Garth Mullins on Drug User Activism & Saving Lives with SAFE SUPPLY of the Drugs People Want

any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. My guest today is someone I don't think I've ever met, but he's doing remarkable work in the city of Vancouver and province of British Columbia and Canada. His name is Garth Mullins and he's become well known as host of an award winning podcast called Crackdown. What makes his podcast somewhat unique is that he and his co producers are themselves drug

users and drug user organizers and activists. They're mostly working with Van DOW, which is an acronym for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, perhaps the longest standing drug user organization in North America. So, Garth, thank you ever so much for joining me today on Psychoactive Ethan. It's a great privilege to be here. I've been an admirer of your work for a long time and that's nice to talk to you. Okay, well, thank you, thank you very much. Garth. Let me just start by asking why

did you start this podcast a few years ago. I'm an old school dope fain. You know, that's the story of my life is I've been on some kind of opioid pretty much every day of my adult life. For most of them, and for a long time that was Heroin, and for a while now it's been methodone and uh,

everything in between. And I came to under stand our struggle just through my own personal experience with police, the different institutions that you run into if you're a drug user, and also with losing so many people across my whole life, like maybe half the people I came up with are gone. And I saw the way that the world looked at us and saw us in popular culture and journalism, and I was like, those aren't the people around me. Those

aren't the people that I know. The people that I know are actually, most of the time pretty rational and smart and kind of trying to make their way and then trying to look out for each other. And I knew a little bit about how to make podcasts and make radio because I played in punk bands for a long time. When you do that, you've got to kind of fix your own gear and run your own sound and sometimes make your own records. So, um, it seemed like this could be my contribution. We don't ever really

talk about the drugs themselves very much. So if you want to tune in and hear what it's like to get high on um LSD or what it's like to be, you know, not in on heroin, we don't really get there exactly. Our podcast is like about the war, you know, So it's it's if we're talking about a drug war, we really talk about the war part of it, I guess a lot more, and what our side is doing

to organize ourselves in that war. This is a podcast about this giant, terrible conflict that spans the world, which is an impossibly large subject, but it's actually just about me and a few of my friends and what's going on with them and how we're trying to organize in our little part of it, and I always think, why would people care very much about Vancouver. We should be making this more universal or something. But what I have noticed is what happens in this town will happen everywhere

else eventually. And I'm not quite sure why that is yet. But we had fent and all contaminated drugs. That was the first time I was noticing it. You know, we had massive waves of heroin and stuff before a lot of other places in Canada, in the US, you know, And we're getting stuff now benzo diazepine contamination into the stuff that sold as opioids over the last couple of years, and I'm starting to hear reports of that from other

places in the US. Two first So, for some reason to do with supply chain or trade patterns or something, what happens to us here is going to happen to other people. There's a good chance of it. I mean, this is a collective enterprise with people at Van do

other drug users. I know. It went award for, you know, basically an investigative journalism that exposed the fact if the government had replaced the traditional effective form of method on with another form of method on that was cheaper but wasn't working as well, and they denied it wasn't working as well. So Garth, I mean when you launched this podcast, was it the emergence of fentanyl and the and the gross increase in over those fatalities that prompted you to

do this or something else? It was just a coincidence of different events, you know. Um, I was just an activist at van Do. I met this Dr Ryan McNeil, who's in Yale now, but it was UBC at the time. Um. We were going around to lobby government on small changes to methodon policy, and you know, we'd go into these rooms with government and try and tell them this or that. Me and other people from the BC Association people on

Methodon would say our piece. Ryan would present the research and we leave the rooms and we go, wow, this is not convincing them. We're not really getting anywhere, but maybe it'd make an interesting podcast. And Ryan's like, oh, yeah, we could do that. I think we could do that. And so, uh, you know, we got ahold of a few of our favorite activists, people that I've worked with for a long time, and we sat down and said do we want to do this? Do we need this?

Is this something the drug user movement wants. And the very first question was what the funk is a podcast? I said, It's just like radio shoved in the computer, you know, And they're like, yeah, we I mean, we've always want to tell our story and we always want to embrace whatever technology gets it out the door that way. Uh. And so the that we listened to a few different ways that we could do it. We had this discussions on the kind of topics we wanted to cover and

the kind of research we wanted to mobilize. I found some people in Vancouver who who had also done um some audio reporting on the heroin prescription Heroin project, and we got all got together and started making the podcast. But man, the thing that really I realized is I couldn't just like stand in the sidelines and hold the mic and interview people and stuff. I just share some of myself too, you know, Like that's the job of

the host. And I kind of maybe I didn't think about that very much starting out, because I didn't have like this ability to explain my life or whatever, because I, like I said, I've been like really carrying a lot of shame about it. So the podcast helped me understand a little bit more who I am and be okay to talk about myself and those parts of my life. And that's been a real great gift, you know, Like I I never thought that would come out of it.

You know, I thought, oh, this would be great. I'll get to interview all these cool people. I'll get to profile a bunch of activists that I know who really deserved the spotlight. But I never thought I'd be talking these little vignettes and anecdotes from my own life, you know. Um, And it's been good that way. Yeah. I think we're having very similar experiences hosting our podcast. And I'll tell you that your answer to the question what's the podcast

is the exact thing that I get to old mom. Well, that's good, you know, I mean it is. It is funny, right, But in Canada, one in five people doesn't really have good internet access. So like we do listening parties, and so it's really legit that lots of people don't know what a podcast is, because why would you. Um, So we just play episodes of the podcast out loud at Van Deu and people can come and listen and then

have a discussion afterwards. And I found out from people just writing me that people all over the place are doing that and I didn't even know about it. Like someone into Ana was having I think they were calling it crafts and crackdown where they have snacks and do knitting or like glue things and and listen and then have conversations. So like, yeah, I mean, if if people want to do that, we and we did create it to be an organizing tool and and that seems like a good use of it to me. So let me

tell me how old are you now? A middle age I am like on the wrong side of fifty now, but only just the wrong side of fifty. I take that means north of okay, Okay, so that means born in the early seventies. Even is my policy to never give out the date of birth. Okay, the police have asked me to. So I'm not being I'm not trying to be coy, like, oh, you're trying to make you think I'm younger than I am. No, I'm fucking middle

age guy. Okay, Okay. Well, so when you reflect back, like, you know, how did Garth mullins land up getting involved in Heroin? It was as a teenager in your twenties? Was it in Vancouver? Or elsewhere, you know, where'd you grow up? What's your own thoughts reflecting back on all this about how and why you landed up? Yeah, I mean I reckon it's like so many other people, you have some bad experiences, you're kind of alienated from your family and your community as a kid, and you start

looking for what's the way back into that? And you know, so I was, like lots of other people, just drinking and trying different drugs when I was you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and then eventually, you know, I come to opioids and that seems the right thing. And then I might have even been when I was in San Francisco when I was nineteen where I first tried the opioid that was just like ah Chef's kiss. It was black tar heroin, and I just thought, fuck me, this is what everybody

