Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show
Speaker 1: where we talk about all things drugs. But any of
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of iHeart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. My guest today
Speaker 1: is someone I don't think I've ever met, but he's
Speaker 1: doing remarkable work in the city of Vancouver and province
Speaker 1: of British Columbia and Canada. His name is Garth Mullins
Speaker 1: and he's become well known as host of an award
Speaker 1: winning podcast called Crackdown. What makes his podcast somewhat unique
Speaker 1: is that he and his co producers are themselves drug
Speaker 1: users and drug user organizers and activists. They're mostly working
Speaker 1: with Van DOW, which is an acronym for the Vancouver
Speaker 1: Area Network of Drug Users, perhaps the longest standing drug
Speaker 1: user organization in North America. So, Garth, thank you ever
Speaker 1: so much for joining me today on Psychoactive Ethan. It's
Speaker 1: a great privilege to be here. I've been an admirer
Speaker 1: of your work for a long time and that's nice
Speaker 1: to talk to you. Okay, well, thank you, thank you
Speaker 1: very much. Garth. Let me just start by asking why
Speaker 1: did you start this podcast a few years ago. I'm
Speaker 1: an old school dope fain. You know, that's the story
Speaker 1: of my life is I've been on some kind of
Speaker 1: opioid pretty much every day of my adult life. For
Speaker 1: most of them, and for a long time that was Heroin,
Speaker 1: and for a while now it's been methodone and uh,
Speaker 1: everything in between. And I came to under stand our
Speaker 1: struggle just through my own personal experience with police, the
Speaker 1: different institutions that you run into if you're a drug user,
Speaker 1: and also with losing so many people across my whole life,
Speaker 1: like maybe half the people I came up with are gone.
Speaker 1: And I saw the way that the world looked at
Speaker 1: us and saw us in popular culture and journalism, and
Speaker 1: I was like, those aren't the people around me. Those
Speaker 1: aren't the people that I know. The people that I
Speaker 1: know are actually, most of the time pretty rational and
Speaker 1: smart and kind of trying to make their way and
Speaker 1: then trying to look out for each other. And I
Speaker 1: knew a little bit about how to make podcasts and
Speaker 1: make radio because I played in punk bands for a
Speaker 1: long time. When you do that, you've got to kind
Speaker 1: of fix your own gear and run your own sound
Speaker 1: and sometimes make your own records. So, um, it seemed
Speaker 1: like this could be my contribution. We don't ever really
Speaker 1: talk about the drugs themselves very much. So if you
Speaker 1: want to tune in and hear what it's like to
Speaker 1: get high on um LSD or what it's like to be,
Speaker 1: you know, not in on heroin, we don't really get
Speaker 1: there exactly. Our podcast is like about the war, you know,
Speaker 1: So it's it's if we're talking about a drug war,
Speaker 1: we really talk about the war part of it, I
Speaker 1: guess a lot more, and what our side is doing
Speaker 1: to organize ourselves in that war. This is a podcast
Speaker 1: about this giant, terrible conflict that spans the world, which
Speaker 1: is an impossibly large subject, but it's actually just about
Speaker 1: me and a few of my friends and what's going
Speaker 1: on with them and how we're trying to organize in
Speaker 1: our little part of it, and I always think, why
Speaker 1: would people care very much about Vancouver. We should be
Speaker 1: making this more universal or something. But what I have
Speaker 1: noticed is what happens in this town will happen everywhere
Speaker 1: else eventually. And I'm not quite sure why that is yet.
Speaker 1: But we had fent and all contaminated drugs. That was
Speaker 1: the first time I was noticing it. You know, we
Speaker 1: had massive waves of heroin and stuff before a lot
Speaker 1: of other places in Canada, in the US, you know,
Speaker 1: And we're getting stuff now benzo diazepine contamination into the
Speaker 1: stuff that sold as opioids over the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: and I'm starting to hear reports of that from other
Speaker 1: places in the US. Two first So, for some reason
Speaker 1: to do with supply chain or trade patterns or something,
Speaker 1: what happens to us here is going to happen to
Speaker 1: other people. There's a good chance of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a collective enterprise with people at Van do
Speaker 1: other drug users. I know. It went award for, you know,
Speaker 1: basically an investigative journalism that exposed the fact if the
Speaker 1: government had replaced the traditional effective form of method on
Speaker 1: with another form of method on that was cheaper but
Speaker 1: wasn't working as well, and they denied it wasn't working
Speaker 1: as well. So Garth, I mean when you launched this podcast,
Speaker 1: was it the emergence of fentanyl and the and the
Speaker 1: gross increase in over those fatalities that prompted you to
Speaker 1: do this or something else? It was just a coincidence
Speaker 1: of different events, you know. Um, I was just an
Speaker 1: activist at van Do. I met this Dr Ryan McNeil,
Speaker 1: who's in Yale now, but it was UBC at the time. Um.
Speaker 1: We were going around to lobby government on small changes
Speaker 1: to methodon policy, and you know, we'd go into these
Speaker 1: rooms with government and try and tell them this or that.
Speaker 1: Me and other people from the BC Association people on
Speaker 1: Methodon would say our piece. Ryan would present the research
Speaker 1: and we leave the rooms and we go, wow, this
Speaker 1: is not convincing them. We're not really getting anywhere, but
Speaker 1: maybe it'd make an interesting podcast. And Ryan's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we could do that. I think we could do that.
Speaker 1: And so, uh, you know, we got ahold of a
Speaker 1: few of our favorite activists, people that I've worked with
Speaker 1: for a long time, and we sat down and said
Speaker 1: do we want to do this? Do we need this?
Speaker 1: Is this something the drug user movement wants. And the
Speaker 1: very first question was what the funk is a podcast?
Speaker 1: I said, It's just like radio shoved in the computer,
Speaker 1: you know, And they're like, yeah, we I mean, we've
Speaker 1: always want to tell our story and we always want
Speaker 1: to embrace whatever technology gets it out the door that way. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the that we listened to a few different
Speaker 1: ways that we could do it. We had this discussions
Speaker 1: on the kind of topics we wanted to cover and
Speaker 1: the kind of research we wanted to mobilize. I found
Speaker 1: some people in Vancouver who who had also done um
Speaker 1: some audio reporting on the heroin prescription Heroin project, and
Speaker 1: we got all got together and started making the podcast.
Speaker 1: But man, the thing that really I realized is I
Speaker 1: couldn't just like stand in the sidelines and hold the
Speaker 1: mic and interview people and stuff. I just share some
Speaker 1: of myself too, you know, Like that's the job of
Speaker 1: the host. And I kind of maybe I didn't think
Speaker 1: about that very much starting out, because I didn't have
Speaker 1: like this ability to explain my life or whatever, because I,
Speaker 1: like I said, I've been like really carrying a lot
Speaker 1: of shame about it. So the podcast helped me understand
Speaker 1: a little bit more who I am and be okay
Speaker 1: to talk about myself and those parts of my life.
Speaker 1: And that's been a real great gift, you know, Like
Speaker 1: I I never thought that would come out of it.
Speaker 1: You know, I thought, oh, this would be great. I'll
Speaker 1: get to interview all these cool people. I'll get to
Speaker 1: profile a bunch of activists that I know who really
Speaker 1: deserved the spotlight. But I never thought I'd be talking
Speaker 1: these little vignettes and anecdotes from my own life, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's been good that way. Yeah. I think we're
Speaker 1: having very similar experiences hosting our podcast. And I'll tell
Speaker 1: you that your answer to the question what's the podcast
Speaker 1: is the exact thing that I get to old mom. Well,
Speaker 1: that's good, you know, I mean it is. It is funny, right,
Speaker 1: But in Canada, one in five people doesn't really have
Speaker 1: good internet access. So like we do listening parties, and
Speaker 1: so it's really legit that lots of people don't know
Speaker 1: what a podcast is, because why would you. Um, So
Speaker 1: we just play episodes of the podcast out loud at
Speaker 1: Van Deu and people can come and listen and then
Speaker 1: have a discussion afterwards. And I found out from people
Speaker 1: just writing me that people all over the place are
Speaker 1: doing that and I didn't even know about it. Like
Speaker 1: someone into Ana was having I think they were calling
Speaker 1: it crafts and crackdown where they have snacks and do
Speaker 1: knitting or like glue things and and listen and then
Speaker 1: have conversations. So like, yeah, I mean, if if people
Speaker 1: want to do that, we and we did create it
Speaker 1: to be an organizing tool and and that seems like
Speaker 1: a good use of it to me. So let me
Speaker 1: tell me how old are you now? A middle age
Speaker 1: I am like on the wrong side of fifty now,
Speaker 1: but only just the wrong side of fifty. I take
Speaker 1: that means north of okay, Okay, so that means born
Speaker 1: in the early seventies. Even is my policy to never
Speaker 1: give out the date of birth. Okay, the police have
Speaker 1: asked me to. So I'm not being I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to be coy, like, oh, you're trying to make you
Speaker 1: think I'm younger than I am. No, I'm fucking middle
Speaker 1: age guy. Okay, Okay. Well, so when you reflect back, like,
Speaker 1: you know, how did Garth mullins land up getting involved
Speaker 1: in Heroin? It was as a teenager in your twenties?
Speaker 1: Was it in Vancouver? Or elsewhere, you know, where'd you
Speaker 1: grow up? What's your own thoughts reflecting back on all
Speaker 1: this about how and why you landed up? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I reckon it's like so many other people, you
Speaker 1: have some bad experiences, you're kind of alienated from your
Speaker 1: family and your community as a kid, and you start
Speaker 1: looking for what's the way back into that? And you know,
Speaker 1: so I was, like lots of other people, just drinking
Speaker 1: and trying different drugs when I was you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
Speaker 1: and then eventually, you know, I come to opioids and
Speaker 1: that seems the right thing. And then I might have
Speaker 1: even been when I was in San Francisco when I
Speaker 1: was nineteen where I first tried the opioid that was
Speaker 1: just like ah Chef's kiss. It was black tar heroin,
Speaker 1: and I just thought, fuck me, this is what everybody
Speaker 1: else is feeling all the time. Like I just felt like, uh,
Speaker 1: like this constant sort of howling of ghosts around me.
