By Sam Colbert
On a hot Sunday in July, a woman in her late 30s called Phoenix entered an unmarked shop in downtown Vancouver and approached the counter. “I’ll have a half gram of cocaine, please,” she said. The proprietor scanned a barcode: C$33 (around $24.50), a bargain for the drug at this purity. The packaging promised unadulterated coke – “no cut/no buff” – above a warning that the product is highly addictive, may impair driving ability and should be kept away from children and pets.
Phoenix then gathered complimentary supplies from across the room: syringes, needles, paper filters, tissues and a small cooking spoon. She carried them to a sanitised metal table, where she liquefied and mixed the cocaine with fentanyl – a powerful synthetic opioid she had bought from her usual dealer – to create the rush she wanted, and drew the solution into a syringe. She jumped up and down, twirling an invisible skipping rope to improve her blood flow. Then she sat down, inserted a needle above the knuckle of her index finger and injected.
The packaging promised unadulterated coke – “no cut/no buff” – above a warning that the product is highly addictive, may impair driving ability and should be kept away from children and pets
Eris Nyx, one of the store’s managers, looked on from the cash point. She runs the shop with Jeremy Kalicum, who was in the back office weighing and packaging cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. “The fact that we’re not in jail is unbelievable,” said Eris. “I think about that every day.”
In 2015, Eris was working at a bike-repair shop when she heard that staff at a nearby homeless shelter made twice her wage. She quit to pick up shifts there instead. The next year, the province of British Columbia, where Vancouver is located, declared a public health emergency. People were dying in large numbers from street drugs tainted with fentanyl, which mimicked the effects of heroin at a fraction of the price but could be fatal even at small doses. Eris observed the drug’s prevalence amongst the shelter’s residents: “You’d have ten overdoses on your shift,” she said. Nearly a thousand people died of overdoses in the province that year, often by contaminated street drugs. Within five years, more than twice as many were dying annually.
In response, a university-affiliated, government-funded research network called the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use proposed a plan for a “heroin compassion club”. It was modelled on buyers’ collectives that were formed during the aids crisis decades earlier – when patients pooled funds to acquire medicinal cannabis (to ease some of the symptoms) and as-yet unapproved medications. Today, Canadian heroin users can sometimes get opioid alternatives like hydromorphone from health-care providers. But many of the most vulnerable aren’t ready to submit to the programme’s requirements for supervision and emphasis on abstinence. Those that do engage often find it physically difficult to switch from their usual supply to prescribed replacements.

A growing movement among social workers and health-care professionals wants drug policy to focus less on interventionist measures and punishment and more on what’s called harm reduction, which aims to mitigate the negative physical and social consequences of addiction. The logical conclusion of harm reduction, some believe, is an affordable, accessible store for hard drugs. “Safe supply has to be as easy as calling your guy and getting the thing you want for the price you’re willing to pay,” said Phoenix, who is a regular at the shop and asked only to be identified by her first name. The drug store run by the Drug User Liberation Front (dulf) – as Eris and Jeremy have named their initiative – has been running for a year. No customer has yet died of an overdose.
Eris, 32, is dazzlingly fluent, to the point of sometimes being glib and unfiltered. She alluded to a difficult home life growing up, but groaned at any suggestion that it explains why she got into this work. “I think if you see the things I’ve seen, you would be doing the same thing,” she said of the drug crisis in Vancouver. “I open my front door and there’s dead people all over the street.” She met Jeremy while planning a safe-supply conference in 2019, the year the heroin-compassion-club report came out. “At that conference, we were like, ‘Somebody better step up and do this,’” Eris said. Both are matter-of-fact about how they came to be those somebodies. Jeremy, a wry and comparatively reserved 28-year-old, told me that, before starting dulf, he planned on becoming a doctor. “I showed a lot of promise,” he joked. His career in harm reduction began when he volunteered at a needle-exchange programme to bolster future medical-school applications. (He still hopes to take the admissions exam.)
Their shop was the culmination of a long experiment: how flagrantly could they traffic clean drugs without going to jail? At one of dulf’s early events, in the summer of 2021, they gave away free drugs in a police-station car park. Officers allowed the event to carry on. A sympathetic city councillor spoke to the gathered crowd about the need for a safer supply. Eris, dressed as Willy Wonka, stood beside her, cradling packages of meth, heroin and cocaine and grinning for the cameras.
Each month, on the day the province announced the latest overdose statistics – which were dire as ever – they would stage another giveaway. But media coverage dwindled over time. The press “want escalation”, Eris said. “They’re like, come back to us when you’re going to overdose in city hall or something.”
dulf did step things up. They applied to the Canadian government for a legal exemption to procure pharmaceutical supplies of illicit narcotics and test, package and sell them, at cost, to customers in a shop. They had letters of support from doctors, addiction researchers, local politicians and the regional health authority. In July 2022 Canada’s federal health department rejected their request. The next month, Eris and Jeremy opened the shop anyway.
DULF’s store operates out of a secret location in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. The neighbourhood is relatively untouched by gentrification, and homelessness and drug use is apparent on the sidewalks. Eris and Jeremy are not aware of anyone else in the world doing exactly what they do – at least not as publicly – so they’ve had to devise a bespoke set of best practices. They took membership applications from would-be customers, and accepted a small group who were at high risk of overdose and were already known to existing drug-user groups – given the amount of work involved, 50 members felt like their maximum capacity. Each member participates in follow-up surveys with dulf about how the shop has changed their health and habits; researchers from the Centre on Substance Use, the group that first proposed the heroin compassion club, are helping to collate that data. (Outcomes so far appear to be positive, but data are limited given the small number of participants.) With the help of volunteers, Eris and Jeremy keep a careful count of cash and inventory. Drugs are marked with test reference numbers and stored in a time-delayed safe; this protects against robbery by remaining locked until several minutes after entering the code, which only Eris and Jeremy know. Confidential member information is kept off-site.
Police have made few public statements about dulf. Jeremy said he’s had conversations with officers, who tell him the shop is “not a priority” for enforcement. Inspector Philip Heard of the Vancouver Police Department’s organised crime unit confirmed those conversations in an interview with me. “I fully appreciate their rationale and where their heart is,” he said, but warned that “if someone is doing something that they know runs afoul of the law, then they will always potentially be the subject of enforcement.” The police have taken an inconsistent approach towards unofficial “safe supply” initiatives. In May they arrested 51-year-old Jerry Martin for trying to sell purity-tested drugs out of a trailer in the same neighbourhood; dulf’s shop, in contrast, remains open. (Tragically, Martin died two months later from a suspected fentanyl overdose.)
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/09/08/the-ethical-drug-dealers-of-vancouver