THE WAR FOR DRUGS

Two Vancouver activists gave away untainted heroin, meth and cocaine to dozens of drug users, with the support of politicians and public-health officials. They say they saved lives. The federal government says they’re drug traffickers.

OMAR MOUALLEM

ERIS NYX has always been rebellious. Growing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto in the mid-2000s, she spent much of her adolescence using drugs, getting into trouble with police and crashing at friends’ houses. Her transgender identity wasn’t accepted at home, and after high school she moved away for good, heading to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a bike mechanic for a while, before finding a job as an attendant at a homeless shelter on the city’s Downtown Eastside, a povertystricken neighbourhood with one of Canada’s highest rates of injection drug use. The neighbourhood was then in the early stages of an overdose crisis that would soon become a state of indefinite emergency. In 2015, around the time Nyx began working at the…

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Maclean's (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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