The need for safer supply continues as the Drug Users Liberation Front contends with legal battle
Ren Zhang (they/them) // Contributor
Cameron Skorulski (He/Him) // Production Manager
As deaths by toxic drug poisoning in B.C. continue to climb, there is growing consensus that the policies in place are not working. Declared a public health emergency in 2016, the toxic drug supply has claimed 13,000 lives in B.C. since April of that year up to September 2023. Recent reports from the BC Coroners Service show that, in the month of September 2025 alone, there was an average of 5.3 deaths per day caused by fatal drug poisoning.
With the government failing to take meaningful action that could make the drug supply safer, drug users are forced to rely on a supply that contains unregulated substances that drive overdose deaths.
While B.C. has dabbled in safer supply measures, these attempts to reduce overdose deaths have been overshadowed by a failure to provide the other essential pillars of harm reduction, such as housing and low-barrier treatment options. In Vancouver, the problem has also been compounded by a disproportionate funding of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), while social services remain stretched for resources.
B.C.’s human rights commissioner, Kasari Govender, says that treating the drug crisis as individual moral failings instead of a health issue fuels stigma and violates peoples’ human rights.
“We actually should be providing people with appropriate treatments and with access to a drug supply that isn’t going to kill them,” she states, adding that safer supply programs are evidence based, being backed by advocates such as Lisa Lapointe, B.C.’s provincial health officer. This idea is not new; community members, activists and organizations such as VANDU (Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users) and DULF (Drug User Liberation Front) have been making this point for years.
DULF, founded by Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx, took this upon themselves and saved lives through their ‘compassion club’ safer supply model. The initiative provided a regulated supply of tested drugs and supervised consumption for drug users from August 2022 until they were raided by the Vancouver police in October 2023. Their community-led program saw no member deaths in the time they operated and non-fatal drug poisonings were cut in half. Other safe supply models in Canada have also proven successful in preventing deaths and reducing strain on the healthcare system. These models are often led by the people that are affected.
Despite their work being previously tolerated by the VPD, DULF was raided in October 2023, leaving community members without an essential service and vulnerable to death via the toxic drug supply. Kalicum and Nyx were charged with possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking.
DULF’s legal battles are long and complicated, beginning with their denied application and appeals to get further exemptions to procure drugs from a legal source in 2021, their ongoing challenge to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), and a trial for their charges spanning more than two years. In November, they were found guilty on three counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking by BC Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray. However, in her ruling she ordered that their charges be stayed until a decision was made in DULF’s constitutional challenge.
In this bureaucratic fight, it’s easy to miss the real casualties, including compasion club members in Vancouver who have died since the shutdown of DULF, and the thousands more that could have been prevented if policies were different.
“Maybe the end goal is to not have any of us around anymore? And what else are we supposed to think? Drug users are being scapegoated for all the failures of our broken system. We’re low hanging fruit. It’s easy, you can always blame the drug user. Vilify, criminalize, stigmatize: Makes it so you want to crawl away and hide. These are lies. The public is being let down. We are a part of society – we work, we rent, we walk these streets, we love, we are everyone,” a letter from five members of DULF’s compassion club reads.
In the wake of families, friends and loved ones losing their lives after the compassion club’s shutdown, activists like Garth Mullins, the host of the Crackdown podcast, put a label to what the VPD, the healthcare system and policy makers have done, calling it ‘social murder.’
Coined by Friedrich Engels in 1845, this term originally came from his writings about the working and living conditions in England that brought about unnatural and premature death. Those in charge directly created, encouraged and profited off these conditions.
At the heart of the DULF case lies a question of what people owe to each other. The lines of power can be traced in this story – the VPD’s involvement, the politicians, Health Canada – and they have led to a crisis with no end in sight. As such, if a society is judged by how well it treats its most vulnerable members, then Vancouver’s measuring stick might fall short.