The War Over Safe Drug Supply in Vancouver
published on July 15, 2024 by Omar Mouallem in Maclean's Magazine
Eris Nyx has always been rebellious. Growing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto in the mid-2000s, she spent much of her adolescence using drugs, getting into trouble with police and crashing at friends’ houses. Her transgender identity wasn’t accepted at home, and after high school she moved away for good, heading to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a bike mechanic for a while, before finding a job as an attendant at a homeless shelter on the city’s Downtown Eastside, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood with one of Canada’s highest rates of injection drug use.
The neighbourhood was then in the early stages of an overdose crisis that would soon become a state of indefinite emergency. In 2015, around the time Nyx began working at the shelter, overdoses claimed nearly 500 British Columbians. The next year, when the province declared a public-health emergency, 800 people died; a year after that, nearly 1,300. Most of the casualties were due to fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid dealers were cutting into heroin and pressing into fake oxycontin pills. Drug users could no longer be certain what was in their supply, nor how powerful it would be. On the Downtown Eastside, where people were dying at a rate more than 25 times the national average, the overdose crisis felt like a massacre. Nyx was surrounded by death…
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