Front Burner - The politics of the toxic drug crisis

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Since 2016, the toxic drug crisis has taken more than 50 thousand Canadian lives.The Conservative party has promised $200-million a year to fund addictions recovery care for 50,000 people, according to the party's platform. Leader Pierre Poilievre has also vowed to “defund drug dens” – imposing strict new rules for overdose prevention sites and supervised consumption sites.Liberal leader Mark Carney has said that his party would review the effectiveness of such sites, while the federal NDP supports them.So given all of that…who’s left fighting the toxic drug crisis? How did harm reduction programs become so politically unviable? And what does that mean for drug users?Front Burner senior producer Elaine Chau brings us this documentary from Vancouver – ground zero of an overdose crisis that’s now wreaked havoc across the country.Make sure to watch our election night livestream on Monday, April 28 starting at 8pm Eastern. You can find it here on the CBC News YouTube channel and on the CBC News TikTok.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at Rom. Tickets at rom.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie just popping in again to say that we really hope that you'll all join us on election night. We're doing a live stream on the CBC News YouTube and

TikTok pages. We'll put those links in our show notes. Elamin Abdelmahmoud of Komotion is going to be there. Aaron Wary from our Ottawa Bureau, poster David Coletto, and lots of other people. Our producer Matt Amha is going to keep an eye out on all your comments and questions coming in throughout the night. The more we hear from you, the better it will be. So again, I really hope that you'll join us. Okay, on to today's show.

With just a few days left until the election, we've been bringing you some specifics on how the federal parties are dealing with issues like housing, cost of living, the environment. Our episode yesterday parsed out the different policies being proposed on those issues. Today, we're going to do a deep dive on one issue in particular. The toxic drug crisis that's taken the lives of more than 50,000 people in Canada since 2016. 16,000 of those deaths have been in BC alone. Earlier this month, Conservative leader Pierre Pauliev chose the province as the place to introduce his party's promises on that front. $200 million a year to fund addictions recovery care for

50,000 people, according to the party's platform, shutting down safer supply programs and imposing strict new rules for supervised consumption sites. Liberal leader Mark Carney has said that his party would review the effectiveness of such sites while the federal NDP supports them. This is all happening at a time when there's been massive walkbacks to harm reduction services across the country.

They've also faced increased scrutiny by the public. So given all of that, who is left fighting the toxic drug crisis? How did drug policy harm reduction programs in particular become so politically unviable? And what does that mean for drug users? Our senior producer Elaine Chao has been looking at all of this in Vancouver,

ground zero of an overdose crisis that's now wreaked havoc across the country. I'm at the Overdose Prevention Site, or OPS as everyone calls it, on East Hastings, in Vancouver's downtown east side, on a Monday morning in January. This is a place where typically clients come to use their drugs. They can access clean needles and pipes, be supervised while they're injecting or smoking. There's a row of oxygen tanks at the front of the room and Narcan at the ready. That's the nasal spray containing naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses right away.

nasal spray containing naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses right away. But this morning the staff is here for a meeting. There's a few dozen people in the room sitting in a rough circle and folks are catching up, joking around over coffee and donuts. Even birthday wishes are shared. Where is Marty Smarty? Sarah Blythe is the director of the Overdose Prevention Society. She oversees what goes on at the site, manages the resource hub across the street, where people can get basics like groceries or toiletries.

Just earlier, she helped someone get some food for their cat. Just earlier, she helped someone get some food for their cat. Hey guys, come and sit down. And at this moment, she's rallying people to take part in a kind of staff ritual. So this morning we're going to start our meeting off by saying something nice about something good that another co-worker did this week, okay? Everyone is asked to share. Shout out a colleague. It's also a bit of a check-in on how they're doing. Yeah, I'm Billy. I'm definitely a new face. I would go definitely with Jodie and Amy for their consistent kindness when I walk in the building.

They treat me exactly the same way. Every time I show up, no matter what condition I'm in, behind my eyes. And I have a relatively broken mind, very prone to depression and suicidal ideation. And to come to a place like this and be like, there's hope here, there's family. Ken.

Without everybody here, I would be, again, lost on the street and God only knows, I would probably be dead. For instance, when I overdosed, I had my cousin and good people around me to keep me alive. But yeah, I think it's also about learning about just keeping everybody, building people up and starting our day off with not complaining about things, but building each other up. I work only once a week, but I'm really grateful to all the peers that work here, working their

butts off out there, freezing. You know, it is cold out there. And, you know, just getting up early, it's getting ready for the day. You know, I'm grateful for everybody that does this job. You know, I did lose a son eight years ago to this, so I'm grateful for everybody that is here. And then Janet. Janet Charlie, an ops worker, says her son is a big reason why she works there.

