If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.
MALCOLM X
ABOUT DOPE ON ARRIVAL GIVEAWAY PROGRAM
Between December 2021 and September 2023, using funds from our sustainer donor campaign, a safe supply of cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine (CHM) was given out for free to Vancouver drug user groups, who signed onto DULF's SUAP and Section 56 Exemption, each time the BC Corner Data was released relating to Illicit Drug Toxicity Deaths. Adverse impacts were measured via follow up with partnered groups and no known overdoses occurred from the distributed drugs.
These actions demonstrated an example of the life-saving potential of a community-led response to the overdose crisis in Canada and a necessary alternative to prohibition and the unregulated drug supply. The distributed drugs were tested via nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, FTIR spectrometry, and immunoassay, and were free of fentanyl, fentanyl analogues, benzodiazepines, and many other harmful cuts and adulterants. Our goal was to show that user-organized programs that provide safe access to drugs are a common sense and rational response to drug poisoning deaths, and that the community of people who use drugs and their allies are willing to take the idea of safe supply from rhetoric to reality.
Ultimately, our aim was to move the public understanding of the regulation of drugs outside of police-orientated and medicalized spheres and to address it from a social standpoint. In our minds, a true “safe supply” constitutes presently illegal drugs, sold legally, with a predictable content and consistency. Even given this, we agree with the idea that chaotic patterns of substance use have harmful outcomes for users. To this end, public education and reducing trauma in our communities are critical factors to keeping rates of chaotic use down. Nevertheless, the forces perpetuating such trauma are systemic and any real change will take many years. In the meantime, drug users are dying - year after year - at rates that exceed the ravages of COVID-19 even at its height.
The DoA Program called on every leader in British Columbia and Canada to listen to people who use drugs and live up to their responsibility to stop the drug war’s senseless cycle of death. Our demands were, and remain, the following:
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All levels of government must immediately fund programs for safe and accessible supplies of all drugs, including cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth, by directly listening to user groups and people who use drugs.
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All levels of government must immediately develop an accessible legal framework that decriminalizes, licenses, funds, and provides facility spaces for heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine compassion clubs.
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All government commissions on drug policy, safe supply, and decriminalization must include meaningful representation from drug user groups. Nothing about us without us.
It is with profound frustration and unimaginable grief, we shared our message to provincial and federal government officials, and we once again ask them to step up and address the issues that are killing us or allow us access to the resources and funds to do it ourselves, outside of the constraints of this discriminatory structure.
PRESS RELEASES