else is feeling all the time. Like I just felt like, uh, like this constant sort of howling of ghosts around me. You know, like like from from Raiders, that lost arc. You know, you got the little the little arc and when they take the lid off, all the face melting ghosts fly everywhere and get everybody. But this is like this puts the lid on the arc. Very nice. Sleean keeps all the face melt and ghosts safely inside. And so yeah, I mean I was I was going to

come back to that for sure, and I did. Did you have this kind of addiction issues like running in the family before you or were you sort of the first in the family to be I think we probably got it in the family, you know. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure how it gets characterized my I mean, my family doesn't have a history that I know of with hard drugs, but maybe maybe drinking is more common. But I don't know that that's where I get it from. You know, I think, uh, it's it's

so hard to find the root causes. But I I sometimes think of it like this, right, like the world as I've known it has been getting shittier and shittier and shittier until we're almost at the end of it now, Like we got a guy in Russia with his finger on nuclear button. Climate change is killing a lot of people here in British Columbia. Five people died in the heat wave last summer. And we're not that bigger province. We got thousands of people from toxic drugs. It's just

like the whole place is going to hell. My question to other people is not why why do I Drew do drugs? It's like, why don't you do drugs? How are you getting away without this nice cushion of opioids to sort of take the edge off of the apocalypse. So that's what I wonder. It's I kind of have given up trying to figure out what my issue is,

But what's everybody else's. You know, I read that you had grown up initially like not in Vancouver, a greater Vancouver area, but like in the Northwest Territory, I mean a sort of remote part of North America. Yeah, I mean I was. I was a kid in the seventies in in Yellowknife, which is north of sixty you know, it's almost it's the Subarctic. But I loved it there, you know, I had really I had a good childhood there. You know, I did like it. Yeah, So that was

That's definitely. It's definitely a It's a good place for a kid, you know, a small town before where you get too old, you can like ride your bike all over the place with the other kids, and and uh, you know, as a mining town, so there's lots of

different kind of characters in that place. I liked it, Yeah, but I ALWASO also think of those kind of places, Like if you think about where, generally speaking, are the worst alcohol problems in the world, the worst relationships with booze, and it's typically the closly are of the Arctic, the

worst of the problems with booze. Right, you look at Russia, Scandinavia, Alaska, Northern Canada, you know, wherever it's kind of light twenty two hours a day and then dark twenty two hours a day, and alcohol just seems to play some particular role in societies like that. I mean I think that's true. Um, Like, like once colonialism got ahold of northern Canada in the early twentieth century and brought booze in in a big way,

I think that was probably true. I don't think there's anything necessarily like linked to the environment or anything like that. Like people managed without for thousands of years. So yeah, maybe there's maybe white people are maladapted to long polar nights or something. I don't know, but um, definitely, when I was a kid, there was lots of lots of booze in that town for sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean

I just think about the history of alcohol prohibition. You know, we had in the US, you had two consideration in Canada, and especially it was popular I think in the North Scandinavian Russia or the other places that flirted with it, and they seemed to be the places where people's relationship with alcohol was different than it was saying places like Southern Europe or Latin America. Right, You know that you basically consumed alcohol to get drunk, and you know, the

association with how light or dark. It's kind of I don't know if it's my own theory, probably other people think that as well, but it's sort of set a frame for kind of thinking about the use of maybe what was oftentimes the only popular psychoactive substance available, about using in a way which was different than a more kind of normalized consumed booze with food this sort of thing. Yeah,

that that could be. That could be. I haven't really traveled, um all that much in Southern Europe, but I know what you're talking about, like having a nice dinner with wine and all that kind of thing. Yeah, it could be. And you're also a bit different, right, I mean you're I mean just you know, I mean, just say a little more about that getting picked on and bullied for for different reasons. Yeah, I mean I got albinism and almost no eyesight, so that means like like albino, like uh,

platinum hair, pale skin, almost blind kind of thing. So it definitely made uh, school and bullying and all that like part of my story for sure. Yeah. When I was, um, you know, when I was in elementary school and stuff, they called me Ghost and Casper the Ghosts and stuff like that, and I hated it, you know. But now ghost is a pre cool street name, so I'm okay.

I'm okay with it now. But it's just like back in the day, you know, I was like, no, so you were one of those like the first time you used heroin, it was like, wow, I like this stuff. It makes me feel I don't know, normal at ease. I'm coming back to it, Yeah, for sure, you know, And I was, I was a depressed kid, you know, I was. I think I was a suicidal kid, you know. I I certainly dreamed of not being alive, and uh, you know, I never I never really tried to hurt

myself like that, but I did. I can look back in my notebooks and journals and I'm like, Wow, that kid was fucked up and it stopped that, you know. So I was one of those people who I guess I was self medicating, but I'm not sure what the outcomes would have been for me, but for the refuge that heroin provided, you know. So, I think even though it didn't maybe look like it from the outside, at the time, I was reaching for a rational choice, you know, I was reaching for a kind of a survival, a

kind of a way to feel a little better. And did it put you into a kind of community of fellow drug users or were you kind of using heroin but otherwise spending a fair bit of your life and sort of non drug, non heroin using world, shall we say? Yeah? I was always in both. So I always knew a crew of people who were wired and was connected like that. But I often, you know, had a workplace that I

was going to where people didn't know. I mean, I think my family had some idea, but I tried to you know, minimize it and kind of tone it down a little bit. And I certainly didn't advertise, you know, like only only a consience. It seems like a funny thing to say being on a podcast. It's like, Hey, I'm a dope fiend. But uh, that's this is kind of new for me, at least it's only been a few years maybe, you know, or something, when I started saying beyond a small group of frenzy ad this is

my story. Oh is that right? It's really recently, the kind of coming out about the past like that and through the podcast and such. Yeah. I mean I was an activist for sure with Van du for longer than that, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, but um, you know, I didn't really cop to it. If I ever did an interview or something, I would be kind of nebulous about it. And so I was very ashamed. You know. I did try to keep it to myself or at

least not advertise. And I learned from the activists at Van Dew the power of like owning your own truth and not being ashamed of it. And it's like, finally you get to relieve yourself of carrying this big backpack full of secrets and bullshit and shame and all of that. And so that's been a lovely gift of activism. So garth. I mean you're you're in you're using heroin, I guess from your late teens for uh ten twenty years. I mean basically during that time, are you smoking or injecting it?

Are you housed all the time? Are you having legal jobs all the time? Do you get involved in criminal other criminal activity apart from obtaining your drugs? I mean, what's your life like during this period. It's a little bit of everything. So, yeah, I had periods where I was pretty poorly slash not housed. Um. Mostly I had places, UM, I was working sometimes sometimes white collar jobs, sometimes blue

collar jobs, sometimes no jobs, you know, getting welfare. Sometimes I was going to school, uh, you know, like post secondary and sometimes I guess what you would call nickel and dime criminal activities outside of outside of the obtaining drugs, Yeah, and injecting all the time. I was one of those ivy drug users, and I kind of thought it was like a waste of time or a waste of drugs to do it any other way, like to smoke it or something like that, you know. So I was definitely

just like get that right to the brain. And you're pretty loyal to heroin or you're mixing it with cocaine or other stimulants or benzos or things like that. Oh yeah, definitely liked speedballs. I you know, heroin and crack together. That was pretty good. But yeah, heroin was the main thing for me, and other opioids if I couldn't get heroin.