She was nearby when he overdosed. He died less than a week later. His name is Tarlo Charlie. You don't wish upon anybody to lose anybody, especially your own son. How old was he? Yeah, he was 26 when he died. He left behind a boy and a girl.

They're growing up without their dad. And it's just, every year it's hard because it's watching his kids grow up without him. You should be here. Janet's been helping out at Ops since Sarah, the director, first got the place going back in 2016. So she's been there for eight years. Working behind the market with them and all the ins and outs of equipment we had to use back then. We didn't have oxygen so we were,

people had to do mouth to mouth because we had no oxygen. It got its start near the street market at Maine and Hastings, where low-income residents sell things to make a bit of money. They didn't have oxygen. They didn't even have a building. Sarah Says Ops was really born out of seeing people in the community overdose on the street and trying to get them the life-saving meds they needed. And for its first three months, the site ran without government

approval. It was a bare-bones operation. I was working at the street market outside and we had Narcan kits and we just started just going through them. Like people were screaming, we need Narcan and I was like, what is this? Like we have to have a stockpile of Narcan? What the hell is going on here? And you know, we were running, ended up running it up and down the alley and I was like, you know what? Forget it. We just have to have a table. We gotta put a table out. We're gonna put a table and chair and have

someone watching all the time because there's so many overdoses and we just have to have someone ready to run with a thing in Narcan. This sort of led to people saying, well instead of using down the alley over here, I'm just gonna stand you know right by here in case something happens and it just kind of progressed from there. Drug overdoses claimed the lives of nearly a thousand people in BC in 2016. At that point, it was the deadliest overdose year on record, nearly an 80% increase from the year before. Since 2016, Opsis had over a million visits, and staff here have helped reverse over 4,400

overdoses. Darcy Knape has been helping on the floor here for three to four years. On his first shift, there were two overdoses. He says that it's still the toughest day he's ever had at ops. The guy was blue, cyanotic, and that's because a lot of times their friends dig them. That's the terms they use. They dig them to get whatever's in their pocket, whatever drugs they have, money and that. And then they don't tell us until they've finished that. And by that time, they're, you know, they've already been expired for a couple of few minutes and you know seconds count.

Darcy was a client at Ops before he started working here. He's one of about 80 peer support workers who run the place. Darcy and I chat while he mans the entrance. Yeah sorry, I should be doing my job. We're not open until 1. I just thought they were staff. I was too busy. No, it's my fault for also distracting you. I'm getting older now and I just turned 60 this month and I know. Congratulations, that's a milestone birthday.

Yeah, well apparently I've beat the odds because I think it's like 45 down here. I still like living on the planet, so I'll stick around for a little while as much as I can anyway. Darcy grew up in a violent home and started living on the street at around eight years old and says that drugs followed not long after that. First it was pot and then harder drugs and they became part of his day-to-day. I've gone cold turkey so many times in a concrete jail cell. I just, I'm a bit traumatized from that.

I just, I really don't want to go through that again. And so, you know, I'm not stealing to get drugs. I use the same supplier. Actually, I'm on the patch. Darcy's talking about a fentanyl patch, something that he gets as a prescription. It took me 50 years to stop what my former life was, breaking into safes and houses and whatnot, you know.

I'm doing it with the help of the people at Ops. Without Ops, like I said, I would be dead in prison or on my way there. There's no doubt. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at rom.ca. Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society.

Whoa! Seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy! I called and spoke with the credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it?

Yup! And now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha! Right on! When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit nomoredebs.org. In the last couple of years, the kind of work that Ops does, along with 42 other sites in the province,

where overdose prevention and supervised consumption happen, have come under much more scrutiny. You can hear that in the way that harm reduction services are talked about. Conservative leader Pierre Polyev calls them drug dens. We'll shut down the drug dens and replace them with treatment centers. The drug dens that have tried to be pushed on Richmond, that won't happen anymore. There will be. And provincially, there's been growing backlash to government policies like prescribed alternatives

or safer supply, or the decriminalization of small quantities of illicit drugs in public spaces, which were all enacted to try and deal with an escalating overdose crisis. Some critics of these policies see a rising number of overdose deaths, which only recently started to drop nationally, as evidence that the harm reduction programs put in place are not working. But public experts worry that dialing back the programs

would endanger the health and lives of drug users and lead to even more deaths. Rob Shaw is a journalist who's been covering provincial affairs in BC for over 17 years. I spoke to him about who's been covering provincial affairs in BC for over 17 years. I spoke to him about what the backlash has looked like in the province and what led up to it. It's easy to forget that BC has been extremely progressive on this issue for the better part of six years. British Columbians have had an appetite to try some very progressive, new, risky approaches to the addictions crisis, including, you know, leading attempts

