Parallel emergencies: the poison drug crisis and climate breakdown (w/ Garth Mullins)

In this episode, Anjali Appadurai and Seth Klein sit down with Garth Mullins to explore the interconnectedness of the climate crisis and the overdose crisis, emphasizing the need for solidarity among various social movements. They discuss the metaphor of a conveyor belt leading to societal collapse, the failures of drug prohibition, and the importance of community organizing and coalition building. The conversation highlights the necessity for genuine emergency responses to both crises, advocating for a shift in how society addresses drug use and climate change, ultimately calling for a more inclusive and supportive approach to activism.

This episode aired on September 8 2025.

Links:

Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs by Garth Mullins: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/700597/crackdown-by-garth-mullins/9780385674898

Crackdown podcast, hosted by Garth Mullins: https://www.crackdownpod.com/

Credits:

Produced by Doug Hamilton-Evans and Anjali Appadurai. Hosted by Anjali Appadurai. Featuring Seth Klein and Garth Mullins. Music by Anjali Appadurai. Audio editing by Blue Light Studios. Artwork by Geoff Smith.

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:04.632)
Hello and welcome back to Break in Case of Emergency, a podcast from the Climate Emergency Unit about mobilizing Canada for the climate crisis with audacious solutions rooted in justice and workers' rights. I'm Anjali Apadare here with Seth Klein from our team.

Hello?

and we are honored to be with Garth Mullins on the show today to talk about the connections between the climate crisis and the overdose crisis and the drug war that fuels it. Garth is the host and executive producer of the award-winning and outstanding Crackdown podcast about the war on drugs from the perspective of drug users. He is a harm reduction activist and organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or VANDU, a musician, a journalist, broadcaster, and author of a new book, a memoir.

entitled Crackdown, Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs. Thank you so much for joining us, Garth.

thanks for having me. Stoked to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:03.47)
So we're obviously thrilled to have you here and I want to kick off our podcast today with a conversation that you and I actually had a couple years ago when we were having a conversation about the policy failures of the BC government when it comes to drug and housing policy. And in that conversation, you used a metaphor that really stayed with me. You said, and I'm paraphrasing here, we're all on the same conveyor belt to the streets.

Some are further away than others from the end of this conveyor belt, but the reality check is that you're a lot closer to the streets than you are to the elites or to those who are making this belt run. And more recently, in the latest episode of Crackdown, The Man in the High Castle, an excellent episode, you connect the rise of the far right globally and within Canada to this general neoliberal trend over the past few decades of major cuts to social supports and public services while

simultaneously increasing police and military funding, while corporations and the wealthy elite, of course, get richer and richer at the expense of everyone else. And that's that conveyor belt. That's that endless death by a thousand cuts that transports all of us, except billionaires, down the conveyor belt to a life that is drained of the scaffolding to live with dignity and comfort. And as we're seeing now that

is opening the door to a concerted surge of a more organized and more shameless far-right nationalist movement. And today's far-right is very different in some ways. In that same crackdown episode, you mentioned Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein's discussion of end-times fascism, which is how the emergent far-right around the world doesn't have a vision for some golden future. They have a bunker mentality or a rocket-shift mentality to escape the destruction of the world that they're

actively aiding and abetting. And also in that episode of Crackdown, this was a really awesome episode, you talk about the need for a mass social movement, one that looks different from the siloed movements of the past few years, but is actually a confluence of various struggles that all understand that we are clustered together on that conveyor belt. And that's where I want to focus today's conversation. In the climate movement that and I are from,

Speaker 2 (03:19.138)
We've long known that the same forces that drive the climate crisis, which are the fossil fuel industry and the architects and upholders of our global economic system, are the same forces that drive inequality, wealth polarization, and the sapping of the public sphere. That system requires sacrifices and it requires scapegoats. The sacrifices can be found in sweatshops, in the farming fields of the global south, on Indigenous lands where resource projects poison the land and the people, and

even here in so-called Vancouver, where the ultra-rich and the government keep housing out of reach of those who desperately need it, allowing so many people to fall through the cracks. And the scapegoats are, as always, Indigenous people, migrants, trans people, the poor, and course, drug users. The climate crisis is a war on the poor, here and globally. And that's where we see that our respective movements are inherently connected, and we should be acting in allyship and cooperation.

And so that's what we want to do today is to learn and talk together about how our movements can work in solidarity together. And I think all of this connects the crises we face from the genocide in Gaza to the climate crisis to the poison drug supply crisis and beyond. So that was a lot, but how does that sound to you, Gareth?

Sounds good, sounds like an ambitious plan for show.

Hahaha.

Speaker 1 (04:41.823)
and a world.

Thank

I also want to welcome you to the podcast. just want to say off the bat, I loved your book and I'm a huge fan of the Crackdown podcast. I'm a paid subscriber to a number of podcasts, but I actually joined and signed up with Patreon a few years ago in order to support Crackdown pod. And I say that just because I did it because I just felt this

incredible gratitude by how much I was learning from your show. And I just really recommend it to people. But there you go, by way of introduction, we thought we should start with a bit of table setting for our audience. You know, our audience knows quite a lot about the climate crisis, but maybe less about the poison drug crisis. So I think while the poison drug crisis touches practically everyone in some way,

Not everyone is up to speed on the policy side of things and the activism around it, which you lay out so well in your work. So could you maybe give our listeners an introduction to drug user activism and the state of the overdose crisis and the war on drugs and the major policy debates at the moment before we get into the connections with the climate crisis?