Speaker 1: You know, like like from from Raiders, that lost arc.
Speaker 1: You know, you got the little the little arc and
Speaker 1: when they take the lid off, all the face melting
Speaker 1: ghosts fly everywhere and get everybody. But this is like
Speaker 1: this puts the lid on the arc. Very nice. Sleean
Speaker 1: keeps all the face melt and ghosts safely inside. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean I was I was going to
Speaker 1: come back to that for sure, and I did. Did
Speaker 1: you have this kind of addiction issues like running in
Speaker 1: the family before you or were you sort of the
Speaker 1: first in the family to be I think we probably
Speaker 1: got it in the family, you know. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I'm not sure how it gets characterized my
Speaker 1: I mean, my family doesn't have a history that I
Speaker 1: know of with hard drugs, but maybe maybe drinking is
Speaker 1: more common. But I don't know that that's where I
Speaker 1: get it from. You know, I think, uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: so hard to find the root causes. But I I
Speaker 1: sometimes think of it like this, right, like the world
Speaker 1: as I've known it has been getting shittier and shittier
Speaker 1: and shittier until we're almost at the end of it now,
Speaker 1: Like we got a guy in Russia with his finger
Speaker 1: on nuclear button. Climate change is killing a lot of
Speaker 1: people here in British Columbia. Five people died in the
Speaker 1: heat wave last summer. And we're not that bigger province.
Speaker 1: We got thousands of people from toxic drugs. It's just
Speaker 1: like the whole place is going to hell. My question
Speaker 1: to other people is not why why do I Drew
Speaker 1: do drugs? It's like, why don't you do drugs? How
Speaker 1: are you getting away without this nice cushion of opioids
Speaker 1: to sort of take the edge off of the apocalypse.
Speaker 1: So that's what I wonder. It's I kind of have
Speaker 1: given up trying to figure out what my issue is,
Speaker 1: But what's everybody else's. You know, I read that you
Speaker 1: had grown up initially like not in Vancouver, a greater
Speaker 1: Vancouver area, but like in the Northwest Territory, I mean
Speaker 1: a sort of remote part of North America. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I was. I was a kid in the seventies
Speaker 1: in in Yellowknife, which is north of sixty you know,
Speaker 1: it's almost it's the Subarctic. But I loved it there,
Speaker 1: you know, I had really I had a good childhood there.
Speaker 1: You know, I did like it. Yeah, So that was
Speaker 1: That's definitely. It's definitely a It's a good place for
Speaker 1: a kid, you know, a small town before where you
Speaker 1: get too old, you can like ride your bike all
Speaker 1: over the place with the other kids, and and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, as a mining town, so there's lots of
Speaker 1: different kind of characters in that place. I liked it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I ALWASO also think of those kind of places,
Speaker 1: Like if you think about where, generally speaking, are the
Speaker 1: worst alcohol problems in the world, the worst relationships with booze,
Speaker 1: and it's typically the closly are of the Arctic, the
Speaker 1: worst of the problems with booze. Right, you look at Russia, Scandinavia, Alaska,
Speaker 1: Northern Canada, you know, wherever it's kind of light twenty
Speaker 1: two hours a day and then dark twenty two hours
Speaker 1: a day, and alcohol just seems to play some particular
Speaker 1: role in societies like that. I mean I think that's true. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: like once colonialism got ahold of northern Canada in the
Speaker 1: early twentieth century and brought booze in in a big way,
Speaker 1: I think that was probably true. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: anything necessarily like linked to the environment or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Like people managed without for thousands of years. So yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe there's maybe white people are maladapted to long polar
Speaker 1: nights or something. I don't know, but um, definitely, when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, there was lots of lots of
Speaker 1: booze in that town for sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I just think about the history of alcohol prohibition. You know,
Speaker 1: we had in the US, you had two consideration in Canada,
Speaker 1: and especially it was popular I think in the North
Speaker 1: Scandinavian Russia or the other places that flirted with it,
Speaker 1: and they seemed to be the places where people's relationship
Speaker 1: with alcohol was different than it was saying places like
Speaker 1: Southern Europe or Latin America. Right, You know that you
Speaker 1: basically consumed alcohol to get drunk, and you know, the
Speaker 1: association with how light or dark. It's kind of I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's my own theory, probably other people
Speaker 1: think that as well, but it's sort of set a
Speaker 1: frame for kind of thinking about the use of maybe
Speaker 1: what was oftentimes the only popular psychoactive substance available, about
Speaker 1: using in a way which was different than a more
Speaker 1: kind of normalized consumed booze with food this sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that could be. That could be. I haven't really traveled,
Speaker 1: um all that much in Southern Europe, but I know
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, like having a nice dinner with
Speaker 1: wine and all that kind of thing. Yeah, it could be.
Speaker 1: And you're also a bit different, right, I mean you're
Speaker 1: I mean just you know, I mean, just say a
Speaker 1: little more about that getting picked on and bullied for
Speaker 1: for different reasons. Yeah, I mean I got albinism and
Speaker 1: almost no eyesight, so that means like like albino, like uh,
Speaker 1: platinum hair, pale skin, almost blind kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: it definitely made uh, school and bullying and all that
Speaker 1: like part of my story for sure. Yeah. When I was, um,
Speaker 1: you know, when I was in elementary school and stuff,
Speaker 1: they called me Ghost and Casper the Ghosts and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and I hated it, you know. But now
Speaker 1: ghost is a pre cool street name, so I'm okay.
Speaker 1: I'm okay with it now. But it's just like back
Speaker 1: in the day, you know, I was like, no, so
Speaker 1: you were one of those like the first time you
Speaker 1: used heroin, it was like, wow, I like this stuff.
Speaker 1: It makes me feel I don't know, normal at ease.
Speaker 1: I'm coming back to it, Yeah, for sure, you know,
Speaker 1: And I was, I was a depressed kid, you know,
Speaker 1: I was. I think I was a suicidal kid, you know.
Speaker 1: I I certainly dreamed of not being alive, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I never I never really tried to hurt
Speaker 1: myself like that, but I did. I can look back
Speaker 1: in my notebooks and journals and I'm like, Wow, that
Speaker 1: kid was fucked up and it stopped that, you know.
Speaker 1: So I was one of those people who I guess
Speaker 1: I was self medicating, but I'm not sure what the
Speaker 1: outcomes would have been for me, but for the refuge
Speaker 1: that heroin provided, you know. So, I think even though
Speaker 1: it didn't maybe look like it from the outside, at
Speaker 1: the time, I was reaching for a rational choice, you know,
Speaker 1: I was reaching for a kind of a survival, a
Speaker 1: kind of a way to feel a little better. And
Speaker 1: did it put you into a kind of community of
Speaker 1: fellow drug users or were you kind of using heroin
Speaker 1: but otherwise spending a fair bit of your life and
Speaker 1: sort of non drug, non heroin using world, shall we say? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I was always in both. So I always knew a
Speaker 1: crew of people who were wired and was connected like that.
Speaker 1: But I often, you know, had a workplace that I
Speaker 1: was going to where people didn't know. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think my family had some idea, but I tried to
Speaker 1: you know, minimize it and kind of tone it down
Speaker 1: a little bit. And I certainly didn't advertise, you know,
Speaker 1: like only only a consience. It seems like a funny
Speaker 1: thing to say being on a podcast. It's like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm a dope fiend. But uh, that's this is kind
Speaker 1: of new for me, at least it's only been a
Speaker 1: few years maybe, you know, or something, when I started
Speaker 1: saying beyond a small group of frenzy ad this is
Speaker 1: my story. Oh is that right? It's really recently, the
Speaker 1: kind of coming out about the past like that and
Speaker 1: through the podcast and such. Yeah. I mean I was
Speaker 1: an activist for sure with Van du for longer than that,
Speaker 1: the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, but um, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't really cop to it. If I ever did
Speaker 1: an interview or something, I would be kind of nebulous
Speaker 1: about it. And so I was very ashamed. You know.
Speaker 1: I did try to keep it to myself or at
Speaker 1: least not advertise. And I learned from the activists at
Speaker 1: Van Dew the power of like owning your own truth
Speaker 1: and not being ashamed of it. And it's like, finally
Speaker 1: you get to relieve yourself of carrying this big backpack
Speaker 1: full of secrets and bullshit and shame and all of that.
Speaker 1: And so that's been a lovely gift of activism. So garth.
Speaker 1: I mean you're you're in you're using heroin, I guess
Speaker 1: from your late teens for uh ten twenty years. I
Speaker 1: mean basically during that time, are you smoking or injecting it?
Speaker 1: Are you housed all the time? Are you having legal
Speaker 1: jobs all the time? Do you get involved in criminal
Speaker 1: other criminal activity apart from obtaining your drugs? I mean,
Speaker 1: what's your life like during this period. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit of everything. So, yeah, I had periods where I
Speaker 1: was pretty poorly slash not housed. Um. Mostly I had places, UM,
Speaker 1: I was working sometimes sometimes white collar jobs, sometimes blue
Speaker 1: collar jobs, sometimes no jobs, you know, getting welfare. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I was going to school, uh, you know, like post
Speaker 1: secondary and sometimes I guess what you would call nickel
Speaker 1: and dime criminal activities outside of outside of the obtaining drugs, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and injecting all the time. I was one of those
Speaker 1: ivy drug users, and I kind of thought it was
Speaker 1: like a waste of time or a waste of drugs
Speaker 1: to do it any other way, like to smoke it
Speaker 1: or something like that, you know. So I was definitely
Speaker 1: just like get that right to the brain. And you're
Speaker 1: pretty loyal to heroin or you're mixing it with cocaine
Speaker 1: or other stimulants or benzos or things like that. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely liked speedballs. I you know, heroin and crack together.