And in terms of taking precautions around HIV A TEPS using a needle exchange program, what was your relationship to all that sort of sort of self involvement in harm reduction, Well, I guess, you know, like back in it was still not easy always get a new syringe. So I did share with people on occasion, on desperate occasion, and we did bleach the needle. And that's you know, only so effective, but that was the harm reduction protocol at the time.

And um, you know, because the police would take needles off you if they found them, and this and that. So I mean back in the day, you had one needle for like a month or whatever, and you'd keep stabbing that blunt thing into you and you'd have to sharpen it on a match striker and that, you know, the rubber would wear down inside and you'd be like, oh, this isn't gonna be good. The numbers would wear off

the barrel like it was bad. I mean, now in Vancouver there's enough syringes that most people or a lot of people can use a new one every time they inject, which is the preferred practice, which is smart because when you look under a microscope, those things get blunt really fast. And also it's like not not sterile anymore, um importantly. So yeah, I mean doing all that definitely sucked up my veins, like they're all collapsed. But um, I picked

up harm reduction. I think the first time I really figured out what this was all about was in a civic center park in San Francisco when there was a big tent encampment there and these people came around with buckets and it was a guerrilla needle exchange, like you turn in your needle and they give you a new one. It was illegal, and these people were risking or asked to do this, and when I you know, everyone lined up and exchanged their needles pretty quick. But the guy,

I remember, she is just like stay safe, man. He wasn't giving me some lecture about twelve step or quitting or nothing like that. And it's the first time I'd run into anything like that. I was completely amazed. I was like, that is a lot of respect for that.

I think it was people from prevention point in San Francisco. Yeah, no, I remember those days, the late eighties, early nineties in New York, San Francisco, people doing little forms of harmonducts and civil disobedience and kind of modeled on what the Dutch and others in Europe have been doing even years earlier, but not facing quite the same threat of sanction from the cops and others. So your early years doing this, then we're more San Francisco and then moving back to

Vancouver at some point. Yeah, there's a bunch of like, uh, little ship punk kids like me who kind of circulated up and down the I five cord or like that. I was was one of those kids, you know as planning bands and visiting friends and and that sort of thing. So I was there mostly Vancouver, mostly in Canada, and yeah, just like a lot of years of just using heroin and when I would have a nice stable connect that could drop off like a product that I knew how

strong it was and I knew it would be. In the nineties, there was quite strong heroine in Vancouver. In fact, we had a big overdose crisis then because of it, But it also meant that, like some of us, were able to find a pretty stable way to conduct ourselves, and and those led to long periods of my life where things were very calm, and I did try to be careful, so I always if I in the very

few times I shared needles, I did bleach them. But there was things I didn't know, like that the virus could live in the cotton, you know, the filter that you use, and we shared those completely, and it could live on the spoon, it could live on the paraphernalia. And I didn't know any of that. In fact, I didn't know that until I tried to be careful. But really I was just very lucky. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. And so when's the first

time you try method on? And when's the point at which you finally begin to stick with that as your your principal drug? Basically, m I think I had taken method on, like just when I, you know, bought it off the street or something when there was no heroin, you know, I can't even remember pretty early on. And then I remember my when my hair and a dealer lived across the hall. I was just like it was very convenient, but I was also like, I came to this point where it's like, okay, I gotta quit, And

I said, where can I get Methodon? He goes, oh, hey, no problem. I sell the cure as well as the disease, by which he meant he sells methodon as well as heroin. And he because he was on Methodon, he was just he was just a guy wired to opioids as well. So he sold me, you know, like a hundred mills

of his methodon for twenty five bucks. And so I went and locked the door, you know, like train spotting style, and like hunkered down for like what turned out to be forty eight hours or so before I was opening the door and like admitting defeat that I had taken all the method and there's no way it was gonna work. So a couple of years after that, I guess I tried to get on a formal Methodon program and it

was so rationed um that they wouldn't let me. They just said, oh, we only have so many slots and you can't you can't come on. And so then it was a couple of years after that I guess. So I got on the program that I'm now on in two thousand two, and then there was a bunch of years of still using heroin, and then uh, kind of I felt like it was a step in the right direction to be using uh, you know, prescription not prescribed

to me, but prescription opioids uh and methodon. And then eventually I got to this place where it's you know, mostly just methadone. And so it was like it was a long it was a long process. So let me bring you and the audience back to Vancouver. Now. I remember going up there a bunch of times in the late nineties. I had met Philip Owen, a somewhat conservative

mayor of Vancouver. He had come to a conference we had organized, my organization organized to Hoover, the very conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford, California, and I remember sitting there was a conference for mostly police chiefs and deputy police chiefs, but there was this guy sitting there just kind of taking notes and taking notes, and I remember going over to him and introducing myself and ask him, well, who are you? And he goes on Philip ball and from Vancouver.

I said, what do you do there, he goes on the mayor. I said, huh, and here's a guy, a mayor. He had not been invited to speak. He was incredibly modest, and he's sitting there taking notes, you know, for like two days. I mean I was just blowing away that a sitting politician could do such a thing, and never that somebody who sort of came from the more conservative

side of the spectrum. And so about you know, six nine months later that I went to see Philip in his office and he was saying, well, what should I do? We got this growing HIV problem. It's over those problems, new powerful heroin. And I talked to him about what they were doing in Europe, about the Frankfurt and a kind of integrated approach harm reduction approach, and he was intrigued by that. And you had this sense of dynamism in Vancouver that really things were maybe going to open up.

You know, there was resistance, you know, national governments, the provincial government, but it looked like there was real promise. And at that point the fight was over over whether or not to open up a safe inject in sight. You know, I think Vancouver was one of the first places to really get you deeply in that debate, and Philippo and the mayor sort of bravely began to take

the right side on that. And so when I look at Vancouver, right, I think of God, Vancouver's took the lead and opening up the safe injection site, took the lead and opening up the kind of heroin prescription programs that Switzerland pioneer thirty years ago and that you now find and Germany and Denmark and the Netherlands and and which had been very successful. They're there. Heroin problems are a dramatic fraction of what we see generally speaking in