Speaker 1 (06:05.454)
Sure, mean, drugs are not illegal because they're dangerous. They're dangerous because they're illegal. So the fact that we have a blanket prohibition on lots of different types of drugs in Canada, North America, lots of parts of the world, has left it to the illicit market to produce and distribute those drugs. And so there's no kind of regulation on them, right? There's no quality control. There's no

Assurance of how strong a drug you're gonna get and so that's just left the market wide open and that's really dangerous It's a it's a wild west and that's what's killing people. It's illegal street drugs that are killing people and the idea that We can just declare them illegal ban them stamp them out use police that idea has been with us since around 1908 in Canada when originally opium

And the manufacturer and production and smoking of opium was all outlawed as an attack on the Chinese community. And, you know, this perception that it was weakening the manly hood of the white race. And, and so, in in a great racist for the beginning of the 20th century, you know, there was a series of measures taken, including like a head tax and eventually a Chinese exclusion act and.

Along with that was the Opium Act of 1908, which began when a government official from Ottawa came out to Vancouver after a racist riot out here, after a big pogrom in Chinatown and Japantown against the residents there by whipped up white Vancouverites who were...

in the thrall of politicians who were saying, you know, this is destroying our country. This immigration is a threat to jobs. A lot of the same arguments you hear today. so making opium illegal was a good way to target the community for the government. those, the acts, prohibition acts have been modified periodically throughout the time ever since.

Speaker 1 (08:30.072)
picking up and on new communities and responding to new sort of racist moral panics, you know, against the black community in Montreal against immigrants and all of these things have brought us to where we are today. And at that time, the first laws were against opium. People were smoking opium is quite genteel and you don't really get overdoses and deaths and all that in the same way you do now. And so as the police chased

Cracked down and stamped out opium it forced the illegal underground drug supply chain to innovate and produce smaller stronger more potent things for people to buy and that's how we went to you know, eventually morphine and heroin and injecting heroin and then eventually when police were chasing heroin and stamping out heroin we got

fentanyl coming in and then as police were stamping out fentanyl we get benzodiazepines replacing part of the fentanyl and then tranquilizers so we get benzodope and tranqdope and you see it's an arms race the the more the enforcement the harder and the more dangerous the drug gets and so if we want to get off this arms race we have to regulate drugs instead of just banning them and pretending that that's the end of the problem because we have over a century of proof to show

It doesn't work. It just leads to more and more death and more and more misery. In fact, we tried the same thing with alcohol and found the same results. We got stronger, know, bootleggers had to come up with moonshine, which was much stronger than the more popular beer and wine at the time. And then because it was unregulated, people went blind, got sick, died, all that stuff. And it just created a market for organized crime. So it's the same thing. But at that time, Canada and the US learned the lesson prohibition doesn't work.

but they learned it for alcohol. we're still going and we're getting increased police budgets, misery, all these things, and we won't get out of it this way.

Speaker 3 (10:32.782)
But it's interesting comparison, like what you just described is now what we do for alcohol. We regulate it, we sell it in public liquor stores. We recognize that it can be very harmful, but it's not banned. Why do you think we've taken that approach with alcohol and yet not when it comes to drugs?

I think drugs have been racially and class-coded. So they are a different population, consumer-based, at least in the public imagination. I mean, the truth is that, you know, five million Canadians or something like that use opioids or, I mean, prescribed and illicit one form or another. And so you get much more prohibition against drugs that are racially or class-coded.

You know, the classic example is the difference in sentencing that was developed in the US, you know, the 100 to 1 ratio of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. It's the exact same drug. But if you got arrested with crack back in the day, you would get a sentence much, much, much harder than if you got arrested with powder cocaine. And that's because crack was more common in poor black communities and cocaine was for, you know, wealthy stockbrokers. so that's, you know, that's just an example of how

It's about who is perceived to be using it. You know, because it gives the police a great excuse to ask for bigger and bigger budgets and to act like an occupying army in different communities. The downtown east side of Vancouver, for example, you cannot spend a minute in that neighborhood without seeing cops. And plenty of them.

And can you, mean part of what's so captivating about your book and your podcast, I mean first of all, you humanize who we're talking about, but you also describe a movement and the evolution of a movement of drug users. Can you give our listeners a bit of a flavor of what that movement's like and the state of it right now?

Speaker 1 (12:47.15)
I mean, I know about this stuff because I've lived it. know, like I have been an opioid user since I was, I don't know, a teenager. And I've also been an organizer in social movements since that same time. But it took a long time for me to understand that these two parts of my life ought to come together. You know, I've been an organizer in a lot of movements, but only in the last sort of decade, decade and a half have I been involved in drug user organizing because I felt so ashamed.

about having a dope habit, you know? so I came to be a part of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, and this organization was formed in the late 90s during the last overdose crisis. So we are in, in British Columbia, sort of like a mass death event that is recognized by the public health authorities, and they have declared an emergency.

in drug toxicity in 2016, April of 2016. We're almost a decade into this. And there was a similar one in the 90s. It was about strong heroin called China White and HIV spreading quickly at that time, a lot through syringes, which we didn't have as much access to. So the organization, Vandu, formed in the late 90s in response to this mass death and

really realized that we needed to use the same sorts of strategies and tactics as other movements. So needle exchanges, for example, distribution of new syringes so that people wouldn't be spreading HIV or hep C. That was first done illegally. That was first done as acts of civil disobedience by activists and healthcare workers who were upset at seeing so much death. The first,

you know, overdose prevention site, know, supervised consumption site, like, like Insight in Vancouver, like many across the country. Now, the first ones were opened without permission. They were started illegally as an act of civil disobedience to try and arm twist government into creating legal programs. And that's been true right up until recent times when we did a distribution of tested heroin, meth and cocaine to people who use those every day, a small group of people within the downtown East side within

Speaker 1 (15:15.086)
Van Do and other drug user organizations. A small compassion club, did that illegally and that has resulted recently in arrest. it's, we use non-violent civil disobedience, but also mass action, know, protests, putting people on the street, sometimes blocking traffic. We used lobbying government, reaching out to the media and forming coalitions. You know, we worked with

Black Lives Matter and a bunch of other groups to form a coalition in 2020 to call for a reduction in the VPD budgets, along with people all across North America calling for the refunding of communities and social services and the defunding by 50 % of police budgets because we had seen such a huge inflation in police budgets. So, you know, we've been using a lot of the same tools as

as labor movement, as working class movements have, and movements of oppressed and exploited people all over the place.