Speaker 1: That was pretty good. But yeah, heroin was the main
Speaker 1: thing for me, and other opioids if I couldn't get heroin.
Speaker 1: And in terms of taking precautions around HIV A TEPS
Speaker 1: using a needle exchange program, what was your relationship to
Speaker 1: all that sort of sort of self involvement in harm reduction, Well,
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, like back in it was still
Speaker 1: not easy always get a new syringe. So I did
Speaker 1: share with people on occasion, on desperate occasion, and we
Speaker 1: did bleach the needle. And that's you know, only so effective,
Speaker 1: but that was the harm reduction protocol at the time.
Speaker 1: And um, you know, because the police would take needles
Speaker 1: off you if they found them, and this and that.
Speaker 1: So I mean back in the day, you had one
Speaker 1: needle for like a month or whatever, and you'd keep
Speaker 1: stabbing that blunt thing into you and you'd have to
Speaker 1: sharpen it on a match striker and that, you know,
Speaker 1: the rubber would wear down inside and you'd be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this isn't gonna be good. The numbers would wear off
Speaker 1: the barrel like it was bad. I mean, now in
Speaker 1: Vancouver there's enough syringes that most people or a lot
Speaker 1: of people can use a new one every time they inject,
Speaker 1: which is the preferred practice, which is smart because when
Speaker 1: you look under a microscope, those things get blunt really fast.
Speaker 1: And also it's like not not sterile anymore, um importantly.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean doing all that definitely sucked up
Speaker 1: my veins, like they're all collapsed. But um, I picked
Speaker 1: up harm reduction. I think the first time I really
Speaker 1: figured out what this was all about was in a
Speaker 1: civic center park in San Francisco when there was a
Speaker 1: big tent encampment there and these people came around with
Speaker 1: buckets and it was a guerrilla needle exchange, like you
Speaker 1: turn in your needle and they give you a new one.
Speaker 1: It was illegal, and these people were risking or asked
Speaker 1: to do this, and when I you know, everyone lined
Speaker 1: up and exchanged their needles pretty quick. But the guy,
Speaker 1: I remember, she is just like stay safe, man. He
Speaker 1: wasn't giving me some lecture about twelve step or quitting
Speaker 1: or nothing like that. And it's the first time I'd
Speaker 1: run into anything like that. I was completely amazed. I
Speaker 1: was like, that is a lot of respect for that.
Speaker 1: I think it was people from prevention point in San Francisco. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I remember those days, the late eighties, early nineties in
Speaker 1: New York, San Francisco, people doing little forms of harmonducts
Speaker 1: and civil disobedience and kind of modeled on what the
Speaker 1: Dutch and others in Europe have been doing even years earlier,
Speaker 1: but not facing quite the same threat of sanction from
Speaker 1: the cops and others. So your early years doing this,
Speaker 1: then we're more San Francisco and then moving back to
Speaker 1: Vancouver at some point. Yeah, there's a bunch of like, uh,
Speaker 1: little ship punk kids like me who kind of circulated
Speaker 1: up and down the I five cord or like that.
Speaker 1: I was was one of those kids, you know as
Speaker 1: planning bands and visiting friends and and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So I was there mostly Vancouver, mostly in Canada, and yeah,
Speaker 1: just like a lot of years of just using heroin
Speaker 1: and when I would have a nice stable connect that
Speaker 1: could drop off like a product that I knew how
Speaker 1: strong it was and I knew it would be. In
Speaker 1: the nineties, there was quite strong heroine in Vancouver. In fact,
Speaker 1: we had a big overdose crisis then because of it,
Speaker 1: But it also meant that, like some of us, were
Speaker 1: able to find a pretty stable way to conduct ourselves,
Speaker 1: and and those led to long periods of my life
Speaker 1: where things were very calm, and I did try to
Speaker 1: be careful, so I always if I in the very
Speaker 1: few times I shared needles, I did bleach them. But
Speaker 1: there was things I didn't know, like that the virus
Speaker 1: could live in the cotton, you know, the filter that
Speaker 1: you use, and we shared those completely, and it could
Speaker 1: live on the spoon, it could live on the paraphernalia.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know any of that. In fact, I
Speaker 1: didn't know that until I tried to be careful. But
Speaker 1: really I was just very lucky. We'll be talking more
Speaker 1: after we hear this ad. And so when's the first
Speaker 1: time you try method on? And when's the point at
Speaker 1: which you finally begin to stick with that as your
Speaker 1: your principal drug? Basically, m I think I had taken
Speaker 1: method on, like just when I, you know, bought it
Speaker 1: off the street or something when there was no heroin,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't even remember pretty early on. And
Speaker 1: then I remember my when my hair and a dealer
Speaker 1: lived across the hall. I was just like it was
Speaker 1: very convenient, but I was also like, I came to
Speaker 1: this point where it's like, okay, I gotta quit, And
Speaker 1: I said, where can I get Methodon? He goes, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: no problem. I sell the cure as well as the disease,
Speaker 1: by which he meant he sells methodon as well as heroin.
Speaker 1: And he because he was on Methodon, he was just
Speaker 1: he was just a guy wired to opioids as well.
Speaker 1: So he sold me, you know, like a hundred mills
Speaker 1: of his methodon for twenty five bucks. And so I
Speaker 1: went and locked the door, you know, like train spotting style,
Speaker 1: and like hunkered down for like what turned out to
Speaker 1: be forty eight hours or so before I was opening
Speaker 1: the door and like admitting defeat that I had taken
Speaker 1: all the method and there's no way it was gonna work.
Speaker 1: So a couple of years after that, I guess I
Speaker 1: tried to get on a formal Methodon program and it
Speaker 1: was so rationed um that they wouldn't let me. They
Speaker 1: just said, oh, we only have so many slots and
Speaker 1: you can't you can't come on. And so then it
Speaker 1: was a couple of years after that I guess. So
Speaker 1: I got on the program that I'm now on in
Speaker 1: two thousand two, and then there was a bunch of
Speaker 1: years of still using heroin, and then uh, kind of
Speaker 1: I felt like it was a step in the right
Speaker 1: direction to be using uh, you know, prescription not prescribed
Speaker 1: to me, but prescription opioids uh and methodon. And then
Speaker 1: eventually I got to this place where it's you know,
Speaker 1: mostly just methadone. And so it was like it was
Speaker 1: a long it was a long process. So let me
Speaker 1: bring you and the audience back to Vancouver. Now. I
Speaker 1: remember going up there a bunch of times in the
Speaker 1: late nineties. I had met Philip Owen, a somewhat conservative
Speaker 1: mayor of Vancouver. He had come to a conference we
Speaker 1: had organized, my organization organized to Hoover, the very conservative
Speaker 1: Hoover Institution at Stanford, California, and I remember sitting there
Speaker 1: was a conference for mostly police chiefs and deputy police chiefs,
Speaker 1: but there was this guy sitting there just kind of
Speaker 1: taking notes and taking notes, and I remember going over
Speaker 1: to him and introducing myself and ask him, well, who
Speaker 1: are you? And he goes on Philip ball and from Vancouver.
Speaker 1: I said, what do you do there, he goes on
Speaker 1: the mayor. I said, huh, and here's a guy, a mayor.
Speaker 1: He had not been invited to speak. He was incredibly modest,
Speaker 1: and he's sitting there taking notes, you know, for like
Speaker 1: two days. I mean I was just blowing away that
Speaker 1: a sitting politician could do such a thing, and never
Speaker 1: that somebody who sort of came from the more conservative
Speaker 1: side of the spectrum. And so about you know, six
Speaker 1: nine months later that I went to see Philip in
Speaker 1: his office and he was saying, well, what should I do?
Speaker 1: We got this growing HIV problem. It's over those problems,
Speaker 1: new powerful heroin. And I talked to him about what
Speaker 1: they were doing in Europe, about the Frankfurt and a
Speaker 1: kind of integrated approach harm reduction approach, and he was
Speaker 1: intrigued by that. And you had this sense of dynamism
Speaker 1: in Vancouver that really things were maybe going to open up.
Speaker 1: You know, there was resistance, you know, national governments, the
Speaker 1: provincial government, but it looked like there was real promise.
Speaker 1: And at that point the fight was over over whether
Speaker 1: or not to open up a safe inject in sight.
Speaker 1: You know, I think Vancouver was one of the first
Speaker 1: places to really get you deeply in that debate, and
Speaker 1: Philippo and the mayor sort of bravely began to take
Speaker 1: the right side on that. And so when I look
Speaker 1: at Vancouver, right, I think of God, Vancouver's took the
Speaker 1: lead and opening up the safe injection site, took the
Speaker 1: lead and opening up the kind of heroin prescription programs
Speaker 1: that Switzerland pioneer thirty years ago and that you now
Speaker 1: find and Germany and Denmark and the Netherlands and and
Speaker 1: which had been very successful. They're there. Heroin problems are
Speaker 1: a dramatic fraction of what we see generally speaking in
Speaker 1: North America. Um, you know, those programs spread not just
Speaker 1: from Van Covercouver, British Columbia, but they go to other
Speaker 1: parts of British Columbia. They go to Ontario, they go
Speaker 1: to Quebec. They even managed to get into conservative province
Speaker 1: of Alberta. But in amidst all this progressive policy, and
Speaker 1: in a country that, unlike the United States, has national
Speaker 1: health insurance, has some measure of a social safety net,
Speaker 1: nonetheless you have an overdose fatality eight that is basically
Speaker 1: comparable or almost comparable to waters in the US. And
Speaker 1: and here we're talking in in the second week of March,
Speaker 1: and just yesterday the Corner's Office in British Columbia comes
Speaker 1: out with a report, you know, on the fact that
Speaker 1: seven eight thousand people have died the province. You know
Speaker 1: in just the last few years, that two hundred people
Speaker 1: died in British Columbia last year and you only have
Speaker 1: a little over five million in the entire province. So
Speaker 1: you're talking about very high rates. And the thing I'm
Speaker 1: trying to understand is, how does one explain the fact
Speaker 1: that Vancouver and BC and other parts of Canada, even
Speaker 1: though you're more advanced than the US in terms of
Speaker 1: embracing harm reduction, why are you not attaining the kind
Speaker 1: of successes we've seen in much, if not all, of
Speaker 1: Europe and and sort of suffering more like we are
Speaker 1: in the US. Here's the key for understanding Canada. Canada
Speaker 1: has a great um pr sense of itself. We like
Speaker 1: to broadcast at ten thousand walk into the world that
Speaker 1: we're Canada, the good, that we're different, we're progressive, we're special.
