Surrey Union of Drug Users board member Peter Woodrow stands among hundreds of flags in Surrey's Overdose Awareness Day event. Each flag represents the roughly 1,800 people who have died in Surrey since 2016 from the toxic drug supply. (Dustin Godfrey)
British Columbia’s government continues to cede ground on harm reduction, as an emboldened opposition, chasing victory in the province’s October 19 general election, expands its array of targets.
Right-wing opposition politicians are going after programs that provide basic tools to keep people safer, such as sterile needles and pipes. And the government—fearing electoral defeat, amid neck-and-neck opinion polls—is seeking to appease the right at the expense of drug-user health.
In early August, Fraser Health, the province’s largest regional health authority, launched a program enabling drug users to order free supplies online—like inhalation and injection kits, naloxone kits, drug testing kits and safe sex supplies—for delivery to where they live.
BC Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Elenore Sturko, a former police officer who represents the opposition BC Conservative Party, has led right-wing politicians’ charge against harm reduction in the province. She immediately told Global News it was “concerning” that the harm reduction supplies were so easily accessible, comparing this to people’s challenges in accessing treatment.
“The services should be equal, at least. It should be just as easy to access detox and treatment as it is to order a crack pipe online,” Sturko said.
The governing BC New Democratic Party was quick to react.
In a press conference on August 22, BC Premier David Eby told reporters that he, too, “had a concern” about the website, and confirmed that the government “asked Fraser Health to do a review of the site and to ensure the site emphasized a couple things.”
Just days later, this pattern—opposition attacks, followed by government backsliding—was repeated.
Fraser Health told Global News that this review resulted in a redesign of the site “to more prominently feature how people may access treatment and prevention,” as well as a “pause on offering some harm reduction supplies on the online portal.”
While treatment and prevention services have been made prominent on the redesigned website, the inhalation and injection kits have not returned.
Just days later, this pattern—opposition attacks, followed by government backsliding—was repeated.
On August 26, BC Conservative MLA candidate Gwen O’Mahony posted a video showing her accessing harm reduction supplies from a free “vending” machine at a hospital on Vancouver Island.
O’Mahony, a former BC NDP MLA, called the machine “yet another example of enabling addiction instead of offering treatment.”
The BC NDP again reacted not by challenging that perspective, but by stepping in to interfere with health authority policy. Within days, Eby had ordered the minister of mental health and addictions to review “any of the distribution methods that don’t involve direct contact between the service provider and somebody struggling with addiction.”
“I think it’s quite shocking that these politicians have stooped so low that they would be putting society at risk, just for a handful of political points.”
People who use drugs and harm reduction advocates in the province say these moves hinder public health efforts to limit the spread of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis, among other harms.
“I think it’s quite shocking that these politicians have stooped so low that they would be putting the broader society at risk of the rise in the spread of infectious diseases, worsening the burden on our health care system, just for a handful of political points,” Anmol Swaich, a community organizer with the Surrey Union of Drug Users, told Filter.
The BC NDP, which bills itself as a social democratic party, has been on the back foot on drug policy for about two years, after the anti-harm reduction movement gained significant momentum rather suddenly. In October 2022, a party running on a platform of boosting police spending swept the city council election, winning all but three seats.
That election season also saw the release of Vancouver Is Dying, a documentary by far-right YouTuber Aaron Gunn, who exaggerated rises in crime rates to rail against progressive politics. Gunn blamed increasing public disorder—over a period that saw a 32 percent increase in homelessness during a housing crisis—on “soft-on-crime” policies and harm reduction.
Since then, right-wing actors have continued their renewed drug war offensive, largely going after safe supply and supervised consumption sites. In that time, the government has, as BC harm reduction advocate Garth Mullins has often put it, “folded like a cheap tent.”
The BC NDP has cut funding for the Drug User Liberation Front; rolled back its extremely limited decriminalization pilot; and repeatedly refused experts’ recommendations to expand access to safe supply.
Right-wingers like Sturko and O’Mahony talk about treatment and harm reduction as if the two are in some kind of zero-sum competition. That’s a problematic framing, said Swaich, who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in health sciences at Simon Fraser University.
Harm reduction programs like those recently under fire “came out of community members stepping up in response to rising rates of HIV, and then researchers evaluated these programs and then public health, like governments, adopted these strategies,” she pointed out, and the efficacy of such interventions has been proven over decades.
Now, the BC opposition is “trying to win an election at the expense” of limiting the spread of disease, Swaich said. “It’s a myriad of other wound and skin infections as well.”
“They’re signing death warrants, and that really bothers me, right? Because I’m there on the front line.”
Surrey, the second-largest city in the province, comes under the jurisdiction of Fraser Health Authority, which offered the now-curtailed mail-order harm reduction supplies program. Frontline harm reduction workers there are incredibly frustrated by the rollback.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me” when harm reduction is “tried and true,” Peter Woodrow, a peer worker and SUDU board member, told Filter. “They’re signing death warrants, and that really bothers me, right? Because I’m there on the front line, [responding to] an overdose every day. Every day. That’s hard.”
BC’s anti-harm reduction movement seeks to mobilize the majority who don’t use state-banned drugs by othering people who do. But while the threats from lost harm reduction access begin with drug users, they don’t end there. The drug-user community isn’t segregated from the wider community, Swaich noted, and neither is the spread of disease.
“These are people amongst us, people who use drugs are amongst us,” she said. “They’re part of society. They’re not separate from society. And so for the government to frame this as only affecting people who use drugs is complete misinformation, and I think it harms the general public.”
She added that harm reduction ultimately saves public money by cutting visits to emergency rooms or clinics for overdoses and infections, thereby reducing the burden on health care systems.
“That’s the message that I’m taking from it—that they’re less than human, unless they go to treatment.”
Advocates say the government could be focusing on issues of serious need—housing and the cost of living, for instance, as well as the crisis of drug-related deaths—but instead is devoting energy to taking away drug users’ supports and rights.
“At the end of the day, I’m there to make sure that person stays alive because they’re a human being,” Woodrow said of his work. “If you’re telling me that because somebody’s used drugs, that makes them less than human, that’s a problem. And that’s the message that I’m taking from it—that they’re less than human, unless they go to treatment.”
Woodrow said he’s proud to be a member of SUDU, and of Surrey’s drug user community.
“These are good people that would save my life faster than that guy would,” he said, referring to politicians who scapegoat drug users. “That’s a problem. When our leadership is not willing to save us, then what are we going to do?”
Photograph, by Dustin Godfrey, of Peter Woodrow standing among flags at Surrey’s 2024 International Overdose Awareness Day event. The flags represented around 1,800 drug-related deaths in Surrey since 2016.