem in the first place.”
Image via Dustin Godfrey