Speaker 1: But this country was actually founded as a resource extraction
Speaker 1: branch plant for the United Kingdom, right, so we were
Speaker 1: we were started because rich people in London liked to
Speaker 1: wear beaver hats. And I'm serious, that's what this place
Speaker 1: was all about at the beginning. So the colonial process
Speaker 1: of stealing the land off the people, the indigenous people
Speaker 1: already lived here, was because of this, and then forestry, mining,
Speaker 1: oil and gas. But that's still what the country is
Speaker 1: all about. And we are um a country that's figured
Speaker 1: out that it's easier to talk nice and do the
Speaker 1: dirty than it is to just advertise that we're mean. Right,
Speaker 1: So we will talk a lot about the great harm
Speaker 1: reduction programs we have in Vancouver, and we have talked
Speaker 1: for twenty years about it, but really there's a few
Speaker 1: pilot projects in twelve square blocks of the city. We
Speaker 1: have not rolled out harm reduction thoroughly. The heroin program
Speaker 1: you talked about was a study fifteen years ago, and
Speaker 1: so right now there's a hundred people that can get
Speaker 1: access to it and no more. The study proved, Wow,
Speaker 1: prescription heroin is great. Really does wonders imagine if they
Speaker 1: had taken that study and made a prescription heroin program
Speaker 1: so that anybody who wanted it could get it. Um,
Speaker 1: we would never have had vent in all here. We
Speaker 1: would never have had the overdose crisis, but we didn't
Speaker 1: do that. We just talked a good game, like we all,
Speaker 1: look how progressive we are with this program, never mentioning
Speaker 1: that it's a tiny pilot, never mentioning that we froze
Speaker 1: it and restricted it so much so we allow there
Speaker 1: to be just enough to advertise but not enough to
Speaker 1: really make a dent in it. And everything we get
Speaker 1: we get by civil disobedience and fighting. For our politicians,
Speaker 1: they may talk progressively, they may have crocodile tears for
Speaker 1: all of the dead drug users, but truly it takes
Speaker 1: civil disobedience to move the needle on this stuff. So
Speaker 1: when we had insight the first safe injection site in
Speaker 1: North America open jeez, fifteen years ago now maybe more
Speaker 1: almost one of years ago, that was because people were
Speaker 1: involved in opening underground, not even underground, just illegal, unsanctioned
Speaker 1: safe injection sites first and saying to the government, look,
Speaker 1: come and arrest us, or do it yourself, you open it.
Speaker 1: We did the same thing with syringes, and right now
Speaker 1: in the last year year and a half, we've been
Speaker 1: doing the same thing with distributing tested clean heroin, methamphetamine
Speaker 1: and cocaine to people in very small, little direct action events,
Speaker 1: but saying, look, this is what post drug war world
Speaker 1: could look like, where people could obtain the drugs they
Speaker 1: need that had been tested and we're pure and we're
Speaker 1: not going to cause them to fatally overdose. Is the
Speaker 1: issue that it's a lack of commitment or is it
Speaker 1: that it's just between federal bureaucracy, provincial bureaucracy, the pharmacist
Speaker 1: that doctors, that there's just all this resistance to embracing
Speaker 1: a kind of radical new way of dealing with a
Speaker 1: tainted drugs supply that's killing large numbers of people. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean the reason that politicians speak progressive is because
Speaker 1: we forced them to. The secret ingredient in Canadian drug
Speaker 1: policy is the drug user union, is the drug user movement.
Speaker 1: Is that we have a strong, militant drug user movement
Speaker 1: that will break unjust laws when we need to. That's
Speaker 1: why we have drug policy the way it is in Vancouver. Definitely,
Speaker 1: some politicians have heard us, but you know, Philip Owen
Speaker 1: heard us after his city hall was occupied and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, Right, So, I mean the militancy plays a
Speaker 1: role in getting to these people and part of getting
Speaker 1: to them is they hear it and they realize, oh,
Speaker 1: we better get ahead of this, so they start talking
Speaker 1: a good game without actually doing it. This is how
Speaker 1: every movement for social justice, every movement for civil rights works.
Speaker 1: This is how all of it works. Is you have
Speaker 1: to you have to demand this from your government. You
Speaker 1: have to arm twist, you have to force it, because
Speaker 1: they just don't. They don't give you things out of
Speaker 1: the goodness of their heart or even when they're nice people,
Speaker 1: they don't really do it. I mean, if you think
Speaker 1: about how did we get the eight hour day or
Speaker 1: days off on the weekend, or votes for women or
Speaker 1: any of that stuff going back a hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 1: it all works like this. So me, that is the
Speaker 1: engine that moves history. That's that's what I know. So listen,
Speaker 1: when it comes to safe supply, Um, maybe give me
Speaker 1: your definition of safe supply, your mob, what would the
Speaker 1: ideal safe supply situation look like? And then talk about
Speaker 1: to what extent is safe supply actually operationalized on the
Speaker 1: ground today. What are the small examples of it happening right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean people are dying here and have been dying
Speaker 1: my whole life because we don't know what's in the
Speaker 1: drugs that we're buying, and we don't know because they're illegal, right,
Speaker 1: that's the problem. And to my mind, say you're doing
Speaker 1: heroin and you don't know, so it could kill you.
Speaker 1: Safe supply is just being able to access pharmaceutical grade diocetomorphine,
Speaker 1: you know, pharmaceutical heroine. So just the same thing that
Speaker 1: you were going to do anyway, but you can get
Speaker 1: your hands on a pharmaceutical version because all the red
Speaker 1: tape and whatever is out of the way and you
Speaker 1: can do it. You can go home and shoot it
Speaker 1: or whatever you want. Like. That's that's safe supply. It's
Speaker 1: replacing the toxic supply with the pharmaceutical version or the
Speaker 1: version that's been tested and you know what's in it,
Speaker 1: and you can tell people and guarantee what's in it.
Speaker 1: And that's it. That we're not trying to get people
Speaker 1: to stop using or change using, or do anything or
Speaker 1: come to some meeting or go to a twelve step no, no,
Speaker 1: nothing like that. That's the only thing. It has the
Speaker 1: biggest effect in the world because it can stop people
Speaker 1: from dying. And that, to me, that is the key
Speaker 1: question that's before us, not whether people are using or
Speaker 1: are people wired or have whatever substance use disorder. It's
Speaker 1: is people alive or not. So that's safe supply is
Speaker 1: a demand that came out of the drug user movement
Speaker 1: here in Vancouver. But the idea was, I mean, we've
Speaker 1: been calling for an end to the drug war, decriminalization,
Speaker 1: legalization for a generation, for a very long time here,
Speaker 1: but safe supplies like a reform. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: if we if we haven't won yet the revolution to
Speaker 1: end the drug war, then at least let us find
Speaker 1: the most vulnerable people and replace the supply of drugs
Speaker 1: that they're using with the pharmaceutical version. So basically, and
Speaker 1: there's the heroin prescription program that you know that Vancouver
Speaker 1: and now some other places had. That's a very limited
Speaker 1: version of safe supply because it is providing the clean
Speaker 1: version of heroin. Where then there's this other drug, hydromorphone,
Speaker 1: which we know in the US is allowed it, which
Speaker 1: is quite similar, but it's done it where you have
Speaker 1: to use it on site. You could come three times
Speaker 1: a day, can't take it home, all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's very different than when you're talking about On
Speaker 1: the other hand, you're also not talking about just simply
Speaker 1: selling these drugs over the counter, right and making it
Speaker 1: available to the water public. It's really about setting up
Speaker 1: a process whereby people who are already obtaining these drugs
Speaker 1: from the illicit market, from the criminal market, can instead
Speaker 1: obtain them from a legal source. Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean the Heroin pilot project here in Vancouver that
Speaker 1: serves a little over a hundred people and that's it.