North America. Um, you know, those programs spread not just from Van Covercouver, British Columbia, but they go to other parts of British Columbia. They go to Ontario, they go to Quebec. They even managed to get into conservative province of Alberta. But in amidst all this progressive policy, and in a country that, unlike the United States, has national health insurance, has some measure of a social safety net, nonetheless you have an overdose fatality eight that is basically

comparable or almost comparable to waters in the US. And and here we're talking in in the second week of March, and just yesterday the Corner's Office in British Columbia comes out with a report, you know, on the fact that seven eight thousand people have died the province. You know in just the last few years, that two hundred people died in British Columbia last year and you only have a little over five million in the entire province. So

you're talking about very high rates. And the thing I'm trying to understand is, how does one explain the fact that Vancouver and BC and other parts of Canada, even though you're more advanced than the US in terms of embracing harm reduction, why are you not attaining the kind of successes we've seen in much, if not all, of Europe and and sort of suffering more like we are in the US. Here's the key for understanding Canada. Canada

has a great um pr sense of itself. We like to broadcast at ten thousand walk into the world that we're Canada, the good, that we're different, we're progressive, we're special. But this country was actually founded as a resource extraction branch plant for the United Kingdom, right, so we were we were started because rich people in London liked to wear beaver hats. And I'm serious, that's what this place

was all about at the beginning. So the colonial process of stealing the land off the people, the indigenous people already lived here, was because of this, and then forestry, mining, oil and gas. But that's still what the country is all about. And we are um a country that's figured out that it's easier to talk nice and do the

dirty than it is to just advertise that we're mean. Right, So we will talk a lot about the great harm reduction programs we have in Vancouver, and we have talked for twenty years about it, but really there's a few pilot projects in twelve square blocks of the city. We have not rolled out harm reduction thoroughly. The heroin program you talked about was a study fifteen years ago, and so right now there's a hundred people that can get access to it and no more. The study proved, Wow,

prescription heroin is great. Really does wonders imagine if they had taken that study and made a prescription heroin program so that anybody who wanted it could get it. Um, we would never have had vent in all here. We would never have had the overdose crisis, but we didn't

do that. We just talked a good game, like we all, look how progressive we are with this program, never mentioning that it's a tiny pilot, never mentioning that we froze it and restricted it so much so we allow there to be just enough to advertise but not enough to really make a dent in it. And everything we get we get by civil disobedience and fighting. For our politicians, they may talk progressively, they may have crocodile tears for all of the dead drug users, but truly it takes

civil disobedience to move the needle on this stuff. So when we had insight the first safe injection site in North America open jeez, fifteen years ago now maybe more almost one of years ago, that was because people were involved in opening underground, not even underground, just illegal, unsanctioned safe injection sites first and saying to the government, look, come and arrest us, or do it yourself, you open it.

We did the same thing with syringes, and right now in the last year year and a half, we've been doing the same thing with distributing tested clean heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine to people in very small, little direct action events, but saying, look, this is what post drug war world could look like, where people could obtain the drugs they need that had been tested and we're pure and we're

not going to cause them to fatally overdose. Is the issue that it's a lack of commitment or is it that it's just between federal bureaucracy, provincial bureaucracy, the pharmacist that doctors, that there's just all this resistance to embracing a kind of radical new way of dealing with a tainted drugs supply that's killing large numbers of people. Well, I mean the reason that politicians speak progressive is because

we forced them to. The secret ingredient in Canadian drug policy is the drug user union, is the drug user movement. Is that we have a strong, militant drug user movement that will break unjust laws when we need to. That's

why we have drug policy the way it is in Vancouver. Definitely, some politicians have heard us, but you know, Philip Owen heard us after his city hall was occupied and stuff like that, Right, So, I mean the militancy plays a role in getting to these people and part of getting to them is they hear it and they realize, oh, we better get ahead of this, so they start talking a good game without actually doing it. This is how every movement for social justice, every movement for civil rights works.

This is how all of it works. Is you have to you have to demand this from your government. You have to arm twist, you have to force it, because they just don't. They don't give you things out of the goodness of their heart or even when they're nice people, they don't really do it. I mean, if you think about how did we get the eight hour day or days off on the weekend, or votes for women or any of that stuff going back a hundred and fifty years, it all works like this. So me, that is the

engine that moves history. That's that's what I know. So listen, when it comes to safe supply, Um, maybe give me your definition of safe supply, your mob, what would the ideal safe supply situation look like? And then talk about to what extent is safe supply actually operationalized on the

ground today. What are the small examples of it happening right? Well, I mean people are dying here and have been dying my whole life because we don't know what's in the drugs that we're buying, and we don't know because they're illegal, right, that's the problem. And to my mind, say you're doing heroin and you don't know, so it could kill you. Safe supply is just being able to access pharmaceutical grade diocetomorphine,

you know, pharmaceutical heroine. So just the same thing that you were going to do anyway, but you can get your hands on a pharmaceutical version because all the red tape and whatever is out of the way and you can do it. You can go home and shoot it or whatever you want. Like. That's that's safe supply. It's replacing the toxic supply with the pharmaceutical version or the version that's been tested and you know what's in it, and you can tell people and guarantee what's in it.

And that's it. That we're not trying to get people to stop using or change using, or do anything or come to some meeting or go to a twelve step no, no, nothing like that. That's the only thing. It has the biggest effect in the world because it can stop people from dying. And that, to me, that is the key question that's before us, not whether people are using or are people wired or have whatever substance use disorder. It's

is people alive or not. So that's safe supply is a demand that came out of the drug user movement here in Vancouver. But the idea was, I mean, we've been calling for an end to the drug war, decriminalization, legalization for a generation, for a very long time here, but safe supplies like a reform. You know, it's like if we if we haven't won yet the revolution to end the drug war, then at least let us find the most vulnerable people and replace the supply of drugs

that they're using with the pharmaceutical version. So basically, and there's the heroin prescription program that you know that Vancouver and now some other places had. That's a very limited version of safe supply because it is providing the clean version of heroin. Where then there's this other drug, hydromorphone, which we know in the US is allowed it, which is quite similar, but it's done it where you have

to use it on site. You could come three times a day, can't take it home, all this sort of stuff. So it's very different than when you're talking about On the other hand, you're also not talking about just simply selling these drugs over the counter, right and making it available to the water public. It's really about setting up a process whereby people who are already obtaining these drugs from the illicit market, from the criminal market, can instead

obtain them from a legal source. Is that right? Yeah? I mean the Heroin pilot project here in Vancouver that serves a little over a hundred people and that's it. No more can get in, and and the small pilot objects that serve a few more with delatted, So that's like a couple hundred people getting that stuff. And we have at least a hundred thousand people in British Columbia that would qualify as having being wired like like daily

opioid user or whatever whatever you wanna call it. And then way more who are like weekend warriors and people who would just encounter it. And and that's half the people who are dying are like we can warriors who don't have a habit or whatever. There's a very small

amount of people who can get that prescribed version. And what we're talking about is the you know, asking the government to not kick in the door if we were to start a co op or a buyer's club or a compassion club where we can just obtain the stuff for ourselves legally and distributed among our members. That's the

ask that we're putting on government right now. And when you say compassion club, I mean that, I think was the language that was used in the medical marijuana community exactly right, So it really is the It is a medical marijuana model that we saw in Vancouver that we've also seen with kind of broader marijuana in Spain, right, a kind of cooperative collective model where members can get these drugs and there's a kind of group participation in

procuring them and then and sharing and distributing them. Now as I understand it, though, right in the last day or two, I talked to a couple of guys in Vancouver, ones Donald McPherson, who was the drug policy coordinator under four different mayors from the late nineties till I think eleven, and very connected I think with the drug user unions

in that world. And the other one was Mark Tindall, a doctor I think used to head the Center of Disease Control in British Columbia and who seems very aligned with this and with both of them, said to me, I sort of pressed them on this and sort of preparing for my discussion with you carth and I said, so, you know, if you look at where the problem is, like how much it's a problem getting the federal government to give permission, you know, even though it's basically in