That's really interesting and it has been very effective in some ways. You have arm twisted the government into creating policy. Obviously not enough and not strongly enough. mean, we saw with the sort of half-hearted attempt at safe supply that it was not enough to meet the need. But I want to go back to this idea of coalition building and working with other movements. And you mentioned the 2020.

finding common cause with the Black Lives Matter movement and the abolition movement against, so to reduce police budgets. What has the experience other than that been like for Van Du and for other drug user organizers in coalition building and in working with other movements, positive or negative, what has that experience been like?

Speaker 1 (17:12.942)
It's been pretty positive, you know, we've also worked with the disability justice movement around Maid and around the heat dome, you know, which is Affected lots of our people More so than the regular population, but this is one of those places where everyone's affected right? like the heat dome here in British Columbia killed 620 people something like that and

disproportionately among them were people with disabilities or people who use drugs and you know when when the heat climbs a lot overdoses increase when there's floods and fires people get displaced from their communities and cut off from their say their methadone prescriptions or or whatever you know whatever they've managed to cobble together for a life to get some kind of stability but that affects everybody right and

I think the thing I was saying about the conveyor belt, which I forgot that I said that by the way until your introduction, what I meant is that often people who are housed and people who are homeless get pitted against each other, but we're all facing the same forces. And I think lots of people who are housed in Vancouver right now are scared. Everyone's like a paycheck away from eviction and their own housing crisis.

I think there's lots and lots of room for common cause and as the years go by, I've seen more and more room for solidarity. You know, back in the 90s, I was an organizer in what was then called the anti-globalization movement. But I mean, that was just a nice word for an anti-capitalist movement. Back then, capitalism, the word capitalism was kind of coded with communists. so anyone who wasn't like a full blown communist was a little gun shy to use the word.

I've always found it fits and never been scared to use it, but we organized a movement of movements around the world from Canada to the global south all over the place because all these leaders were meeting to lower trade barriers to basically make the world that we're seeing now possible to create a smoother, more frictionless

Speaker 1 (19:32.27)
more helpful world for billionaires and and and capitalism and That kind of solidarity is what we need again today and that was a high point of struggle that was really derailed by the state's reaction to 9-eleven and I think The state found us to be a threat, you know there was there was real worries about the power of this movement and the ability for us to affect the agendas of these kind of

multilateral organizations. I think we need that kind of solidarity and power again. But at the time in the 90s, was kind of, it was a little abstract to talk to people about, how does the World Trade Organization affect your daily life? You know, how will it affect it in the future and all that? Now people can see that a lot easier, but people can see it through the raised temperatures that they're experiencing right now, like today. You know, it's probably going to be

five degrees higher in Vancouver than the average than it usually is, you know, and those extremes are felt much worse in other parts of the world. So everyone can now feel what we have to get together on. And what drug users can bring to this fight is we have been losing people throughout this. We've been trying to organize during an emergency, and that's what makes the solidarity the most difficult.

is that we are constantly losing our own leaders. We're constantly burying and memorializing people. So we're having this organizational chaos created by the drug supply also. Like as benzodiazepines got introduced into the drug supply, when the police were pressing on fentanyl and dealers started mixing other things in to try and substitute, well, that started to affect people's memories. And so,

Suddenly we couldn't remember what were we talking about earlier in the meeting or what's on the agenda for next week. And it started to destroy our ability to organize. you know, I just think my habit was mostly heroin and heroin. could do it once every 12 hours and I'd be okay. But the dope that is on the street now, this, you know, it's called down, like heroin used to be called down. just refers to opioids sold on the street, but what's called down now doesn't have any heroin in it.

Speaker 1 (21:57.164)
It's got fentanyl and benzodiazepines and animal tranquilizers and shit. And you need to get more of that every couple of hours and it's affecting your memory. So it's much, much harder to organize. So the material conditions of life make it more difficult to organize. And I think that's true for other movements too. You know, when you have to work three jobs and take care of your kids, it's probably harder to find time to organize. When you're, you know, constantly a threat of losing your job or losing your housing, that makes it more difficult.

when you're being evacuated from your community every summer because of wildfire and floods, that can make it harder too. So we have skills born of emergency and crisis, which are helpful. The knowledge that nobody's coming to save us, so we got to save ourselves, that we can help bring. But at the same time, these are the things that make organizing in solidarity more difficult, these kind of critical emergencies.

Yeah, definitely the terrain on which we're organizing is growing more difficult for everyone and across movements. I when you don't have stable housing and that's across the board, or if you're a renter, you know, it's, and just our time getting drained by all of this and our, also our devices keeping us just engaged and our distraction is through the roof.

Yeah, it's harder to organize. Although when there are breakthrough moments, as we saw with the Palestine Solidarity Movement over the last couple of years, those breakthrough movements carry a tremendous amount of energy with them. And you see that it is possible to have this wonderful organizing culture be built in a very short amount of time. Yeah, I think when you talked about heat, heat is a really interesting confluence point where all of this comes together.

You know, in the climate movement, we talked about the heat dome. We use the heat dome as a framing event for so much policy advocacy for climate policy. And I'm just, you know, I keep thinking that there's a gap here between we're talking about heat and how it's affecting those most marginalized in our community. And we're advocating for climate policy that is provincial and federal in scope.

Speaker 2 (24:19.49)
And I wonder if there's more of an opportunity to work more at a local level and to work with people like Van Du and to find more common cause there to talk about how it's common for all of us and we have the same enemy, we have the same set of forces that we're working against.