Speaker 1: No more can get in, and and the small pilot
Speaker 1: objects that serve a few more with delatted, So that's
Speaker 1: like a couple hundred people getting that stuff. And we
Speaker 1: have at least a hundred thousand people in British Columbia
Speaker 1: that would qualify as having being wired like like daily
Speaker 1: opioid user or whatever whatever you wanna call it. And
Speaker 1: then way more who are like weekend warriors and people
Speaker 1: who would just encounter it. And and that's half the
Speaker 1: people who are dying are like we can warriors who
Speaker 1: don't have a habit or whatever. There's a very small
Speaker 1: amount of people who can get that prescribed version. And
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is the you know, asking the
Speaker 1: government to not kick in the door if we were
Speaker 1: to start a co op or a buyer's club or
Speaker 1: a compassion club where we can just obtain the stuff
Speaker 1: for ourselves legally and distributed among our members. That's the
Speaker 1: ask that we're putting on government right now. And when
Speaker 1: you say compassion club, I mean that, I think was
Speaker 1: the language that was used in the medical marijuana community
Speaker 1: exactly right, So it really is the It is a
Speaker 1: medical marijuana model that we saw in Vancouver that we've
Speaker 1: also seen with kind of broader marijuana in Spain, right,
Speaker 1: a kind of cooperative collective model where members can get
Speaker 1: these drugs and there's a kind of group participation in
Speaker 1: procuring them and then and sharing and distributing them. Now
Speaker 1: as I understand it, though, right in the last day
Speaker 1: or two, I talked to a couple of guys in Vancouver,
Speaker 1: ones Donald McPherson, who was the drug policy coordinator under
Speaker 1: four different mayors from the late nineties till I think eleven,
Speaker 1: and very connected I think with the drug user unions
Speaker 1: in that world. And the other one was Mark Tindall,
Speaker 1: a doctor I think used to head the Center of
Speaker 1: Disease Control in British Columbia and who seems very aligned
Speaker 1: with this and with both of them, said to me,
Speaker 1: I sort of pressed them on this and sort of
Speaker 1: preparing for my discussion with you carth and I said, so,
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at where the problem is,
Speaker 1: like how much it's a problem getting the federal government
Speaker 1: to give permission, you know, even though it's basically in
Speaker 1: Canada to the provinces how they do healthcare. But both
Speaker 1: of them sort of almost intimated that the fundamental problem
Speaker 1: is that they're doing this safe supply through a medical model,
Speaker 1: and the medical model is inhera inherently constrictive, and that
Speaker 1: it's hard to find all that many doctors, and even
Speaker 1: Vancouver never mind brought to British Columbia, who are all
Speaker 1: that sympathetic, right, I mean definitely, it's it's difficult. The
Speaker 1: province can can do it, you know, Um, I think
Speaker 1: of what happens since COVID. Just in the year the
Speaker 1: province got two or maybe three COVID vaccines into the
Speaker 1: arms of almost five million people in a year. Right,
Speaker 1: that's a massive public health initiative. And why do we
Speaker 1: need to have the individual doctor and have to find
Speaker 1: a willing doctor And most doctors, it's true, don't want
Speaker 1: to do this. So that's why we have such few
Speaker 1: people able to find any kind of even prescription for
Speaker 1: delauded for example, So we we do need to move
Speaker 1: outside of the strictures of that medical model, you know,
Speaker 1: that doctor patient prescription. It just seems like the doctors
Speaker 1: have said, we're not really willing to do this. A
Speaker 1: few are. There's a few courageous doctors and they don't
Speaker 1: have to break the rules. There's a little channel to do, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a reasonable version of of prescribing. But this
Speaker 1: is a problem, Like I was saying, that's at least
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand people in our little province, probably a
Speaker 1: lot more. So it's going to take a real sort
Speaker 1: of mass rollout program, not a one by one by one.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that you must be running into
Speaker 1: resistance on a few counts, right. One is the basic idea,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're just giving going to give drugs to junkies,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah. You know what what are
Speaker 1: you doing expecting you know, government to pay for it.
Speaker 1: The second is that Canada did have a problem, not
Speaker 1: maybe not quite as bad as the US, but the
Speaker 1: whole problem of the over prescribing of opioid. You know, medications.
Speaker 1: The oxycontent oxy code on that sort of stuff was
Speaker 1: an issue in Canada as well, And so the pendulum
Speaker 1: has swung so far back the other way where you
Speaker 1: had this kind of broader societal fear of opioids generally,
Speaker 1: and as certainly opioids getting out there. And when one's
Speaker 1: talking safe supply, you're not talking about making available over
Speaker 1: the counter. But is there a great fear among people
Speaker 1: on the other side of this, the opposition about diversion,
Speaker 1: about making opioids too readily available to people who are
Speaker 1: not otherwise already using illicit opioids, sir, I mean people
Speaker 1: in popular culture have been scaring the ship out of
Speaker 1: everybody about heroin for decades and decades and vent and
Speaker 1: all all of it for a long time. And for
Speaker 1: prescription opioids, I mean, we didn't have mass overdoses because
Speaker 1: of prescription opioids in Canada. We all of our overdose
Speaker 1: crisises have been because of the illegal market and what's
Speaker 1: not known. In fact, some places where they didn't cut
Speaker 1: off the prescription pills so hard seemed to be a
Speaker 1: little immune to the deaths, at least in the numbers
Speaker 1: of places like Vancouver, but they went hardcore on us here,
Speaker 1: following the model in the US of cutting everybody off.
Speaker 1: And of course people don't just go, oh, my prescription
Speaker 1: for oxy's is gone. I guess I'll just go home now.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, I'm going to go score off the street.
Speaker 1: You know. So every time you all make a like
Speaker 1: a scary Netflix show about about prescription opioids, we all
Speaker 1: watch it up here, right, We mostly watch American TV
Speaker 1: in Canada, and you know, we get freaked out. That's
Speaker 1: that's where we get a lot of ideas, you know,
Speaker 1: our if you can believe this, one of our leading
Speaker 1: politicians in this province got all of his ideas about
Speaker 1: the overdose crisis from watching a segment on John Oliver
Speaker 1: which pinned it right on pills. And I'm just like, dude,
Speaker 1: please please fucking come to the neighborhood or come back,
Speaker 1: because he used to even work near the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: opened your eyes to what's going on. Prescription opioids are
Speaker 1: the solution to this. We need more because people get
Speaker 1: it all twisted here. They say it's an opioid crisis,
Speaker 1: it's an addiction crisis, but it's not for me. It's
Speaker 1: a death crisis. It's a toxic drug supply crisis. It's
Speaker 1: what they identify as the problem, you know, whether it's
Speaker 1: some being wired to a substance or someone dying, And
Speaker 1: these are completely different things that require different solutions. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm completely wired to method On right now. I'm an addict.
Speaker 1: I'm an opioid addict right this second. If I stopped
Speaker 1: using method On, I'd be puking out my mouth and
Speaker 1: my ass tomorrow morning. So I ain't gonna do that.
Speaker 1: I'll probably be using it for the rest of my life,
Speaker 1: and I'll be filing my taxes and going to work
Speaker 1: and doing all that ship. So what So what the
Speaker 1: problem Isn't that I'm wired too, That's not the problem.
Speaker 1: My life is completely fine right now. Um. But the
Speaker 1: problem is in my life is when I was wired
Speaker 1: to a very similar molecule that happened to be illegal
Speaker 1: and so therefore was subject to the police all up
Speaker 1: my ass, in my life, subject to all kinds of
Speaker 1: different changes in potency and potential overdoses and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: So when people say, oh, it's addiction crisis and addiction
Speaker 1: now that's a law problem. That's a problem with laws
Speaker 1: and policies. That's a social problem, not a health problem.
Speaker 1: And right now we have a death people dying problems,
Speaker 1: so sorting out what even problem we're talking about and
Speaker 1: Canadian politicians have not got the message on that, even
Speaker 1: the most progressive sounding If you go and listen careful,
Speaker 1: you'll hear what they're trying to do at the end
Speaker 1: of it. What they really want to announces more treatment beds.
Speaker 1: We have this privatized recovery industry. We love. This is
Speaker 1: also another thing about Canada, the good We love to
Speaker 1: tell you and lecture you Americans about our beautiful socialized
Speaker 1: health care system. And you should have that, by the way.
Speaker 1: But if you're a dope feine, you're in the private sector.
Speaker 1: You're going to a private, unregulated recovery house run by
Speaker 1: some fanatic, or you're going to a private, for profit
Speaker 1: method on clinic where you're paying extra fees, like I
Speaker 1: pay fees every month to go to a method own clinic.
Speaker 1: So these are like the secret things, right, But that's
Speaker 1: that's true. Well, let me just step back for our
Speaker 1: audience because never will be so conversing with this issue.
Speaker 1: But just so people understand, you know that heroin um
Speaker 1: sometimes called dia morphine. When it enters the human body,
Speaker 1: it essentially becomes morphine. It feels a little different going in,
Speaker 1: but essentially in the body it's like morphine. Methodon is
Speaker 1: a synthetic opioid, and it's one that basically is like
Speaker 1: replacing heroin use or fentinel use with methodon or another
Speaker 1: drug called groupern Orphine is basically like replacing smoking cigarettes
Speaker 1: in which you're getting you know, you know, you're hooked
Speaker 1: on the nicotine, but getting killed by the other other
Speaker 1: crap that's in a cigarette and replacing it with a
Speaker 1: nicotine patch or a gum or an east cigarette or
Speaker 1: a pouch or snuff or something like that takes away
Speaker 1: the craving. Helps people manage their lives. I mean, would
Speaker 1: you would you agree with that basic description I just
Speaker 1: laid out karth or add or change anything to yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember when I was at a twelve step program
Speaker 1: and they said methodon is just trading a drug for
Speaker 1: a drug, and I said, yes, so what you know,
Speaker 1: Like it's true, they're both opioids, right, But like my
Speaker 1: life is, you know, I'm a fully functional, working all
Speaker 1: the time, have great relationships with my family, not in
Speaker 1: trouble with the law. But it's all because that molecule,
Speaker 1: that opioid, happens to be on the right side of
Speaker 1: the law by by complete ideological reasons. You know, right,
Speaker 1: and I know you're doing it for dramatic effect. But
Speaker 1: you know, some people listening to this week going would
Speaker 1: be saying, don't talk about yourself as a methodon addict,
Speaker 1: your method on depend You're only an addict if your
Speaker 1: dependence is actually causing harmful consequences in your life. And
Speaker 1: you're being dependent upon methodon is no difference than somebody
Speaker 1: else being depending on a drug for their heart, or
Speaker 1: for their cholesterol, or for their coffee in the morning. Right,
Speaker 1: good point, And then that and I would say, yes,
Speaker 1: it's true. My the person who prescribes in a method
Speaker 1: on would say exactly what you just said, and I'd say, well, then,
Speaker 1: addiction is a description of social and legal conditions as
Speaker 1: opposed to a description of something that's medical. Right, like
Speaker 1: if you if you cause problems in your life because
Speaker 1: you're broke, or because you're doing something illegal, or because
Speaker 1: you're having to score something illegal. But almost the same
Speaker 1: mall fuel, if it's prescribed to you, you don't have
Speaker 1: to do any of that stuff. Then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden we're describing effects which are not biochemical effects, they're
Speaker 1: not mental health effects. There effects to do with the
Speaker 1: law and the organization of society. And this is a
Speaker 1: real piece of gas lighting that gets fitted up onto
Speaker 1: drug users. Is that. And I was told for years
Speaker 1: and years, you know, his chronic relapsing brain disorder, it's
Speaker 1: your brain that's all messed up, and we got to
Speaker 1: fix you. And and actually, you know, it may be
Speaker 1: true that there's things in my brain that are messed up,
Speaker 1: you know, like for sure, but that's not one of them.