Canada to the provinces how they do healthcare. But both of them sort of almost intimated that the fundamental problem is that they're doing this safe supply through a medical model, and the medical model is inhera inherently constrictive, and that it's hard to find all that many doctors, and even Vancouver never mind brought to British Columbia, who are all that sympathetic, right, I mean definitely, it's it's difficult. The province can can do it, you know, Um, I think

of what happens since COVID. Just in the year the province got two or maybe three COVID vaccines into the arms of almost five million people in a year. Right, that's a massive public health initiative. And why do we need to have the individual doctor and have to find a willing doctor And most doctors, it's true, don't want

to do this. So that's why we have such few people able to find any kind of even prescription for delauded for example, So we we do need to move outside of the strictures of that medical model, you know, that doctor patient prescription. It just seems like the doctors have said, we're not really willing to do this. A few are. There's a few courageous doctors and they don't have to break the rules. There's a little channel to do, uh,

you know, a reasonable version of of prescribing. But this is a problem, Like I was saying, that's at least a hundred thousand people in our little province, probably a lot more. So it's going to take a real sort of mass rollout program, not a one by one by one. It seems to me that you must be running into resistance on a few counts, right. One is the basic idea, I mean, you're just giving going to give drugs to junkies,

blah blah blah blah blah. You know what what are you doing expecting you know, government to pay for it. The second is that Canada did have a problem, not maybe not quite as bad as the US, but the whole problem of the over prescribing of opioid. You know, medications. The oxycontent oxy code on that sort of stuff was an issue in Canada as well, And so the pendulum has swung so far back the other way where you had this kind of broader societal fear of opioids generally,

and as certainly opioids getting out there. And when one's talking safe supply, you're not talking about making available over the counter. But is there a great fear among people on the other side of this, the opposition about diversion, about making opioids too readily available to people who are not otherwise already using illicit opioids, sir, I mean people in popular culture have been scaring the ship out of everybody about heroin for decades and decades and vent and

all all of it for a long time. And for prescription opioids, I mean, we didn't have mass overdoses because of prescription opioids in Canada. We all of our overdose crisises have been because of the illegal market and what's not known. In fact, some places where they didn't cut off the prescription pills so hard seemed to be a little immune to the deaths, at least in the numbers of places like Vancouver, but they went hardcore on us here, following the model in the US of cutting everybody off.

And of course people don't just go, oh, my prescription for oxy's is gone. I guess I'll just go home now. They're like, no, I'm going to go score off the street. You know. So every time you all make a like a scary Netflix show about about prescription opioids, we all watch it up here, right, We mostly watch American TV

in Canada, and you know, we get freaked out. That's that's where we get a lot of ideas, you know, our if you can believe this, one of our leading politicians in this province got all of his ideas about the overdose crisis from watching a segment on John Oliver which pinned it right on pills. And I'm just like, dude, please please fucking come to the neighborhood or come back, because he used to even work near the neighborhood and opened your eyes to what's going on. Prescription opioids are

the solution to this. We need more because people get it all twisted here. They say it's an opioid crisis, it's an addiction crisis, but it's not for me. It's a death crisis. It's a toxic drug supply crisis. It's what they identify as the problem, you know, whether it's some being wired to a substance or someone dying, And these are completely different things that require different solutions. I mean, I'm completely wired to method On right now. I'm an addict.

I'm an opioid addict right this second. If I stopped using method On, I'd be puking out my mouth and my ass tomorrow morning. So I ain't gonna do that. I'll probably be using it for the rest of my life, and I'll be filing my taxes and going to work and doing all that ship. So what So what the problem Isn't that I'm wired too, That's not the problem.

My life is completely fine right now. Um. But the problem is in my life is when I was wired to a very similar molecule that happened to be illegal and so therefore was subject to the police all up my ass, in my life, subject to all kinds of different changes in potency and potential overdoses and all that stuff. So when people say, oh, it's addiction crisis and addiction now that's a law problem. That's a problem with laws and policies. That's a social problem, not a health problem.

And right now we have a death people dying problems, so sorting out what even problem we're talking about and Canadian politicians have not got the message on that, even the most progressive sounding If you go and listen careful, you'll hear what they're trying to do at the end of it. What they really want to announces more treatment beds.

We have this privatized recovery industry. We love. This is also another thing about Canada, the good We love to tell you and lecture you Americans about our beautiful socialized health care system. And you should have that, by the way. But if you're a dope feine, you're in the private sector.

You're going to a private, unregulated recovery house run by some fanatic, or you're going to a private, for profit method on clinic where you're paying extra fees, like I pay fees every month to go to a method own clinic. So these are like the secret things, right, But that's that's true. Well, let me just step back for our audience because never will be so conversing with this issue. But just so people understand, you know that heroin um

sometimes called dia morphine. When it enters the human body, it essentially becomes morphine. It feels a little different going in,

but essentially in the body it's like morphine. Methodon is a synthetic opioid, and it's one that basically is like replacing heroin use or fentinel use with methodon or another drug called groupern Orphine is basically like replacing smoking cigarettes in which you're getting you know, you know, you're hooked on the nicotine, but getting killed by the other other crap that's in a cigarette and replacing it with a nicotine patch or a gum or an east cigarette or

a pouch or snuff or something like that takes away the craving. Helps people manage their lives. I mean, would you would you agree with that basic description I just laid out karth or add or change anything to yeah. Yeah.

I remember when I was at a twelve step program and they said methodon is just trading a drug for a drug, and I said, yes, so what you know, Like it's true, they're both opioids, right, But like my life is, you know, I'm a fully functional, working all the time, have great relationships with my family, not in trouble with the law. But it's all because that molecule, that opioid, happens to be on the right side of the law by by complete ideological reasons. You know, right,

and I know you're doing it for dramatic effect. But you know, some people listening to this week going would be saying, don't talk about yourself as a methodon addict, your method on depend You're only an addict if your dependence is actually causing harmful consequences in your life. And you're being dependent upon methodon is no difference than somebody else being depending on a drug for their heart, or

for their cholesterol, or for their coffee in the morning. Right, good point, And then that and I would say, yes, it's true. My the person who prescribes in a method on would say exactly what you just said, and I'd say, well, then, addiction is a description of social and legal conditions as opposed to a description of something that's medical. Right, like if you if you cause problems in your life because you're broke, or because you're doing something illegal, or because

you're having to score something illegal. But almost the same mall fuel, if it's prescribed to you, you don't have to do any of that stuff. Then all of a sudden we're describing effects which are not biochemical effects, they're not mental health effects. There effects to do with the law and the organization of society. And this is a real piece of gas lighting that gets fitted up onto