Yeah, mean, I think all organizing is ultimately hyper local or I think that's a lot of time where it starts. That's where people experience the world is in their neighborhoods. And so, for example, because there's so much people with disabilities and people use drugs and overdoses and stuff in the downtown East side, you would have expected the heat dome to have a real

bullseye the map of where the deaths are on the downtown east side. But it didn't. know, when the stats were all published and put together, we found that downtown east side had less than expected, not more than expected deaths. And that's because of community organizing. That's because when it's hot, we go give water around to people. Because we fought for the city to put out, you know, like fire hydrants or drinking fountains or whatever. You know, we've

done that work and because people already have the experience for years and years and years of shitty housing being sweltering rooms, lots of SR, you know, single room occupancy, the hotels in the neighborhood don't have windows. Lots of the rooms don't have windows. So they're already sweltering before, you know, in the nineties they were sweltering. So people sometimes would go out and sleep in parks or tents or wherever they could in the in the hot summer days. So people already have that built in.

the knowledge of, I better not let myself get too hot in here. And people already know that there's a little, it's called the downtown Eastside air conditioners where if you got a sink in your room, you turn on the water and run the water and put the fan right in front of the water, know? I don't know. Anyway, it's like, so people have learned some of those survival tips and tricks before we got to last 10 years of, you know, hotter summers, but

Speaker 1 (26:34.742)
Yeah, I think that building locally, I found is really good too, but you need to build up, you need to build those connections. And we do have a network of a coalition of drug user groups that have gone through the process of all finding each other, gotten together, and are going through, we kind of run our groups through a bit of a long meeting process where we identify, okay, who are we?

who are our friends who are our enemies you know so you look for who who you have you know that natural solidarity with who are the people who are trying to fuck your life over kill you arrest you or whatever you know so you can identify where where you sit in and how you should organize yourself

That's so interesting about, I hadn't heard that stat about the downtown Eastside and the heat dome. yet it's, yeah, it's striking to me. We talk a lot about how mobilizations require social solidarity. And yet in that heat dome, it strikes me that in so many other neighborhoods, we've forgotten how to check on our neighbors. And consequently, a bunch of them died.

Some people who live in other parts of the city tell me that the downtown east side and maybe a commercial drive are the last places that feel like neighborhoods to them. But I don't know whether that reflects where they come from. I think there are probably more. But I think they're putting a finger on something that is probably true is that a lot of places don't feel like neighborhoods anymore. A lot of places are really alienated and it's the type, it's the way they

you know, I built this sort of investment based housing structures and stuff like that. And they sort of destroy that, those filing cabinets for dead capital that they stack into the sky sort of feel not like a neighborhood. And so they destroy that. And, and it's actually a dangerous thing to not have a neighborhood and to not know people and to not to be able to check on people. You know, like I know who some of my

Speaker 1 (28:45.152)
neighbors with kids are and and some of the older neighbors night you know i i called around a little bit during the heat don't check on some of the older people and i handed out some water to but mostly i cowered in my apartment because we got an air conditioner right and it's like one of those little boxes with a hose that goes to the window and i think that everybody ought to be able to get a when you come to come for whatever because those to do the same sort of cooling right but

You know, the place looks more and more like Brazil. I don't know if you've seen the film, Brazil, it's from the 80s and everybody lives in this dystopia and all their apartments are very small and they've got all these hoses around to clean the, you know, clean the air and stuff like that. And this is what we have now. We don't, it doesn't look pretty. You got this box with a hose that goes to the, anyway, it's, it's just like we're getting there.

You know, I'm speculating here, but to your point about neighborhoods, I I grew up in Montreal and I spent a number of years living in Toronto and then I've lived half my life here in Vancouver. But it struck me when I first moved to Vancouver that unlike Montreal and Toronto, there were not neighborhoods. I mean, there were a few, as you just said, but huge swaths of the city don't feel like neighborhoods the way

I experienced in Montreal and Toronto. And I mean, there is an interesting climate connection here because there's something about how particularly car-dependent Vancouver is and how we have constructed this city of single-family homes and without the kind of gentle density that Montreal and Toronto have that create a street life and where, you know, the...

my non-scientific observation is that people know each other in a way that is less true in Vancouver. And Vancouver, as I'm sure you know, as terminal city where so many of us come from somewhere else, also has the highest addiction rate.

Speaker 2 (30:49.612)
Yeah, we do a little bit of organizing workout in Surrey and the heat deaths were really bad out there, exactly because of what you were saying. It's developer-led building. It's just investment properties, condos, that are tiny, that are not set up for the heat. And the buildings are set up so you can't get to know your neighbors. It's almost built on the assumption of like...

like strangers are dangerous and so we're going to like protect you from each other as much as possible. Like you can't get to other floors in your building, there's no common areas, everything's locked off. Even the door to the apartments in a lot of these Surrey condos are, and Vancouver too, they're like really heavy big doors. It's not like you can just knock on your neighbor's door. Everything says, everything screams, do not come, do not approach.

And it's, yeah, it's a lot of seniors passed away alone in the heat in Surrey during that heat dome.

mean, these things are connected too, right? Because if people feel alone and alienated from the world, that's, they're going to be coming to see us soon, right? Like they're going to be coming to score dope because like, honestly, that's what for me, opioids is, it's an end to the alienation, right? It's like, if you feel like you're outside everything and you don't belong and you, you got that, that feeling of just being an alien who's been dropped off on the wrong planet or something.

Um, opioids wipe that out, you know, for a lot of people anyway. And if you've got trauma on top of that, like if you've come from somewhere else where it was war torn, you miss where you come from and miss your family or whatever, like there's lots of reasons, social reasons like that. Um, reasons like how we've organized society that are going to make people want to use dope, want to find that moment of escape, you know, a lot of people, like you were saying earlier, do that on their devices right now, Anjali, like what you were saying, but

Speaker 1 (32:55.246)
Drugs is more effective and I'm not promoting that people do it, but I'm just being like being real. Like that's what people are looking for. And that's what people use alcohol for to take the edge off. I just think that the kind of heavy alienation we all are experiencing right now, you might need something stronger.