Speaker 1: Let's take a break here and go to an ad
Speaker 1: you know. I sometimes have had conversations with people who
Speaker 1: have a relative, a child, the cousin, whatever, my husband,
Speaker 1: who are in a method On program and they're pushing
Speaker 1: them to get off. And I say, why you're pushing
Speaker 1: to get off because they're on Methodon, because they're on
Speaker 1: a drug, because da you know, And I say, stopped
Speaker 1: that right now, because you could be killing them right
Speaker 1: that for many people's for some people in methodons a
Speaker 1: way to get off at heroin and then stop using
Speaker 1: all opioids. But for other people, methodon becomes like a
Speaker 1: lifelong medication, the same way say insulin. You know, there
Speaker 1: are diabetics who could learn to control their diabetes through
Speaker 1: diet and exercise and life changes, but for many of them,
Speaker 1: insulin is going to be a long term or lifelong medication.
Speaker 1: How do you, Garth, How do you feel about your
Speaker 1: relationship with method I mean, obviously you're grateful there it's
Speaker 1: helped you stabilize your life. Are you content with the
Speaker 1: idea of being on it for the rest of your
Speaker 1: life and that this is gonna be your daily medication
Speaker 1: just like a diabetic on insulin or or do you
Speaker 1: feel that it's it's somehow undermining your health or you're
Speaker 1: worried about long term consequences. What's what's your own feeling
Speaker 1: about that. I don't even think about it. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I'll probably be on it for my life. That's okay.
Speaker 1: It doesn't bother me. But it did take me a
Speaker 1: long time to get over that. You know. I was
Speaker 1: always I used to be super aware of like how
Speaker 1: many mills am I taking? Can I grind it down
Speaker 1: a little? When am I going to be off? But
Speaker 1: now I'm just like, I don't care this works. I'm
Speaker 1: just fine with it, you know, and I think the
Speaker 1: health consequences of stopping taking it are much worse. Oh yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious, like, if you look at two different
Speaker 1: parts of your worlds. Right on the one hand, people
Speaker 1: who are not really part of the drug world in
Speaker 1: a significant way, do you still encounter some stigma from them?
Speaker 1: And conversely, is there an element of the heroin or
Speaker 1: federal using world that sometimes looks down on people who
Speaker 1: have turned to Method on, Like, you know, you've kind
Speaker 1: of sold out, or you've gotten the man, you're taking
Speaker 1: the you know, the man's chemical bracelet, you're you know,
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. Do you get it from both
Speaker 1: sides or not? Really? People people ask me like, how
Speaker 1: how did you make that work? You know, like really
Speaker 1: from both both of those worlds? How on earth did
Speaker 1: you make that work? And I said, well, it's just
Speaker 1: a function of when I got wired, right, And I
Speaker 1: told you earlier in the interview how many years it
Speaker 1: took me to sort of get across the bridge from
Speaker 1: Heroin to methodone. Heroin and methodone are a lot closer
Speaker 1: to each other than fentol on methodon art. That's a
Speaker 1: lot further of a bridge to go. I don't think
Speaker 1: I would be making it so well. You know, I
Speaker 1: really struggled to get across. My doctor told me not
Speaker 1: so long ago. I never thought you would do it
Speaker 1: like I never thought you would just be a guy
Speaker 1: on methodon. I thought you'd be using everything forever. You know,
Speaker 1: if I was twenty years younger, I don't know that
Speaker 1: i'd be able to use ventenol and then get across
Speaker 1: to methodon. And then of course the drug contamination isn't
Speaker 1: even stopping at fent and all. There's lots of other
Speaker 1: stuff going on car fent and al benzos and everything.
Speaker 1: It's it's making it very complicated. So that's mostly what
Speaker 1: I get from people is just like, how did you
Speaker 1: manage that? You know? And I was just like, it's
Speaker 1: just the luck. It really is a little bit of
Speaker 1: luck um of when I was born. You know. It's interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, you think that they're in the United States,
Speaker 1: there must be close to three thousand people now on
Speaker 1: method on, or or maybe even more if you put
Speaker 1: all together method on and bupreneurphane, and you know, a
Speaker 1: large number them the ones that you have this paradox
Speaker 1: where the people who are where it's working best, for
Speaker 1: the ones for whom has become a daily medication has
Speaker 1: removed the the issue of drugs from their lives effectively.
Speaker 1: You know, they're having stable jobs, family, the whole thing.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who are least likely to tell other
Speaker 1: people that they're using METHODOL because of this stigma associated
Speaker 1: with it, right, and and and conversely, the people who
Speaker 1: are using method on but also involved still in a
Speaker 1: drug scene and a criminal scene whatever, those are the
Speaker 1: ones who the media focuses on. The one people may
Speaker 1: see lingering around a method on clinic, this sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: and it's part of what's given a method on a
Speaker 1: bad rap. And and I'm not sure what the answer
Speaker 1: is because I'm not sure how one persuades large numbers
Speaker 1: of people who are successfully stabilized in Methodon to become
Speaker 1: more open or to be able to tell their story
Speaker 1: to the broader population so that people get it. I mean,
Speaker 1: up here, I know that method runs on the same
Speaker 1: rules as it did a long time ago. You know that,
Speaker 1: you um, most people have to go to the pharmacy
Speaker 1: every day or a clinic and have it witnessed their
Speaker 1: ingestionally someone watches them drink it, you get piss tested
Speaker 1: a lot. You know. They're that's why people call it
Speaker 1: liquid handcuffs, because all these rules, because you can't travel
Speaker 1: very easily, you can't really go very far away from
Speaker 1: where the place where you get your mouth downe is.
Speaker 1: And so I think they need to free that up
Speaker 1: a lot, and they have in a lot of other countries,
Speaker 1: there's just a lot more liberal with that stuff. And
Speaker 1: they just rolled out. Like when I was in Portugal
Speaker 1: for the last harm Reduction conference in nineteen, I went
Speaker 1: to see their little methanon van. You know, they just
Speaker 1: drive it around, and so I was like lining up
Speaker 1: to just check it out, and the guy hands me
Speaker 1: a cup and like, oh, no, I'm not from here, man,
Speaker 1: I don't even I don't speak Portuguese, you know. And
Speaker 1: he's like, I'm alright, sure, takes it back. So I
Speaker 1: said to the doctor, don't ever worry about people about
Speaker 1: this making its way out from the people who are
Speaker 1: prescribed it. And he's like, not really, because if you
Speaker 1: hold onto it too tight, you create this black market
Speaker 1: for it, and this way more people get it. And
Speaker 1: I just thought that's a very enlightened way to look
Speaker 1: at it. We should do more of that in Canada.
Speaker 1: We should like free that stuff out to get to
Speaker 1: more people. You know, yeah, I mean, Garth, I mean
Speaker 1: I always struck me that the whole preoccupation of the
Speaker 1: d e A and others about the diversion of method
Speaker 1: on it always seemed preposterous because from a public health perspective,
Speaker 1: if people are in a methodon program and they are
Speaker 1: diverting some of their methodon and giving it or selling
Speaker 1: it to other people who cannot or will not get
Speaker 1: into a method on program, that basically that's a net
Speaker 1: positive from a public health perspective, right. And meanwhile, there's
Speaker 1: almost no market for method on, you know, among people
Speaker 1: who are not already involved with illicit opioins. But when
Speaker 1: it's it's really true, say, everybody I know pretty much
Speaker 1: started on diverted methodon. Like very few people that I
Speaker 1: know have gone into the clinics signed up in their
Speaker 1: first taste of methodon comes from the official source. This
Speaker 1: is how everybody finds their way there, and it's it's
Speaker 1: great harm. Actually, even you know people worry about diversion
Speaker 1: of prescription pills, it's the same thing. There's a real
Speaker 1: harm reduction benefit to diversion. And I never realized this.
Speaker 1: I just thought of it as this shameful, illegal thing
Speaker 1: that me and my friends did. And then I started
Speaker 1: reading into the research, and it shows that people are
Speaker 1: trying to help and take care of each other, and
Speaker 1: that if you're using something like methanone or maybe a
Speaker 1: prescribed pill that isn't yours, you're not using street supply
Speaker 1: that day or that afternoon, and so it reduces the
Speaker 1: likelihood that you'll die. Yeah, it reduces that. It also
Speaker 1: reduces the black market, reduces the market for you know,
Speaker 1: the gangsters and the traffickers. I mean, it reduces you know,
Speaker 1: whole a whole lot of things that could be positive.
Speaker 1: But the thing is this mark. And there's with safe supply.
Speaker 1: You're talking that's just about method on where people can
Speaker 1: get high from method on and you can overdose from methanon.
Speaker 1: But basically, you know, it's a relatively safer drug. If
Speaker 1: you've been involved with illidopiois before. When you're talking about
Speaker 1: making pharmaceutical grade heroine or amphetamy or a cocaine or
Speaker 1: even you know, low dose fentanel available, the issue is there.
Speaker 1: It seems like the potential for diversion to others who
Speaker 1: may not be current users or who may just be
Speaker 1: playing around, and there's the risk of it getting out
Speaker 1: there broadly in a way that you know, we hold
Speaker 1: out produce pharma for you know, over promoting. I mean,
Speaker 1: isn't there a risk there? And how does one control
Speaker 1: for that or do you just not worry about it?
Speaker 1: I mean, everybody can already get drugs really easily, right Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I was able to get drugs back in
Speaker 1: the day underage, before I could go legally by booze,
Speaker 1: you know, Like you can get drugs anywhere in North
Speaker 1: America really easily. You can order them over the internet.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like it's already the genies out of
Speaker 1: the bottle. This is already out there. So if you
Speaker 1: have a safe supply, a clean supply, and it gets diverted,
Speaker 1: then maybe the person who would otherwise be taking the
Speaker 1: dodgy thing is getting something that's safer for them. You know,
Speaker 1: the same rules apply. But if if a country is
Speaker 1: going to go to um a safe supply or a
Speaker 1: regulated market instead of a black market, right like we
Speaker 1: have an unregulated drug market now, so anyone can get
Speaker 1: unknown substances at any time if you regulate it, Like
Speaker 1: the liquor store near me um they check your I D.