drug users. Is that. And I was told for years and years, you know, his chronic relapsing brain disorder, it's your brain that's all messed up, and we got to fix you. And and actually, you know, it may be true that there's things in my brain that are messed up, you know, like for sure, but that's not one of them. Let's take a break here and go to an ad

you know. I sometimes have had conversations with people who have a relative, a child, the cousin, whatever, my husband, who are in a method On program and they're pushing them to get off. And I say, why you're pushing to get off because they're on Methodon, because they're on a drug, because da you know, And I say, stopped that right now, because you could be killing them right that for many people's for some people in methodons a way to get off at heroin and then stop using

all opioids. But for other people, methodon becomes like a lifelong medication, the same way say insulin. You know, there are diabetics who could learn to control their diabetes through diet and exercise and life changes, but for many of them, insulin is going to be a long term or lifelong medication. How do you, Garth, How do you feel about your relationship with method I mean, obviously you're grateful there it's

helped you stabilize your life. Are you content with the idea of being on it for the rest of your life and that this is gonna be your daily medication just like a diabetic on insulin or or do you feel that it's it's somehow undermining your health or you're worried about long term consequences. What's what's your own feeling about that. I don't even think about it. Yeah, sure, I'll probably be on it for my life. That's okay. It doesn't bother me. But it did take me a

long time to get over that. You know. I was always I used to be super aware of like how many mills am I taking? Can I grind it down a little? When am I going to be off? But now I'm just like, I don't care this works. I'm just fine with it, you know, and I think the health consequences of stopping taking it are much worse. Oh yeah, yeah, no, definitely. And I'm curious, like, if you look at two different

parts of your worlds. Right on the one hand, people who are not really part of the drug world in a significant way, do you still encounter some stigma from them? And conversely, is there an element of the heroin or federal using world that sometimes looks down on people who have turned to Method on, Like, you know, you've kind of sold out, or you've gotten the man, you're taking the you know, the man's chemical bracelet, you're you know, this sort of thing. Do you get it from both

sides or not? Really? People people ask me like, how how did you make that work? You know, like really from both both of those worlds? How on earth did you make that work? And I said, well, it's just a function of when I got wired, right, And I told you earlier in the interview how many years it took me to sort of get across the bridge from Heroin to methodone. Heroin and methodone are a lot closer to each other than fentol on methodon art. That's a lot further of a bridge to go. I don't think

I would be making it so well. You know, I really struggled to get across. My doctor told me not so long ago. I never thought you would do it like I never thought you would just be a guy on methodon. I thought you'd be using everything forever. You know, if I was twenty years younger, I don't know that i'd be able to use ventenol and then get across to methodon. And then of course the drug contamination isn't

even stopping at fent and all. There's lots of other stuff going on car fent and al benzos and everything. It's it's making it very complicated. So that's mostly what I get from people is just like, how did you manage that? You know? And I was just like, it's just the luck. It really is a little bit of luck um of when I was born. You know. It's interesting.

I mean, you think that they're in the United States, there must be close to three thousand people now on method on, or or maybe even more if you put all together method on and bupreneurphane, and you know, a large number them the ones that you have this paradox where the people who are where it's working best, for the ones for whom has become a daily medication has removed the the issue of drugs from their lives effectively. You know, they're having stable jobs, family, the whole thing.

They're the ones who are least likely to tell other people that they're using METHODOL because of this stigma associated with it, right, and and and conversely, the people who are using method on but also involved still in a drug scene and a criminal scene whatever, those are the ones who the media focuses on. The one people may see lingering around a method on clinic, this sort of stuff, and it's part of what's given a method on a

bad rap. And and I'm not sure what the answer is because I'm not sure how one persuades large numbers of people who are successfully stabilized in Methodon to become more open or to be able to tell their story to the broader population so that people get it. I mean, up here, I know that method runs on the same

rules as it did a long time ago. You know that, you um, most people have to go to the pharmacy every day or a clinic and have it witnessed their ingestionally someone watches them drink it, you get piss tested a lot. You know. They're that's why people call it liquid handcuffs, because all these rules, because you can't travel very easily, you can't really go very far away from where the place where you get your mouth downe is.

And so I think they need to free that up a lot, and they have in a lot of other countries, there's just a lot more liberal with that stuff. And they just rolled out. Like when I was in Portugal for the last harm Reduction conference in nineteen, I went to see their little methanon van. You know, they just drive it around, and so I was like lining up to just check it out, and the guy hands me a cup and like, oh, no, I'm not from here, man, I don't even I don't speak Portuguese, you know. And

he's like, I'm alright, sure, takes it back. So I said to the doctor, don't ever worry about people about this making its way out from the people who are prescribed it. And he's like, not really, because if you hold onto it too tight, you create this black market for it, and this way more people get it. And I just thought that's a very enlightened way to look at it. We should do more of that in Canada. We should like free that stuff out to get to

more people. You know, yeah, I mean, Garth, I mean I always struck me that the whole preoccupation of the d e A and others about the diversion of method on it always seemed preposterous because from a public health perspective, if people are in a methodon program and they are diverting some of their methodon and giving it or selling it to other people who cannot or will not get into a method on program, that basically that's a net

positive from a public health perspective, right. And meanwhile, there's almost no market for method on, you know, among people who are not already involved with illicit opioins. But when it's it's really true, say, everybody I know pretty much started on diverted methodon. Like very few people that I know have gone into the clinics signed up in their first taste of methodon comes from the official source. This is how everybody finds their way there, and it's it's

great harm. Actually, even you know people worry about diversion of prescription pills, it's the same thing. There's a real harm reduction benefit to diversion. And I never realized this. I just thought of it as this shameful, illegal thing

that me and my friends did. And then I started reading into the research, and it shows that people are trying to help and take care of each other, and that if you're using something like methanone or maybe a prescribed pill that isn't yours, you're not using street supply that day or that afternoon, and so it reduces the likelihood that you'll die. Yeah, it reduces that. It also reduces the black market, reduces the market for you know,

the gangsters and the traffickers. I mean, it reduces you know, whole a whole lot of things that could be positive. But the thing is this mark. And there's with safe supply. You're talking that's just about method on where people can get high from method on and you can overdose from methanon. But basically, you know, it's a relatively safer drug. If

you've been involved with illidopiois before. When you're talking about making pharmaceutical grade heroine or amphetamy or a cocaine or even you know, low dose fentanel available, the issue is there. It seems like the potential for diversion to others who may not be current users or who may just be playing around, and there's the risk of it getting out there broadly in a way that you know, we hold out produce pharma for you know, over promoting. I mean,

isn't there a risk there? And how does one control for that or do you just not worry about it? I mean, everybody can already get drugs really easily, right Like, you know, I was able to get drugs back in the day underage, before I could go legally by booze, you know, Like you can get drugs anywhere in North America really easily. You can order them over the internet. You know, it's like it's already the genies out of