Exactly, know, substances come in all forms across the board and you just, we are going to need more substances as this alienation continues. It's already happening. I mean, even the best of us are feeling, you're just feeling drained. And the pandemic, I think, added a really deep kind of accelerator to that. People lost social skills. It's a lot more social anxiety added to that mix.

When I first started going to meetings as a drug user organizer, mean, I wasn't an organizer. was going to meetings, I was kind of sitting in the back, had my ball cap pulled low. I saw this couple and their names rhymed with each other. And I saw them in every meeting I went to. And I was just like, what are you guys, do you guys just only go to meetings? What's going on here? And they said, you know, like, feels good to go and be with people and everything. And we're broke. We smoke less rock when we go to meetings and we're when we're doing something like this. And I was just like,

that clicked to me and I've been asking people about it ever since, know, and one of the old heads at Van Dew told me, know, because I went to him and I said, like, I feel really good coming here. I feel like I actually belong, you know, like I don't feel like I've got this secret or that I'm ashamed of who I actually am because I'm a drug user or whatever. He said, yeah, lots of people say that, you know, this is a place where people come to be who they were supposed to be.

This is a place where we make ourselves new as we make the world new. And I thought that was really prophetic, know, or really profound, I guess. And like, I think that that's true for all of us because part of the problem is that we're all, you know, isolated and alone from geography, architecture, society, the organization, the city, whatever. But organizing helps you find each other.

Speaker 1 (35:09.708)
helps you find your people, find your place in the world. And all of a sudden you have people who are going to maybe check on you during a heat dome or you're going to check on other people too. Right? So it kind of meets some of these same problems that we're talking about.

Exactly. Organizing spaces are so precious and are such a lifeline because the backbone of organizing is mutual care. I know sometimes those are tough spaces to be in sometimes because we do fight and there are conflicts, etc. But the backbone of it is you're showing up, you're sharing food together, you're chatting about other things other than just the work, you you're friends.

It's a huge lifeline for a lot of people while also being a tangible concrete place that you can put those feelings of helplessness that are bigger and more vague and more amorphous. So yeah, I want that for everyone. And it's beautiful, like even just the heat statistic example that you gave about the downtown Eastside being less affected speaks so well to that. It's part of also this broader move

into secularism, right? Not to get too deep into this because we want to get back to talking about our movements, but you know, we're moving away from religion and with that comes the loss of these buffering institutions, like institutions that stand between you and the wild west of capitalism and the violence of the state, institutions that are just

groups and organizations that you can show up to and be in community with other people. And I grew up in a church community. And I think I kind of took for granted as a kid, like how that space was intergenerational, informal, a total mix of people from across, know, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds. And I...

Speaker 2 (37:16.32)
Maybe we were lucky in that way. We just had the small community church that met in a school gym. And now as an adult, I reflect on that and I'm like, that helped my parents so much as immigrants. Like they just had a crew of people showing up to their house to like help them move or like to help them. You know, like I was a bookworm and we couldn't afford any books when we needed the country. And the people from the church just came by and dropped off boxes of books for me and things like that. And to date,

Where I find that is in organizing spaces, for a huge number of us, we don't have anything like that if we're not religious.

You know, I think the left ought to really take that serious what you just said, right? Because we ought to be a welcoming space. We ought to be intergenerational and take care of each other and have that vibe, right? Because people are so bereft, so without a community, without solidarity, that when something like MAGA comes along, it's intoxicating.

to feel part of something. you can even be like, my survival kind of depends on this. Because in some ways, like we just explained with the heat dome, it really can. So people can get swept along with things that maybe they might not otherwise be swept along with if they were part of their union or church or local community or something like that, that had other people around it to say, really, are you, do you really support this kind of cruelty? You know, because ...

And I think some people are just genuinely cruel and awful people. I think that, you know, you're seeing the far right have success in a lot of the world because there has been so much alienation and because the left has been beaten back over decades and decades, right? And we have had some good successes more recently, but we're nothing like what we used to be before I was born. But, and I think people...

Speaker 1 (39:22.918)
used to have places where they got that kind of camaraderie and companionship and we can't underestimate that sense of belonging. And so I think when we're fighting fascism, we have to create spaces that feel, you know, generous and caring and not judgy and like if you're, if you know enough stuff and you can speak enough jargon, you know, that's, that's the thing about Van Dewey, right? It's like, lots of us didn't finish school. Lots of us didn't

get to start, even get out of elementary school and stuff, right? So like, we can never be judgy about what people know and don't know, right? And you know, someone was saying to me the other day, or saying at a meeting that I was at the other day, they're like, okay, so there's a provincial minister health and a federal minister of health, and I have to know who both these fucking people are? Why do I have to keep learning shit all through my life? You know, and was just like, and the system of government's complicated, nobody in Canada knows it unless they have to.

get involved and fight it or something like that. But it's just like, we have to be gentle and welcoming about people who don't know the jargon or whatever and not judgy and scolding or scolding or whatever, you know.

Totally. I totally agree. And we've seen a really beautiful cultural shift with the Palestine Solidarity Movement in the past couple years. And you know, I got jealous when I hear both of you, like Garth and Seth, you know, that generation of lefties in Canada, it sounded like there were some really beautiful, exciting moments. And I think one thing that we all have in common is both of you came out of anti-globalization movements. And my...

My organizing mentors who that I sort of came up under were also anti-globalization folks. So that's kind of where I got my foundational worldview as well. I think, you know, today I struggle with the lack of internationalism in our movements. And it's come to this place where it's like, we can only care about what's in our backyard, but I just know that there's a political culture.

Speaker 2 (41:29.262)
that's possible to build, where we are organizing within our communities, where we have strong communities that are totally place-based, and we have a broader sense of where we sit in the world and how we're connected and implicated in the rest of the world. you know, this broader global view, this internationalism, doesn't have to be some, like, intellectual, high-flying thing. It could just be a part of our culture on the left. And I just dream about that, you know?