Speaker 1: They only run certain hours, They can't sell stuff over
Speaker 1: a certain alcohol proof, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: the government puts rules on it. And so if you
Speaker 1: had just illegal anything goes on a moonshine being sold
Speaker 1: by the guy in the alley, it would be more dangerous,
Speaker 1: and kids or anybody else who is I don't know
Speaker 1: moonshine naive would be able to get ahold of it
Speaker 1: more easily. So it's like regulation gives the community, the public,
Speaker 1: the societ idy more control over these substances because right
Speaker 1: now they're completely everywhere and uncontrolled. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: it doesn't solve the problem entirely right because I mean
Speaker 1: the great problem now it involves fentinel, which it is
Speaker 1: so easy. You know, it's overdose and die from I
Speaker 1: mean with heroin. I think most people who died of
Speaker 1: a quote unquote heroin overdose, it was typically really a
Speaker 1: fatal drug combination evolving other drugs combining you know, heroin
Speaker 1: with booze or with benzos with fentanyl. Even though most
Speaker 1: fentinel is now combined with you know, other drugs as well.
Speaker 1: It's typically the fentanyl I think is as my understanding
Speaker 1: is that the you know, it can in fact kill
Speaker 1: you all by itself in a way that no other
Speaker 1: opioid that was previously out there would do. And then
Speaker 1: of course you just had people you know, mixing drugs,
Speaker 1: doing dumb stuff, you know, not taking precautions. So obviously
Speaker 1: cleaning up the drug supply and making it legit in
Speaker 1: that respect it would solve a big and probably a
Speaker 1: majority of this problem, but it would not eliminate the problem.
Speaker 1: You know, I was doing fentanyl. I was doing fentanyl
Speaker 1: before it was well, you know, I was doing fentanyl
Speaker 1: before it was on the street. Like we did it
Speaker 1: from the patches, the Dermo patches, and you can break
Speaker 1: them down and do them however you want. You don't
Speaker 1: have to do them as directed, right, but we get
Speaker 1: a hold of these things. And when I very first
Speaker 1: heard about it, like this is a long time ago now,
Speaker 1: and everyone said, wow, it's like supposedly ten times stronger
Speaker 1: than heroin or something. I was like, great, sign me up,
Speaker 1: let's dry it. But nobody was overdosing on that because
Speaker 1: you knew, uh, you knew what you were getting. The
Speaker 1: way that people are overdosing on fentanyl now is because
Speaker 1: very small quantities of it can cause a big effect.
Speaker 1: So if you're making up a batch, maybe you haven't
Speaker 1: distributed all the grains of fentanyl evenly through your drug batch.
Speaker 1: So you sell someone to flap a dope has got
Speaker 1: more fentanyl in it than the rest of the batch
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right, it's like the concentration and the potency,
Speaker 1: those together are the problem. Ventanyl in and of itself
Speaker 1: is albeit powerful, it's an opioid, right, So like if
Speaker 1: we could assure people, um, here's here's what's in it,
Speaker 1: here's vent and all, there's no one cut, there's nothing else,
Speaker 1: and here's the potency and here's how much, then you
Speaker 1: have a much less likelihood of these kind of venting
Speaker 1: all overdoses. And still what you see right now is
Speaker 1: mostly poly drug overdoses. Like a big amount of overdoses
Speaker 1: that are recorded by the coroner in Vancouver are people
Speaker 1: who have been drinking at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: or people who for whom there's venting all in the
Speaker 1: rock or something else. M So in your models, say,
Speaker 1: supply who's paying for the drugs? I mean when drug
Speaker 1: users are buying on the street, they have to raise
Speaker 1: the money one way or another to pay for it.
Speaker 1: Would they still be paying for inderstafe supply or would
Speaker 1: it be free or how would that work? The most
Speaker 1: immediate thing, the compassion club model of the co op
Speaker 1: that we're looking to build, it would be us we
Speaker 1: pool our money or raise it and uh supply ourselves.
Speaker 1: Because we just don't think yet that the government's inter
Speaker 1: ha didn't doing that. Um so, I mean not that's
Speaker 1: what that's what we're trying to do right now. And
Speaker 1: maybe it depends on how it's applied for, Like if
Speaker 1: you're doing a prescription heroin program, Yeah, the government should
Speaker 1: pay for that, you know, like the government. I believe
Speaker 1: governments should everywhere should pay for pharmaceuticals. I believe pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: companies should be nationalized because their strategic national interest a
Speaker 1: public interest to health thing, and they shouldn't have cartoon
Speaker 1: villains at the top of them profiteering off everybody. I
Speaker 1: think we would have avoided all of the big panic
Speaker 1: and response of the last twenty years on Boxy's if
Speaker 1: we had been able to have national control instead of
Speaker 1: just wild West free market style pharmacy. But Garthon, with
Speaker 1: your Compassion Club model, I mean, I presume you're buying
Speaker 1: the drugs on the darknet you're testing in before you're
Speaker 1: making them available to the members. Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: what's happening now. But if if we have applied the
Speaker 1: Drug User Liberation Front, which is the one the group
Speaker 1: that has put on five of these give a ways,
Speaker 1: these little events where a very small amount of heroin,
Speaker 1: coke or math is given to a very small amount
Speaker 1: of people that are in our groups as a sort
Speaker 1: of active civil disobedience as a as a sort of
Speaker 1: like a little here's what a possible future could look like.
Speaker 1: So yeah, those are sourced from the dark web by
Speaker 1: a couple of very courageous people. But the um Compassion
Speaker 1: Club model, if if the governments would deign to permit
Speaker 1: this to occur, you would legally be able to purchase
Speaker 1: uh diocetyl morphine or whatever off of some pharmaceutical company,
Speaker 1: because you now you'd be you'd be into what's something
Speaker 1: that's legal? You know? But I mean that's also the question,
Speaker 1: right because I think you know, the libertarian model right
Speaker 1: basically says let people adults by whatever they want from
Speaker 1: the company that produces it, and there will be no
Speaker 1: criminal laws involved, except maybe if you're selling the kids,
Speaker 1: and you'd have civil liabilities. So you know, the companies
Speaker 1: would only be responsible if they were selling something other
Speaker 1: than what they claimed it to be. And I thought
Speaker 1: with with safe apply, we're talking about something a little
Speaker 1: more limited than that, where the people who are accessing it,
Speaker 1: even if one's not using a medical model where doctors
Speaker 1: are prescribing, at the very least, there's some constraints. It's
Speaker 1: not just go on the not the dark web, but
Speaker 1: go on the internet and get it. Or are you
Speaker 1: actually saying go all the way? Like are you closer
Speaker 1: to being a libertarian in your approach when it comes
Speaker 1: to safe supply? Well, I mean safe supply is a
Speaker 1: form of triage, right, Like, ultimately we want to end
Speaker 1: the drug war and you have like regulated access to
Speaker 1: the substances in the same way, you know, not necessarily
Speaker 1: the exact identical mechanisms, but in the same way that
Speaker 1: we ended alcohol prohibition and now you have alcohol. Personally,
Speaker 1: I don't like the libertarian model of companies can just
Speaker 1: make a fortune marketing alcohol to everybody, Like I think
Speaker 1: the hugely pro capitalist marketing of the way that we
Speaker 1: and you came out of prohibition to the enrichment of
Speaker 1: a few. Yeah, that's not for the public good. So
Speaker 1: we don't need to make all those same mistakes again,
Speaker 1: you know. And I think there's needs to be like
Speaker 1: a really adult society wide conversation about how we want
Speaker 1: to come out of it and who we want the
Speaker 1: winners and losers to be. Yeah, I mean, because it's funny,
Speaker 1: I find myself wing people ask me if if I support,
Speaker 1: you know, full legalization, and I'll typically say, look, I'm
Speaker 1: not a libertarian, I'm not a free market guy. I
Speaker 1: actually do worry about opioids becoming or or some other
Speaker 1: drugs becoming so widely available or potentially promoted in ways
Speaker 1: that you actually increase the number of people in the
Speaker 1: country who are addicted by some significant percentage. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's at the level that our opponents fear, you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of settlement go more of the you know,
Speaker 1: the skies falling. But I do think it's it's problematic.
Speaker 1: Look what's happened with food, you know, with with you know,
Speaker 1: powerful corporations, you know, combining sugar, fat, salt into all
Speaker 1: these you know, types of you know, very attractive uh
Speaker 1: uh and not very healthy food products that and you
Speaker 1: have this extraordinary transformation, you know, an obese city in
Speaker 1: the human body and oh man, opioid McNuggets. Bring on
Speaker 1: the opioid McNuggets. Ean, Yeah, you know, I hear you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, But I mean that you hear
Speaker 1: me so and so you know that's the thing about
Speaker 1: how I mean, it's always seems to me the sixty
Speaker 1: four question of legalization debate is how do you get
Speaker 1: as many people who are currently engaged in the illicit
Speaker 1: market and the criminal market, how do you get them
Speaker 1: to shift into a legal supply situation as much as
Speaker 1: possible without making these substances much more broadly available to
Speaker 1: the broader society, including a people who you know, might
Speaker 1: because it's always a matter of a spectrum of degree.