the bottle. This is already out there. So if you have a safe supply, a clean supply, and it gets diverted, then maybe the person who would otherwise be taking the dodgy thing is getting something that's safer for them. You know,

the same rules apply. But if if a country is going to go to um a safe supply or a regulated market instead of a black market, right like we have an unregulated drug market now, so anyone can get unknown substances at any time if you regulate it, Like the liquor store near me um they check your I D. They only run certain hours, They can't sell stuff over a certain alcohol proof, you know what I mean, Like

the government puts rules on it. And so if you had just illegal anything goes on a moonshine being sold by the guy in the alley, it would be more dangerous, and kids or anybody else who is I don't know moonshine naive would be able to get ahold of it more easily. So it's like regulation gives the community, the public, the societ idy more control over these substances because right

now they're completely everywhere and uncontrolled. I mean, it's not it doesn't solve the problem entirely right because I mean the great problem now it involves fentinel, which it is so easy. You know, it's overdose and die from I mean with heroin. I think most people who died of a quote unquote heroin overdose, it was typically really a fatal drug combination evolving other drugs combining you know, heroin

with booze or with benzos with fentanyl. Even though most fentinel is now combined with you know, other drugs as well. It's typically the fentanyl I think is as my understanding is that the you know, it can in fact kill you all by itself in a way that no other opioid that was previously out there would do. And then of course you just had people you know, mixing drugs,

doing dumb stuff, you know, not taking precautions. So obviously cleaning up the drug supply and making it legit in that respect it would solve a big and probably a majority of this problem, but it would not eliminate the problem. You know, I was doing fentanyl. I was doing fentanyl before it was well, you know, I was doing fentanyl before it was on the street. Like we did it from the patches, the Dermo patches, and you can break

them down and do them however you want. You don't have to do them as directed, right, but we get a hold of these things. And when I very first heard about it, like this is a long time ago now, and everyone said, wow, it's like supposedly ten times stronger than heroin or something. I was like, great, sign me up, let's dry it. But nobody was overdosing on that because

you knew, uh, you knew what you were getting. The way that people are overdosing on fentanyl now is because very small quantities of it can cause a big effect. So if you're making up a batch, maybe you haven't distributed all the grains of fentanyl evenly through your drug batch. So you sell someone to flap a dope has got more fentanyl in it than the rest of the batch or whatever. Right, it's like the concentration and the potency,

those together are the problem. Ventanyl in and of itself is albeit powerful, it's an opioid, right, So like if we could assure people, um, here's here's what's in it, here's vent and all, there's no one cut, there's nothing else, and here's the potency and here's how much, then you have a much less likelihood of these kind of venting all overdoses. And still what you see right now is

mostly poly drug overdoses. Like a big amount of overdoses that are recorded by the coroner in Vancouver are people who have been drinking at the same time, you know, or people who for whom there's venting all in the rock or something else. M So in your models, say, supply who's paying for the drugs? I mean when drug users are buying on the street, they have to raise the money one way or another to pay for it. Would they still be paying for inderstafe supply or would

it be free or how would that work? The most immediate thing, the compassion club model of the co op that we're looking to build, it would be us we pool our money or raise it and uh supply ourselves. Because we just don't think yet that the government's inter ha didn't doing that. Um so, I mean not that's what that's what we're trying to do right now. And maybe it depends on how it's applied for, Like if you're doing a prescription heroin program, Yeah, the government should

pay for that, you know, like the government. I believe governments should everywhere should pay for pharmaceuticals. I believe pharmaceutical companies should be nationalized because their strategic national interest a public interest to health thing, and they shouldn't have cartoon villains at the top of them profiteering off everybody. I think we would have avoided all of the big panic and response of the last twenty years on Boxy's if we had been able to have national control instead of

just wild West free market style pharmacy. But Garthon, with your Compassion Club model, I mean, I presume you're buying the drugs on the darknet you're testing in before you're making them available to the members. Yeah, I mean that's

what's happening now. But if if we have applied the Drug User Liberation Front, which is the one the group that has put on five of these give a ways, these little events where a very small amount of heroin, coke or math is given to a very small amount of people that are in our groups as a sort of active civil disobedience as a as a sort of like a little here's what a possible future could look like. So yeah, those are sourced from the dark web by

a couple of very courageous people. But the um Compassion Club model, if if the governments would deign to permit this to occur, you would legally be able to purchase uh diocetyl morphine or whatever off of some pharmaceutical company, because you now you'd be you'd be into what's something

that's legal? You know? But I mean that's also the question, right because I think you know, the libertarian model right basically says let people adults by whatever they want from the company that produces it, and there will be no criminal laws involved, except maybe if you're selling the kids, and you'd have civil liabilities. So you know, the companies would only be responsible if they were selling something other

than what they claimed it to be. And I thought with with safe apply, we're talking about something a little more limited than that, where the people who are accessing it, even if one's not using a medical model where doctors are prescribing, at the very least, there's some constraints. It's not just go on the not the dark web, but go on the internet and get it. Or are you actually saying go all the way? Like are you closer to being a libertarian in your approach when it comes

to safe supply? Well, I mean safe supply is a form of triage, right, Like, ultimately we want to end the drug war and you have like regulated access to the substances in the same way, you know, not necessarily the exact identical mechanisms, but in the same way that

we ended alcohol prohibition and now you have alcohol. Personally, I don't like the libertarian model of companies can just make a fortune marketing alcohol to everybody, Like I think the hugely pro capitalist marketing of the way that we and you came out of prohibition to the enrichment of a few. Yeah, that's not for the public good. So we don't need to make all those same mistakes again,

you know. And I think there's needs to be like a really adult society wide conversation about how we want to come out of it and who we want the winners and losers to be. Yeah, I mean, because it's funny, I find myself wing people ask me if if I support, you know, full legalization, and I'll typically say, look, I'm

not a libertarian, I'm not a free market guy. I actually do worry about opioids becoming or or some other drugs becoming so widely available or potentially promoted in ways that you actually increase the number of people in the country who are addicted by some significant percentage. I don't think it's at the level that our opponents fear, you know, the sort of settlement go more of the you know, the skies falling. But I do think it's it's problematic.

Look what's happened with food, you know, with with you know, powerful corporations, you know, combining sugar, fat, salt into all these you know, types of you know, very attractive uh uh and not very healthy food products that and you have this extraordinary transformation, you know, an obese city in the human body and oh man, opioid McNuggets. Bring on

the opioid McNuggets. Ean, Yeah, you know, I hear you know what I mean, But I mean that you hear me so and so you know that's the thing about how I mean, it's always seems to me the sixty four question of legalization debate is how do you get as many people who are currently engaged in the illicit market and the criminal market, how do you get them to shift into a legal supply situation as much as possible without making these substances much more broadly available to

the broader society, including a people who you know, might because it's always a matter of a spectrum of degree. I mean, yes, it's true that if you really want to get these things today, you can, but lots of people aren't, just because they're illegal, or they're less available

because you need a prescription or what have you. Right, sure, and don't you know, I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of possible outcomes of this, right and I roll back the tape and think, Um, the drug war is brought us really strong opioids, right, that's from the drug war. And in Canada, the first drug arrest was in and it was for opium. And that's what people

used to do is smoke opium. And as they've been arresting and chasing drug users for all the you know, hundred and fourteen years or whatever since then, Um, they've just created this arms race of stronger and stronger and stronger drugs. So the very first thing we have to do is stop the arms race or we're gonna have like space astro dope any moment, now, you know what I mean. It won't stop here, It'll keep going and going. So it's like we're now in a trade off of harms, right.