to get safe supply to people who need it, to keep them from using toxic drugs, to to people who need it to keep them from using toxic drugs, to make sure they aren't arrested by police with decriminalization, to provide them social housing where they're allowed to use their drugs freely. And so, to understand how we've, as a province, suddenly run out of compassion for some of the progressive drug policies, you have to realize that they have been a six year project in the province of support for trying new things. And they haven't worked until very recently, the

overdose death rate has only been going up. So you have new ideas and a lack of progress that have collided in British Columbia and a fatigue from the public that they're willing to try new things, but they don't see visibly any reduction in people in distress on the street or in people in distress committing crimes or people in distress dying and that has fueled the political backlash that we're seeing that frustration and kind of unwillingness to continue down the path the government's been on.

Danielle Pletka And I would think some advocates of harm reduction would argue that there hasn't been enough time to properly assess the things that have been tried out. Ben Shepard That is certainly an argument from some, but, you know, BC has been That is certainly an argument from some, but you know, BC has been ramping up its safe supply program to provide prescription alternatives to people since the New Democrats took office in 2017. And the problem that British Columbia is facing with diversion of those drugs into a whole new source of organized crime controlled government prescription pills is a problem that has grown over at least four years before the government has started to take action on it.

This year, the political capital on safe supply has been extinguished because of what police have said repeatedly in public, that they are watching gangs deal government-prescribed drugs. B.C.'s health minister says people who rely on prescription opioids like hydromorphone can no longer take those drugs home. It follows evidence revealed in leaked Ministry of Health slides that many of those safe supply pills were being diverted and trafficked nationally and internationally by organized criminals.

We've heard concerns about this. And this issue comes up in the legislature and embarrasses the government and it has led to changes over the period of five years. You could make the argument that not enough time passed on the decriminalization experiment only a year or so after government implemented it, but again, so many voices came out from neighborhood groups to mayors, to police saying, this isn't working.

And enough individual stories of concern came up from people that it became politically unpalatable. When you talk about like individual stories of concern kind of from the public, are there any examples that stand out for you? Like one that stands out for me like that happened not too long before the walk back happened is like the protests in Richmond over the possibility of a supervised consumption site. Hundreds of people came out to City Hall and it got quite heated. The metaphors you use, yes, we've heard all those metaphors before off the internet, but I can tell you... I'm wondering if there are, you know, other examples that stand out to you that tell us

something about the concern that we've seen kind of escalate just from everyday people that has contributed to this becoming such a challenging political issue. Yeah, there's different ways to sort of describe the political kind of fear that seems to have arisen. The 58-year-old had asked two men who were openly using drugs to move along. Instead, they took their needles, puncturing the worker repeatedly in his face and abdomen. One of our girls here on the way to work one morning ran in, there was a guy in no clothing, and it was like a movie for her. She had to run in and lock the door, and as she was doing it, he tugged at the door. A tremendous increase in the level of violence, desperation around drug use and addiction.

We've seen an increase in the homeless. We have seen a few stories land larger than others that have caused concern. There was a case in Nanaimo of someone throwing, I think it was a brick at a pregnant woman in the middle of a psychotic incident. Aidan Tai has now been charged with assault and mischief. Adding to the more than 100 brought against him since 2005,

he was arrested Friday in the same spot he assaulted a pregnant woman two years ago. Terrifying. He decided to throw a brick at my wife's stomach who was nine months pregnant with my two-year-old son that we have now. We have not been back downtown Nanaimo since. There are the cases that people feel downtown and many people have seen them where you're walking downtown and someone is completely out of it. They're just out of it on the streets. Like they're not there.

They're yelling, they're screaming, they're on the ground and it scares people. And that fear becomes a political tool for opponents of this to say, maybe you're not safe, Maybe your kids aren't safe. Maybe you shouldn't go downtown. And often like there's the specter of like needles at the playground that gets talked about as well. There was a very, very, very small number of actual, you know, needles in playground stories that occurred. But the fear that they produced was immense.

