Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx were convicted of trafficking earlier this month for having operated the unsanctioned compassion club from August, 2022, until October, 2023.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
After political backlash forced B.C. health authorities to pull funding and the Vancouver storefront they had provided to the two operators of an illicit-drug compassion club, Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx convened a meeting with club members and representatives from the local health authority.
The program, which for more than a year provided 43 members with access to lab-checked heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, would no longer be able to operate, Mr. Kalicum told the group in October, 2023, as he recounted in a B.C. courtroom on Tuesday.
“We wanted to make sure people in the club weren’t left in the lurch,” he said. “We worked to try to transition people to medicalized alternatives to the best of our ability, understanding that this was a very high-barrier system.”
In the end, only two or three people were able to obtain pharmaceutical alternatives through legal programs – a figure that seemed to surprise B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray, who is hearing the pair’s constitutional challenge of Canada’s drug laws.
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Mr. Kalicum and Ms. Nyx were convicted of trafficking earlier this month for having operated the unsanctioned compassion club from August, 2022, until October, 2023. Under the banner the Drug User Liberation Front, the two bought illicit drugs from the dark web, sent them to university labs to be checked for fentanyl and other impurities, and sold them at cost to the club’s members, who lived with severe substance use disorders.
The two contended that the toxic drug crisis is driven by a highly volatile street drug supply and the compassion club would reduce overdose deaths and related harms by providing members with “clean” drugs of known potency.
Police, health officials and politicians were aware of their activities, and they operated out of a storefront in the city’s Downtown Eastside with $200,000 in funding, both provided by Vancouver Coastal Health, ostensibly for drug checking and overdose prevention services.
In her Nov. 7 judgment against the pair, Justice Murray said the pilot project “worked” and that there were no overdoses involving the substances provided at DULF’s site.
“There is no question that their intentions were and are good,” Justice Murray wrote. “They want to save lives. But were they exempt from criminal liability?”
That same judge will now determine the constitutionality of their charges.
On Tuesday, Justice Murray asked Mr. Kalicum why only two or three club members were able to transition to legal pharmaceutical alternatives, also called safer supply, upon the club’s closing.
Mr. Kalicum cited numerous barriers to access, including limited prescriber availability, large user demand, physician hesitancy, available medications being ineffective, and the fact that many people who use drugs don’t trust the health care system.
The pair’s lawyers are arguing that Canada’s drug trafficking law is overly broad and violates Charter rights because it blocks life-saving non-medicalized safer supply models, such as DULF’s compassion club, which could prevent overdose deaths in a toxic drug crisis that the government has failed to adequately address.
In testimony Monday, Mr. Kalicum offered a window into his motivations, telling the court about his brother’s substance use disorder, and the effect of reversing hundreds of overdoses as a harm reduction worker but seeing no meaningful government effort to prevent them.
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Mr. Kalicum told the court that he and Ms. Nyx made every effort to follow proper channels, meeting with police, politicians and health officials and applying to Health Canada for the exemption from drug laws needed to operate legally. When they were unable to obtain the exemption, they proceeded anyway.
They are asking the court to either strike down the trafficking provision of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act or, failing that, exempt the pair from it and stay their charges.
In coming weeks, the lawyers will detail Mr. Kalicum and Ms. Nyx’s efforts to operate their compassion club above-board and the practical impossibility of doing so under current legal and regulatory regimes.
They expect to call about a dozen witnesses, including five experts who will testify to the causes of the toxic drug crisis, the inadequacy of the current response, the efficacy and limitations of existing programs that provide regulated alternatives and the urgent need for access to safer substances outside a medical setting.