So like we have to organize ourselves so that we stopped giving the police this excuse to inflate their budgets, get this paramilitary equipment going occupy black neighborhoods all over North America and all that, and we have to stop the escalation of the potency and the body count. So what do we get in trade of that? Do do

we get more people wired? I don't know. We're getting more people wired right now with the illegal market because something that we're doing in our society, something about how we're organizing this late stage capitalist apocalypse, is really alienating and traumatizing to people. And a lot of people find a little solace in opioid. So if we're really worried about not getting more people wired, then we're gonna have to start thinking about what is driving it to begin with.

I'm not just talking about weekend Warrior stuff. I'm talking about what's at the roop of it. Gotta have to stop traumatizing people. Gonna have to stop asking people to do these herculean efforts to just survive, to work three jobs, blah blah blah blah. You know, like we're gonna have to make a nicer society, because otherwise, how can you blame people for finding that little warm hug that is opioids.

Of course it makes sense, you know, or using methamphetamine to keep up with the pace of maybe their workplace or whatever. Hey, Garth, let me switch subjects for a second, you know, just to give our audience a greater sense of van do and the drug user union and and the feeling of it and what sort of community it provides. I mean, they're obviously central to your doing your podcast Crackdown, you know, helping produce it and to come up with

ideas and and all this sort of stuff. But you know, I think for for a lot of people listening to the Wonders. So when you talk about you know, drug users hanging out, when you talk about this union, I mean, obviously there's an advocacy element, but when you go to a gathering Van dou gathering, are people like you know it worked up about what's going on with Russia and Ukraine right now as you would see any place else in society, or they more caught up in their own

lives around this scene. No. I mean yesterday I was in a meeting of the British Columbia Association people on methodone. I'm on the board of that, and we did talk actually about Ukraine, you know, and and Russia, and the president of the group was just like, no good things to say about Putin, you know, and uh, don't get

me wrong, it is a war. And we we have this storefront space on East Hasting Street here that's got you know, a big room where we hold meetings and a few side offices where we can old board meetings or do work on the computer. There's a safe injection room in the back. And all over the walls are

pictures of our dead members. And it's just like the walls are full of more pictures than you can ever imagine, because I mean, if you're if you're a VAN new member, you're a member forever, Like after you die whatever, you will never forget you. So there is constant death all

around us. The building is crowded with ghosts. So we try to organize the next piece of advocacy, the next campaign, do the next civil disobedience, have the next meeting with some government officials to try and gently lobby them on a small reform um. With all this in the background, and people still have space to think about the odder world, you know, the threats of war, the threats of the

far right. You know, Canada just had this terrible uh month of a convoy of people on the very far right driving across the country pretending to be truckers and all this stuff about vaccines and everything, and so we felt that a lot, because I mean, we're into harm reduction, we're into public health, so we know all of that's bullshit. You know, we we know COVID is real, and we want the vaccines and we we want to take care

of each other. That way, we know we're more vulnerable, so we keep we keep an eye on all that stuff because we know the rest of the world affects us too. You know, I'm curious you mentioned van Do, the drug Users group that a Livingston and but Osborne started, you know, almost twenty five years ago. You've mentioned the Drug Users Liberation Front, which is doing civil disobedience around safe supply and making drugs available through a compassion club model.

You also mentioned a group of Methodon activists and I'm curious, how does the method and activists relate to the other two And are the group of the Methron activists people who are mostly using method on and still listen to DRU.

Are there people on Methodon who just need to keep arms length from the people are actively involved with the illicit drug use just in order to you know, keep it straight um or are they fully engaged in supporting the uh you know, the objectives of VANDU and the Drug Users Liberation people in the Methodone group span it all. You know, So there's people who are just on methodone. There's people who are still using. There's people who are on some box zone and all the other kinds of

things that you can get prescribed. And you know, people make an effort to not use in sight of people in that group. You know, they try to be careful, and you know, if someone's trying really hard not to use, not to not put that sort of thing in in someone's face. So, but we're all part of VANDOU, right, Like all of these people we meet in the in the VANDU space were members of the Drug User Union. We're all part of the same movement. So um, we

broadly share the same goals. It's just that the world of method and you get so wrapped in all the rules and regulations. It's like you need to break off the conversation to have a separate chat about it in a separate group, you know. Yeah, So Garth, in your own life, I heard you mentioned someplace that you we've gone back and you're working on a PhD. Now that's right, Yeah, University of we're just Glumbia. Do you have a subject? What's it? What is it? It's an interdisciplinary of journalism

and public health. And you have a dissertation. I'm just into that phase now, so I'm about halfway through. And will it be a drug theme, you think, yes, yeah, it's it's uh, it's something on the something on the overdose crisis, you know, and how we represent ourselves and tell stories and form partnerships on on journalistic enterprises. Yeah. No, I heard you make a comment somewhere one of the things I was listening to about you actually have a

lot of respect to the academics. You just wish there's stuff more, you know, like the the the literature and the studies and the research around harm reduction and drug use is phenomenal. It's like liberating. There's there's great information in there. Um, you know, social theory, writing on policing, all that stuff is fantastic. It's just so much of it as written, so dent Uh you know that you need I guess you need people to get on the mic and popularize that. And maybe that's part of what

my job is. But uh, I sometimes wish that academic writing style hadn't been so embedded into people and you could just talk like a human instead of a weird Uh. These sentences that are a half page long and sixteen clauses.

You know, well, let me just thank you. I mean, I wanted to first congratulate you for having you know, you know, launched this podcast with your colleagues in Vancouver, and for your activism and the great work you're doing and the impact you're having, and uh and thank you for taking the time to uh you know, spends a

few hours. Moving on, thank you for having me and congrats on the podcast, and thank you for talking to our mayor like twenty or twenty five years ago or whatever it is that you met him at that conference, because I'll bet you that help. I'll bet you there's people people who are around today. I think I know some of them because of the changes in policy that conversations like the one you had with Philip Owen helped create. And and also just thank you for your career in

organizing on this stuff. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three, three, seven, seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can

also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and At Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks

to a bio Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next week I'll be talking with Gould Dolan, the neuroscientists at John's Hawkins who's been administering M d M A and other psychedelics to octopuses and mice with fascinating results. So we decided that we wanted to understand Sarah Tonin by looking at an octopus. If you put two octopuses in a tank together, they will kill each other. And so M d M A has this very powerful ability to override that and make them desire social interaction and spend

more time with the other animal. Subscribe to Psychoactive now, see it, don't miss it.