It was a good time. I was at a meeting where people were new to the internet, so they were asking everybody, what's the first thing you looked up on the internet? And lots of people said porn. I said the first thing I saw was somebody showed me a hook, a dial-up of really early 90s. And it was one of those monitors that was just like green and black background.

It was the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's Declaration of War that was published on New Year's Day, 1992. it was stirring, but you couldn't see the images. Eventually you did in the news of the people riding horses with the bandanas across their mouth and a little pipe coming out and stuff. But we held demonstrations in solidarity with the Zapatista Army like

because we understood that they were fighting, they had come out of the jungle to fight against, well, we didn't even have the word globalization yet, but, you know, colonial capitalism. And we were against that too. And so there used to be so many little sects and left groups up and down commercial drive in Vancouver, and they would organize big groups and they were left groups from around the world, you know, the Iranian Communist Party and this and that.

and try to make those links. know, when people would get on boats to go drop supplies off in Gaza, like back in the late 80s and early 90s and shit like that. You know, and it was just part of being on the left is understanding global struggles and our relationship to global struggles. know, and Palestine Solidarity has been part of this work since I was brought into it as a teenager.

Speaker 1 (43:53.25)
It was just part of, one of the indigenous solidarity events I went to was a solidarity march to get the army to pull out of Kanisatake in the early 90s, when they went in there on what was called the Okla Crisis by the media and all that. And then one of the guys who was on the Mercy Bridge, one of the Mohawk warriors, Wade Crawford, he was one of the people.

seized the bridge and they said to the cops that they had planted bombs and they were going to blow the bridge up and who knows if that was true. But you know, they were trying to back the army and the cops and everything off of their people too. Wade came out here. He was an organizer against the Olympics and he was an organizer at Van Do and he showed us all how important it was that drug users on the downtown East side expressed solidarity with

you know, what so it and elders who were getting arrested by the RCMP on the CGL pipeline, you know, and like those links were, they never left us. You know what I mean? The, the, the feeling that we have to be hyper local, like we have to know the material conditions of the place we live and downtown East Side is just a hyper local place. East, East Van used to be a hyper local place, all of it, you know, that's, that's the place I used to know, but it's largely disappeared. But

all of those hyperlocalities have to be connected somehow. And that was the job of the movement of the movements that grew up in the late 90s. You know, the anti-globalization movement was to connect all of those things. And that was something that had, I don't know if that had happened before in history, whether we'd ever been able to build a global movement of movements before. And we see lots of it since, like the international Palestinian solidarity struggle, but I think we need more of that now.

Okay, so the wonderful dreaming about a movement of movements has led us to, I think, a good segue into our last section here. And it's a good time to return to the call from the top of the show to discuss what links, well, particularly, poison drug supply crisis and climate crisis, their underlying causes and their resistance to the solutions that abound.

Speaker 2 (46:17.056)
if anyone in power cared to listen, and how we can encourage greater solidarity between our movements, which is the call that you made in that episode of Crackdown, the last one. And so I know that Seth has some thoughts on this, and I think this flows really well from the discussion that we just had. So I want to throw it Seth.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll start it off, I'd love to get your thoughts on the action, Garth. partly what led to us reaching out to you to do this podcast with us is that the more I was listening to your podcast, the more parallels I was seeing between the climate and the poison drug crisis. Both of them are wars of a sort, battles to save lives. In both cases, we've had governments

make declarations of emergency. You talked earlier about how it's been virtually 10 years that a public health emergency was declared with respect to poison drugs. And similarly, in 2019, the Canadian federal government declared, formally declared a climate emergency. And yet the actual response has not been an emergency response. And instead, both movements have struggled with

political and societal denial about the true scope of the crisis. Both have struggled to get political leaders to listen to experts, whether it's health experts or climate scientists. Both involve, in my mind, both of them involve confronting what are really forces of a death cult, in my mind. Leaders who, in the end, seem content to consign to death.

or displacement, those who are deemed too weak or too poor or somehow guilty of moral failure. We are in both of our movements wrestling with governments that are engaged in what I would call the phony war stage of this fight. As some of our listeners will know, my book is drawing parallels from the mobilization of the Second World War. Historians refer to the

Speaker 3 (48:34.242)
first nine months of the Second World War as the phony war because we declared war, but not really. We were still for much of that first year in denial about what was actually going to be needed. And to me, you see this, the public health emergency declaration and the climate emergency declaration, it's the same damn thing. And also both of these crises are in the end wrestling with this

hepid incrementalism in the policy response. We see these half measures, these small measures that can ultimately never get ahead of the curve when it comes to confronting the crisis. so the responses end up being condemned to failure. then they get attacked by the far right, who roll it back before it's even had a chance to succeed.

Anyway, I'd love to hear your take on those parallels.

yeah, mean, lots of people on the right like to say that it's been a confrontation between the left and the right, but it's been a confrontation between the center right and the right or the mushy middle and the far right. We have seen, you know, I can speak to the overdose crisis. We have seen like politicians get up and

and say, we're going to have a prescribed safe supply, even taking the word safe supply right out of our mouths. It was a phrase created by the drug user movement. And then make something so small and pitiful and useless that really it can't possibly affect the number of deaths. then the right rolls into town and

Speaker 1 (50:32.684)
declares, look at this, they're just handing out free drugs of every sort to anybody who wants them, including school kids. Isn't this an outrage? Isn't this terrible? This is what's causing all the death. So they flip the script entirely. The thing that would actually be the solution to the death, because the coroner shows that the mass deaths are not coming from prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, but illicit street drugs. So they flip the script and then they mobilize

fear and a kind of moral panic and backlash around it.