Kids are not allowed to play in the park. What kind of park is it where parents are too frightened to let their children run on the grass? And that's exactly what it is because there are news needles everywhere. That is the problem that politicians face in any public policy, whether it's drugs or taxes or anything else, is it only takes a few bad stories for the public to jump to conclusions and begin to fear things. And that happened in B.C.'s drug policy that really changed the public dial in BC and led to government having to, to back away and its critics getting a lot of ammunition to, to attack it with. And

you end up with a kind of political sniff test that is, um, that it becomes unpalatable to proceed down the same track when people are scared. That leads to the issue of becoming polarizing in our provincial political system. We only have in politics, for good or bad, it becomes a contrast issue. So opponents of the government say, we will change course and we'll change course by not doing this anymore and by getting rid of this policy

and by making you feel a different way. And that's how we end up with binary policies course by not doing this anymore and by getting rid of this policy and by making you feel a different way. And that's how we end up with binary options on drug policy where government wants to do safe supply and the opposition says get rid of it. Government wants to try decriminalization, the opposition says scrap it. LESLIE KENDRICK In what ways have we seen this have an impact across the country as well? Every provincial move that the government has made here requires federal permission

on drug policy. And so the failures in British Columbia politically have made the federal government less willing to partner with other provinces and cities on these types of issues because their MPs are telling them in British Columbia, holy moly, is this a political problem for us? And British Columbia's political problems on this and the headaches it has caused for government have caused other premiers to include Doug Ford in Ontario to kind of call our province out and say, we're not, we don't want to go down that path.

And Alberta has said that about British Columbia as well. We don't want to do what British Columbia is doing because it's not producing results and it is not popular and the politicians are unable to defend it and so they're going in different directions. That direction is towards treatment and recovery. Nine supervised consumption sites in Ontario closed down last month. An overdose prevention site in Red Deer, Alberta closed at the end of March after a protracted legal battle. And the province has adopted a recovery-centered approach to their addictions care. And the Conservative Party has promised to divert money

from supervised consumption sites to fund addiction treatment for 50,000 Canadians. In March, I headed back to Ops in Vancouver's downtown Eastside to talk to a few more of the staff. Beyond supervising people using drugs, the site is also a place where clients can work with recovery navigators to tap into the patchwork of available treatment options, from detox to a support network through narcotics anonymous meetings. My name is Hallie Hoeven. I work for Ops, a few different roles mostly. I'm a peer. I do some outreach to help people as much as I can. The harm reduction like it keeps people alive.

Like I overdosed and I'm still here because we had access to that. If I didn't have access to that, I wouldn't be sitting here doing this interview, but I wouldn't have a new lease on life. A few years ago, when Halley was still using drugs, he would go into ops pretty much every day. He's been sober for a year now, but that hasn't been a straight line.

I was fresh off of a federal prison sentence. I got released to be homeless, put on methadone. Obviously I was going to start using drugs, right? So fast forward three years, I was a skeleton to myself. I had no hope, no aspirations. His sister found him on the street and encouraged him to get into treatment. He got clean and found a steady job. In that couple years, I was able to move my way up pretty high with the big construction

company, you know, make money. So I had stable living, I had stable employment, I had stable income, and that's something I never had before, right? Eventually, I ended up losing my job and losing my housing. Everything kinda just spiraled out of control, and I started using drugs again. Just saw this back down here, and I just wanted the good life back, right?

And I knew at that point that nothing was going to be handed to me. I just had to go out and do it, right? I think I was just ready. That's a big thing. Like, the beast of addiction, it's hard to explain, but addiction, it takes over your mental man. It controls every aspect of your life. I think it starts with some sort of euphoria, but then your body is hooked to that rush and you're constantly chasing that rush, but you never get it.

So you're chasing, you're chasing. And it takes over your mind, man. Going through treatment, usually your first couple weeks of treatment, something keeps trying to pull you out, right? A lot of people don't last. It takes a few tries to get it, right? That sentiment from Hallie, that treatment often takes a few tries, and it's really a lifelong journey is something that I heard over and over again from people who use drugs and also from folks who are in the trenches of providing that treatment.

Dr. Andy Ryan oversees the addictions program at St. Paul's Hospital here in Vancouver. She also runs Road to Recovery, an initiative that's all about getting people into treatment as quickly as possible. There's a central phone line that patients can call to tap into services, like detox. You want to really tailor the care to the needs and the goals of the patient. But having that front door access that is very clear, where you don't need to go to 10 different places to hear that you're going to get put on a wait list and someone's going to call you in four days when you don't even have a phone. Like that doesn't work for our patients and so creating this single

point of access has been extremely helpful. Urgent clients tend to get seen within a day and everyone else is generally waiting less than a week for access to a bed. We're able to line up the care in a way that makes sense so you could move seamlessly from a withdrawal management bed to a transitional care bed to a treatment bed and then throughout all of that still have access to the harm reduction services that you need that you're attached to. Dr. Ryan says that harm reduction services like overdose prevention sites are meant to work together with treatment and recovery because the risk of relapse is always there. She says that's really crucial because of how potent

