“Everyone else is too afraid”: DULF’s unsanctioned compassion club saves lives

published on April 8, 2023 by V. S. Wells in Georgia Straight

Eris Nyx didn’t think she’d be spending her time running a compassion club.

“I’m an artist by trade, I’m not a fucking drug dealer,” she says in a phone call with the Straight. “And I certainly don’t like doing math.”

And yet, the co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) is running an ambitious, unsanctioned program that’s trying to remove people at high risk of poisoned drug death from the unregulated illicit supply by selling its club members pure, tested drugs—and studying what happens next.

As the unregulated drug emergency hurtles toward its seven-year anniversary, almost seven people are dying from poisoned drugs in BC every day. In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one in 200 people die every year from unregulated illicit drug poisonings. The municipal and provincial government’s interventions do little to change this death toll, leaving community members to come up with their own solutions…