You know, is so similar to what we experience in the climate movement. when I was interviewing politicians from my book, politicians federally and provincially who, you know, are people who I thought got the emergency. And yet they were con... their rejoinder was always, look, you got to go slow, got to meet the public where they're at. So we're going to have these. And if we don't, we'll get a right wing backlash. So what did we get? We got these...

lackluster, milk toast policy responses that don't accomplish anything meaningful when it comes to the crisis. And we still got the right wing backlash to all of those measures, just as you just described.

Well, on the one hand, right, if you get a tepid half measure and people at home are being told by the politician standing up at the dais, look, I'm solving the problem. I'm doing this brave thing. And then the problem continues. They will go, I guess the measure doesn't work. Not the fact that it's a half measure or it's anemic and little. They just think, the politician promised that they were the solution to the emergency and they had it in hand.

Speaker 1 (52:20.78)
and look at them go and vote for them, they're going to solve the problem. The problem doesn't go away. Right? So everyone said, well, you know, if safe supply worked, why are people still dying? And that's a reasonable kind of logic based on the narrative that the politicians say, because the politicians don't say, we're doing a little shitty half measure. They say, look at me, I'm solving the problem. Right? Up and until the person who's the biggest threat to them becomes the right. So for a moment,

drug users were organized, we were pressing an arm-twisting government so they were giving us some harm reduction services in NEMIG half measures, yes. And then the right catches wind. I watched the convoy on TV in 2022 in the winter and I saw their supply lines and their food and their organizing and the thousands of them occupying the parliamentary district of Ottawa and I just thought, man,

If these guys find us as in the harm reduction movement, we are going to be fucked. And sure enough, they did. And we are, we are right now losing and we're facing a rollback of programs and government is running scared to even say the word harm reduction. They don't even want to say it anymore. Right? So these politicians who claim to be for solving the emergency, they, for them, it is much, much more important to stay in power than it is to get anything done or improve people's lives.

I tell you, you actually went with the programs that Van Dew is offering, not only would it save lives of drug users, it would improve the lives of everybody in the community. If people were housed and given the things that they need, like pharmaceuticals, there would be no organized crime involved in drug dealing anymore. We've even done these small studies that were big enough to show that if we rolled them out at mass scale, how we could solve the problems.

and that would improve the quality of life for all Vancouverites. And if politicians did that, did the big thing, that improved life for everybody, there wouldn't be a backlash because everybody would be like, I'm not fighting back against the thing that's actually helping. Right? The same way as if, you know, if people were seeing actual changes, actual big things in the field of work you guys are in, I think the backlash would have no wind in its sails.

Speaker 3 (54:43.8)
Yeah, yeah. You know, there was another heartbreaking part of your book, Near the End, where you described a dynamic that was very familiar when in the early months of the pandemic, I think we all had this fleeting moment of hope that, suddenly our governments are actually in emergency mode. Suddenly we're seeing action at speed and scale. And for this window of a few months,

it felt like we had been given a picture of what an emergency response could look like. And you you described some of your friends saying, hey, maybe they really can move fast. Similarly in climate, we was like, this is what it could look like. They're showing us it's possible. And yet with a kind of whiplash, it was so short-lived.

They were preserving the market.

Yeah, baby, baby.

I mean, I think that's the thing is a lot of people may believe that the state is incapable of solving problems, right? The state, in the municipality here, like Vancouver municipal government, provincial government, federal government, whatever. They've back in the seventies or whatever, they would talk about like, know, Trudeau senior peer, Trudeau had the just society and all this stuff. People had big ideas. And we even had a mayor here once who said he would end homelessness. We don't have any of that anymore.

Speaker 1 (56:15.402)
We have people who are going to manage problems, not solve problems, and usually use police to manage problems. And so I think that a lot of people have just given up on the idea that governments can, even if they wanted to, could solve anything. And maybe that's true, that governments as they're currently constituted would have a lot of trouble because they've faced decades of austerity and cuts. And they've hired people who no longer are involved in being able to solve things.

You know, I don't know, but we have to overcome that too, I think. You know, and we have to build our own institutions that can solve things. Like if they're not going to do it, we have to build, and this is really into revolutionary theory, we have to build dual power. You know, if they're not going to keep us safe, we have to keep us safe. And we have to show the whole world that if, you know, if everyone isn't safe, then no one's safe. The billionaires don't just get to go off in a rocket ship or

barricade themselves into a bunker because they're going to need sanitation workers and food service workers and everybody else to keep them alive right so all of us gotta be safe

I think the, when I think about dual power, the thing that comes closest in my, across Canada, as far as I can tell, is in the Dantani side, where people are finding ways and building systems to take care of each other's material needs and to sort of set up a system where the state cannot completely eradicate them. Would you agree or do you think

I mean, obviously we need more, but how should we go about that and how can we help each other build this idea of deal power, the kind of power that the state cannot touch because we hold it so strongly within our networks.

Speaker 1 (58:10.232)
Well, mean, unfortunately they did. We set up the drug user liberation front, which since the government wasn't willing to give us access to drugs that were not going to kill us, we sourced them and tested them with a mass spectrometer and all that stuff to make sure that they were okay for people. And then people who were already drug users would be able to access them through our little network, a small number of people.

We weren't able to replace the giant prescribing capacity of the state, but we could show a little what's possible. It was illegal as hell, and we operated for about three years, but as the political winds turned and as the eyes of the opposition fell on us, the police raided our operations, took everything, raided the houses of two of our leaders, and arrested them and charged them with three counts each of possession for the purposes of trafficking. And now we're...

shut down and in court. I mean, the state can come down on you. And I think that's what we also have to reckon with is that our fight has to be against the issues that we're working on, know, climate change or the overdose crisis. But we also have to confront the rising specter of fascism and not just in the U.S. or somewhere else, but here as well. And that's, you know, increased police power, increased police brutality.

and the increasing tolerance for the state to go this way. I think we're going to see that more and more. And so we have to build anti-fascism into everything that we do.