and how toxic street drugs are right now. We have never been in a situation where the toxicity of the substances on the street has been anywhere near as complex. This is the worst. It's the worst it's ever been. We are constantly being updated by our public health colleagues

about what is currently in the drug supply, and every week things are changing. And so just when you think you're getting a handle on all the different forms of fentanyl and the analogs and everything else, then all of a sudden there are new tranquilizers being combined, there are new benzodiazepines being combined, there are novel substances that are being, you know, mixed into the drug supply that we

don't even know what they are. But what the result is for the people that are using these substances is that they have, you know, very unpredictable experiences, they're at very high risk of overdose. Would it be fair to say that it's gotten even more you know if someone experiences a relapse their chances at dying are even higher because of how potent the drug that they've you know been withdrawing from is. Yeah that's correct. The unpredictability and the potency of the

substances that are available right now on the street are such that if you are going to resume use you are at a very high risk of death. Last year, more than six British Columbians died per day because of toxic drugs. For the people at the front lines of this crisis—the staff members at Ops in the downtown Eastside, Dr. Ryan at St. Paul's Hospital—that's not just a number. It's losing people you've cared for, are friends with. That's made the public backlash to harm reduction even more discouraging. Here's Dr. Ryan again. The narrative in the general public is often that, you know, or I get the sense anyways, that people think that much of what we do is futile, that, you know, people aren't going to

get better and they just see visible poverty and they see people on the street who are using substances and could be disruptive, etc. And they just think, well, none of this is working, why bother? But for us who are on the inside and we're on the front line, I see people getting better every day. That's what really motivates me to keep going. There is a lot of political noise in our world and like it's not helpful. I think for all of us it does tend to get us down a bit and we are also keenly aware that you know the winds of change shift in politics but we're always going to be here. Like we're always going to be here seeing patients, trying to meet their needs, trying

to help them along their path to wellness. And fortunately, we get to see people sometimes at their lowest, but often at their highest. Sarah Blythe, the director at Ops, says that no matter which party ends up winning the federal election, she wants to work with them. You know, we've invited MPs to come down. We've had liberal and NDP MPs and we invited conservative MPs to come down. We've had liberal and NDP MPs and we invited conservative MPs to come down. And I think it's really important for them to, you know, before they make any major decisions or even before they talk about these things, that they really need to spend a lot of time down here with us at these places. I think it's an ignorant way to look at things by not actually coming down to the front lines

and actually seeing what we're doing and how important the work is and what effect we are actually having on helping people and getting in into recovery and how we could be a big part of that. Do you let yourself think about if you were asked to shut ops down, like, do you have a plan? Like if that is the directive that you receive? Well, I don't I don't actually think that's a possibility. If we were given the directive to shut it down, we would definitely do our best to educate people in every way we possibly could, that that's not a good idea. And I think we would succeed, because we help so many people get into recovery. We have the data, we have the information, we have the folks who want to get help.

And you know there are a lot of things that can be done but shutting us down is just not one of them. It's going to kill people, it's going to create a burden on the system. If you are only thinking of it and is a financial budgetary item then we are saving taxpayers a lot of money. Like in terms of taking away burden from the greater healthcare system, is it the way you're thinking about it? Yeah, I mean, like if ambulances have to take away everybody who's been in an alley,

or people have get brain damage because we haven't gotten to them soon enough, they'll need long-term care. The way that we deal with things, people overdose, we give them oxygen right away, they're totally fine, and we can help them get into recovery, we can help them come to NA meetings, we can have them trained with a bunch of certificates,

we help them with their resume, we help them get housing. We do a lot, we do a huge public service and I mean in some ways it's fairly insulting because we've been down here doing this work and we help people as much as we can with not a lot of boundaries attached just because we care

and we try to be non-partisan because we have to be, because governments come and go. And we're still here, right? So it doesn't matter who gets elected. We're here and we got to work with whoever gets elected. And, you know, we can only hope that it's somebody. And even if it's not, then we have to figure out how to work with them so that we can help people and We're willing to do that

You know some situations might be easier than others but at the end of the day, you know, we're here for the people down here and we're here to help them and we've committed to people that we're gonna support them and we're gonna fight for them and make sure that they're gonna survive this overdose crisis and we've made a commitment to people. Last week BC marked nine years since the drug poisoning and overdose crisis became a public health emergency and even though the numbers have gone down a bit the work hasn't abated. So no matter the outcome of next week's election, for people like Sarah, Hallie, Darcy, Janet, Dr. Ryan, it will go on. For Frontburner, I'm Elaine Chao. All right.

That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.