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, it's true that if you really want
Speaker 1: to get these things today, you can, but lots of
Speaker 1: people aren't, just because they're illegal, or they're less available
Speaker 1: because you need a prescription or what have you. Right, sure,
Speaker 1: and don't you know, I mean, I think there's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of possible outcomes of this, right and I
Speaker 1: roll back the tape and think, Um, the drug war
Speaker 1: is brought us really strong opioids, right, that's from the
Speaker 1: drug war. And in Canada, the first drug arrest was
Speaker 1: in and it was for opium. And that's what people
Speaker 1: used to do is smoke opium. And as they've been
Speaker 1: arresting and chasing drug users for all the you know,
Speaker 1: hundred and fourteen years or whatever since then, Um, they've
Speaker 1: just created this arms race of stronger and stronger and
Speaker 1: stronger drugs. So the very first thing we have to
Speaker 1: do is stop the arms race or we're gonna have
Speaker 1: like space astro dope any moment, now, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It won't stop here, It'll keep going and going.
Speaker 1: So it's like we're now in a trade off of harms, right.
Speaker 1: So like we have to organize ourselves so that we
Speaker 1: stopped giving the police this excuse to inflate their budgets,
Speaker 1: get this paramilitary equipment going occupy black neighborhoods all over
Speaker 1: North America and all that, and we have to stop
Speaker 1: the escalation of the potency and the body count. So
Speaker 1: what do we get in trade of that? Do do
Speaker 1: we get more people wired? I don't know. We're getting
Speaker 1: more people wired right now with the illegal market because
Speaker 1: something that we're doing in our society, something about how
Speaker 1: we're organizing this late stage capitalist apocalypse, is really alienating
Speaker 1: and traumatizing to people. And a lot of people find
Speaker 1: a little solace in opioid. So if we're really worried
Speaker 1: about not getting more people wired, then we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to start thinking about what is driving it to begin with.
Speaker 1: I'm not just talking about weekend Warrior stuff. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about what's at the roop of it. Gotta have to
Speaker 1: stop traumatizing people. Gonna have to stop asking people to
Speaker 1: do these herculean efforts to just survive, to work three jobs,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah. You know, like we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to make a nicer society, because otherwise, how can you
Speaker 1: blame people for finding that little warm hug that is opioids.
Speaker 1: Of course it makes sense, you know, or using methamphetamine
Speaker 1: to keep up with the pace of maybe their workplace
Speaker 1: or whatever. Hey, Garth, let me switch subjects for a second,
Speaker 1: you know, just to give our audience a greater sense
Speaker 1: of van do and the drug user union and and
Speaker 1: the feeling of it and what sort of community it provides.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're obviously central to your doing your podcast Crackdown,
Speaker 1: you know, helping produce it and to come up with
Speaker 1: ideas and and all this sort of stuff. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think for for a lot of people listening to
Speaker 1: the Wonders. So when you talk about you know, drug
Speaker 1: users hanging out, when you talk about this union, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously there's an advocacy element, but when you go to
Speaker 1: a gathering Van dou gathering, are people like you know
Speaker 1: it worked up about what's going on with Russia and
Speaker 1: Ukraine right now as you would see any place else
Speaker 1: in society, or they more caught up in their own
Speaker 1: lives around this scene. No. I mean yesterday I was
Speaker 1: in a meeting of the British Columbia Association people on methodone.
Speaker 1: I'm on the board of that, and we did talk
Speaker 1: actually about Ukraine, you know, and and Russia, and the
Speaker 1: president of the group was just like, no good things
Speaker 1: to say about Putin, you know, and uh, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, it is a war. And we we have
Speaker 1: this storefront space on East Hasting Street here that's got
Speaker 1: you know, a big room where we hold meetings and
Speaker 1: a few side offices where we can old board meetings
Speaker 1: or do work on the computer. There's a safe injection
Speaker 1: room in the back. And all over the walls are
Speaker 1: pictures of our dead members. And it's just like the
Speaker 1: walls are full of more pictures than you can ever imagine,
Speaker 1: because I mean, if you're if you're a VAN new member,
Speaker 1: you're a member forever, Like after you die whatever, you
Speaker 1: will never forget you. So there is constant death all
Speaker 1: around us. The building is crowded with ghosts. So we
Speaker 1: try to organize the next piece of advocacy, the next campaign,
Speaker 1: do the next civil disobedience, have the next meeting with
Speaker 1: some government officials to try and gently lobby them on
Speaker 1: a small reform um. With all this in the background,
Speaker 1: and people still have space to think about the odder world,
Speaker 1: you know, the threats of war, the threats of the
Speaker 1: far right. You know, Canada just had this terrible uh
Speaker 1: month of a convoy of people on the very far
Speaker 1: right driving across the country pretending to be truckers and
Speaker 1: all this stuff about vaccines and everything, and so we
Speaker 1: felt that a lot, because I mean, we're into harm reduction,
Speaker 1: we're into public health, so we know all of that's bullshit.
Speaker 1: You know, we we know COVID is real, and we
Speaker 1: want the vaccines and we we want to take care
Speaker 1: of each other. That way, we know we're more vulnerable,
Speaker 1: so we keep we keep an eye on all that
Speaker 1: stuff because we know the rest of the world affects
Speaker 1: us too. You know, I'm curious you mentioned van Do,
Speaker 1: the drug Users group that a Livingston and but Osborne started,
Speaker 1: you know, almost twenty five years ago. You've mentioned the
Speaker 1: Drug Users Liberation Front, which is doing civil disobedience around
Speaker 1: safe supply and making drugs available through a compassion club model.
Speaker 1: You also mentioned a group of Methodon activists and I'm curious,
Speaker 1: how does the method and activists relate to the other
Speaker 1: two And are the group of the Methron activists people
Speaker 1: who are mostly using method on and still listen to DRU.
Speaker 1: Are there people on Methodon who just need to keep
Speaker 1: arms length from the people are actively involved with the
Speaker 1: illicit drug use just in order to you know, keep
Speaker 1: it straight um or are they fully engaged in supporting
Speaker 1: the uh you know, the objectives of VANDU and the
Speaker 1: Drug Users Liberation people in the Methodone group span it all.
Speaker 1: You know, So there's people who are just on methodone.
Speaker 1: There's people who are still using. There's people who are
Speaker 1: on some box zone and all the other kinds of
Speaker 1: things that you can get prescribed. And you know, people
Speaker 1: make an effort to not use in sight of people
Speaker 1: in that group. You know, they try to be careful,
Speaker 1: and you know, if someone's trying really hard not to use,
Speaker 1: not to not put that sort of thing in in
Speaker 1: someone's face. So, but we're all part of VANDOU, right,
Speaker 1: Like all of these people we meet in the in
Speaker 1: the VANDU space were members of the Drug User Union.
Speaker 1: We're all part of the same movement. So um, we
Speaker 1: broadly share the same goals. It's just that the world
Speaker 1: of method and you get so wrapped in all the
Speaker 1: rules and regulations. It's like you need to break off
Speaker 1: the conversation to have a separate chat about it in
Speaker 1: a separate group, you know. Yeah, So Garth, in your
Speaker 1: own life, I heard you mentioned someplace that you we've
Speaker 1: gone back and you're working on a PhD. Now that's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: University of we're just Glumbia. Do you have a subject?
Speaker 1: What's it? What is it? It's an interdisciplinary of journalism
Speaker 1: and public health. And you have a dissertation. I'm just
Speaker 1: into that phase now, so I'm about halfway through. And
Speaker 1: will it be a drug theme, you think, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's uh, it's something on the something on the
Speaker 1: overdose crisis, you know, and how we represent ourselves and
Speaker 1: tell stories and form partnerships on on journalistic enterprises. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I heard you make a comment somewhere one of the
Speaker 1: things I was listening to about you actually have a
Speaker 1: lot of respect to the academics. You just wish there's
Speaker 1: stuff more, you know, like the the the literature and
Speaker 1: the studies and the research around harm reduction and drug
Speaker 1: use is phenomenal. It's like liberating. There's there's great information
Speaker 1: in there. Um, you know, social theory, writing on policing,
Speaker 1: all that stuff is fantastic. It's just so much of
Speaker 1: it as written, so dent Uh you know that you
Speaker 1: need I guess you need people to get on the
Speaker 1: mic and popularize that. And maybe that's part of what
Speaker 1: my job is. But uh, I sometimes wish that academic
Speaker 1: writing style hadn't been so embedded into people and you
Speaker 1: could just talk like a human instead of a weird Uh.
Speaker 1: These sentences that are a half page long and sixteen clauses.
Speaker 1: You know, well, let me just thank you. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wanted to first congratulate you for having you know,
Speaker 1: you know, launched this podcast with your colleagues in Vancouver,
Speaker 1: and for your activism and the great work you're doing
Speaker 1: and the impact you're having, and uh and thank you
Speaker 1: for taking the time to uh you know, spends a
Speaker 1: few hours. Moving on, thank you for having me and
Speaker 1: congrats on the podcast, and thank you for talking to
Speaker 1: our mayor like twenty or twenty five years ago or
Speaker 1: whatever it is that you met him at that conference,
Speaker 1: because I'll bet you that help. I'll bet you there's
Speaker 1: people people who are around today. I think I know
Speaker 1: some of them because of the changes in policy that
Speaker 1: conversations like the one you had with Philip Owen helped create.
Speaker 1: And and also just thank you for your career in
Speaker 1: organizing on this stuff. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends about it, or you can write us a
Speaker 1: review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave
Speaker 1: us a message at one eight three, three, seven, seven
Speaker 1: nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
Speaker 1: can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can
Speaker 1: also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noham Osband
Speaker 1: and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
Speaker 1: and At Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman.
Speaker 1: Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks
Speaker 1: to a bio Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next
Speaker 1: week I'll be talking with Gould Dolan, the neuroscientists at
Speaker 1: John's Hawkins who's been administering M d M A and
Speaker 1: other psychedelics to octopuses and mice with fascinating results. So
Speaker 1: we decided that we wanted to understand Sarah Tonin by
Speaker 1: looking at an octopus. If you put two octopuses in
Speaker 1: a tank together, they will kill each other. And so
Speaker 1: M d M A has this very powerful ability to
Speaker 1: override that and make them desire social interaction and spend
Speaker 1: more time with the other animal. Subscribe to Psychoactive now,
Speaker 1: see it, don't miss it.