It'll be, it'll, I mean that case will be one to watch for sure with the drug liberation.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00.802)
we go to court this fall and our counter argument is that your laws are killing us and they're unconstitutional so vacate the charges and by the way get rid of your bad laws so we'll see who we are

Yes. Yeah. It's a real conundrum because, you know, my own contention on the climate front is that speed and scale to actually do what needs to be done ultimately has to be state led. We do need these examples of what the solution is. if we're hoping for the voluntary adoption of all of these things, we're going to be fried. And yet we're caught. Like you tell...

this incredible story, both in the podcast and the book, about this state decision a few years ago, where for everyone who was on methadone, they got switched over to this alternate treatment of methodex, was it? Dose. Methadose. where the state was basically captured and made some sweet deal with the company that was offering that.

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11.988)
And it was devastating to the entire community and people ended up off their treatment and their lives were ruined. And it's arbitrary actions like that that of course read this distrust of authorities. And it's so harmful because in emergencies we actually do need people to have some level of trust in authorities.

But man, they aren't making it easy for us.

No, I mean, you're right, Seth. Like that is the conundrum because as we were organizing the drug user liberation front, the coroner was putting out statistics that there are, you know, 225,000 people in British Columbia who are at risk of the toxic drug market. And I just, I knew that we could never reach that scale, right? We could not replace the health system of the state. can use civil disobedience.

You were

Exactly proof of concept and arm twisting the state right now. So I think we still it's very hard and and the other thing I worked on was decriminalization You can't decriminalize yourself because the state is the one who's making you a criminal you have to relate to the state to that Like so we're stuck with it one way or the other But there are like the state will change Very radically when there's a mass social movement. It's gonna basically throw everybody out of office and

Speaker 1 (01:02:41.822)
I think that's, I mean, often right before you see some of the classic revolutions in history, you see states that are willing to, you know, meet people a lot of the way. I can't remember who it was that said, you know, we got to give them social reform or they'll give us social revolution like someone in England and, you know, talking about healthcare, providing like healthcare and benefits and stuff like that. I, you know, I think that's the kind of thing we have to do.

Yeah, yeah. What's your... I want to give our audience a sense of what the solution actually looks like. For our work in the climate emergency unit, we have this framework for what a genuine emergency response looks like. For the poison drug crisis, what does a genuine emergency response look like?

Well, I think first of all, the thing that I want to stop is the deaths, right? Like a lot of conservative people want to stop people from using drugs. I have no idea how to do that. People have always used drugs. In fact, I'm going to be on methadone or some kind of opioid probably for the rest of my life. And that's fine. I'll continue my life and be a productive member of society or whatever. But stopping the deaths is the first thing. And that means

Everybody who's at risk of overdose or who's relying on the toxic drug market right now needs access to pharmaceutical versions of the same thing that they are using that's from the street that's risking their death. So that's the first thing. Like the second thing is that we need to stop criminalizing people for it. So no more sending people to jail for drug possession and all that.

I think there needs to be some kind of justice for people who are producers in the global south. I don't know whether it's fair trade arrangements between consumers and producers, some kind of system worked out there. They're not subject to hyper exploitation. I think there are other ancillary things like housing. A lot of people have talked about

Speaker 1 (01:05:00.23)
how to solve the housing crisis. But I should say that people aren't homeless because they're using drugs. They're often using drugs because they're homeless. So people in the city can't afford to pay rent. It's just too high. That's what's creating homelessness in the city. so we do need to address that too. to address the deaths and the misery, think a real pharmaceutical alternative to the

to the toxic street supply and a real decriminalization model. Like we just have to, we've experimented through the 20th and 21st centuries with prohibition. It doesn't work. We have to abandon it. We have to rewrite the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and we have to find a different way to go. You can also see that when we did that for alcohol, we limited how strong the alcohol can be. Like you can't find booze above a certain proof in the liquor store. And so we can do that.

with drugs too, like society can explore how we want to put limits on what we think the most difficult or dangerous aspects of the pharmaceutical world could be. And you just don't see organized crime involved in alcohol anymore. You don't see people shooting it out on the street over who's going to run a liquor store. So it's like we can bring that kind of order and peace.

to the wild west it is the drug war right now i think also on changing the role of police in society is a big part of that that comes with the criminalization when you and the drug war you're going to end the rationale for hundreds of millions of dollars spent on policing

Absolutely. think that's a really, really great point to end on. We all need to converge around, as you said, to weave anti-fascism into everything we do, and that means opposing this bloating of police force wherever we can, across all our movements. What a beautiful vision you've laid out, Garth. I want to live in that world. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14.796)
Before we go, if you aren't already to the audience, please listen to the Crackdown podcast wherever you get your podcasts and better yet, support the great work of Garth and the Crackdown team at patreon.com slash crackdownpod. And also get yourself a copy of Garth's book, Crackdown, Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs at any local independent bookstore or the library or steal it from Indigo if you have to. Garth, is there anything else you'd like to plug before we go today?

How else can people support your work and the work of drug user activists?

I've always, you know, I've always just fall. I just wanted to say I've always followed the work of the policy alternatives and you know, I can't, I don't read everything you make, but when you write something in a field of my interest, I always pick it up and I appreciate it. I think it's a real benefit for the world. And so Seth, I know that's been like a big part of your life's work and I've appreciated and been aware of it since way back in the day. And, and Julie,

I had really hoped that you would become the next premier of British Columbia. I'm sad that you didn't. just in the attempt, you really showed a lot of people of what's possible and the popularity of the ideas that you and all of us stood behind. So it was great to talk to you again, Angeli. And good to meet you properly, Seth. So thanks for having us. Stay safe and keep six.

Thank you so much, Garth. And to our audience, if you liked what you heard, please like, review, subscribe, and share this podcast so more people will hear it. We appreciate it. Thanks again, and goodbye.