#dulf

DULF was a grassroots organization that was trying to tackle the drug crisis in Vancouver, Canada particularly the downtown east side which is especially bad for overdose and unsafe drug practices (and the government just lets people die smile). DULF did this by sourcing pure drugs and partnering with University of British Columbia to ensure they were 100% clean, then sold them at an below market value at a safe injection site. There are multiple papers out of UBC outlining the positive effects of their actions. They operated like this for years and the BC government knew of their existence for many of those years... Until right wing reactionaries caught wind of it and lost their minds and the BC gov back pedalled to save face. The person I know directly (a trans woman) and their friend who started it with her was arrested for literally saving people's lives and now faces a lengthy jail sentence as a result and is fund raising for her legal fees.

If you support safe supply and actual actions to save people's lives and you can afford to help, they are in desperate need of legal funds and they have until tomorrow at midnight (Sunday 11:59:59) to scrape together as much as they can. I haven't been keeping up with it recently because I deleted Instagram but the DULF Instagram account got banned so their fundraising efforts have been stunted.

If you can and want to help I've linked an instagram post with the paypal info and other details. Truly anything helps at this point.

Vancouver police have arrested drug policy activists Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum after executing search warrants on the Drug User Liberation Front office and their homes.

Since 2020, Nyx and Kalicum have held protest events and operated a compassion club to supply tested heroin, cocaine and meth to drug users, despite the risk of arrest for breaking Canada’s controlled substances laws.

Nyx and Kalicum said they were driven to break drug laws through firsthand experience of the overdose crisis. Nyx has spoken about losing dozens of friends to the overdose crisis, while Kalicum previously told Vancouver city council about reversing over 100 overdoses when he worked in the Downtown Eastside.

Full article

David Eby, the Premiere of British Columbia and the leader of Canada's NDP, flat-out said that the Drug User Liberation Front (an organization providing tested drugs to people who would otherwise have used street fentanyl) were saving lives, indeed doing "essential live-saving work"-- but that they could not be tolerated (this was a few days before the police arrested them) because their essential live-saving work broke the law.

David Eby apparently thinks people saving lives should be arrested when saving lives is against the law.

By this logic, people who provide clean needles to heroin users at risk of AIDS (when doing so was illegal in the 1980s and 1990s, and sometimes it is still illegal today) should also have been arrested, even if they saved people's lives.

Things like cigarettes are so villainized and taxed so high. Menthol cigarettes are even ILLEGAL. While in British Columbia narcotics are FREE and packaged nicely with warning labels for the homeless!

This Christmas a man sent all 87 B.C. MLAs magic mushrooms and politicians had the nerve to be angry. The same politicians who are mad about being gifted drugs are the same ones who allow organizations to freely dispense them!

We are living in clown world 🤡 so called “safe supply” will only lead to death and ruined lives.

Recent claims from British Columbia’s BC United Party are misrepresenting the nature of funds received by a BC-based drug user advocacy group Drug User Liberation Front.

DULF was one of many organizations that received funding from Vancouver Coastal Health in 2022. 

BC United issued a press release regarding the funds received by DULF which was itself based on an earlier Global News article about the funding, claiming the BC NDP was helping “organized crime” to “purchase illicit drugs from the dark web.”

[...]

The Global News article claims that they had “obtained documents” regarding the funding, however, those documents are publicly available to everyone on the VCH website.

The article claims DULF received the funding “to operate what the group calls a “’compassion club’ selling heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine.” 

However, experts as well as the government say this claim is off-base.

Full article

This is just straight up stigma about drugs and substance use. Not only are the Global News article and BC United statement full of misinformation, their true goal is to deny funding that goes to support and advocacy for people who use substances.

These people are trying to create a moral panic around people who use drugs to try to deny them support and advocacy, and they aren't even trying to deny their hatred and lack of compassion.

Removing this funding would only increase the already harmful marginalization of people who use substances.

this saturday we're headed out to kitchener to play with petrochemicals, kahraba, and our new friends fenech.

this show is a benefit in support of DULF, a vancouver-based safer supply compassion club created in response to bc's ongoing drug toxicity crisis. they're currently in need of community support to help cover legal fees after a series of vpd raids. if you can't make it, we encourage you to donate a few bucks to help them out.

fuck 12. we keep us safe.