Hearings wrapped up today in the BC Supreme court in a crown case brought against Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) co-founders Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum. Nyx and Kalicum were charged with drug trafficking after they ran a successful compassion club that sold tested drugs from 2022 until the Vancouver police raided DULF in 2023.
In a province where five people per day die from the toxic and unregulated drug supply, not one member of the compassion club overdosed while using the DULF supply.
DULF’s team of lawyers appeared to excel in front of a sympathetic judge. A ruling is expected to arrive shortly – likely within the first week of November 2025.
Part of DULF’s legal argument centered on the fact that they were operating under the aegis of Vancouver Coastal Health’s federal exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. VCH supports drug checking and Overdose Prevention Sites (OPS) throughout the region, and was apprised of DULF’s activities. For a period, the health authority also leased a space to the group at 390 Columbia St.
A favourable ruling would be good news for Nyx and Kalicum. It would also raise questions about how much further DULF could proceed in the courts.
“Our lawyers did incredibly well today, maybe a little too well,” says Kalicum.
If convicted with trafficking, DULF and their legal team would proceed to a wider Charter challenge to the constitutionality of the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The CDSA underpins Canada’s prohibitionist drug laws across the country.
If the November 7 ruling exonerates Nyx and Kalicum, the Crown could nonetheless appeal the decision, leaving the Charter challenge avenue open to DULF and their lawyers.
An appeal is not unlikely, with the provincial BC NDP government and premier David Eby showing signs of digging deeper into its manufactured drug war moral panic. Statements in recent months have seen Eby declare, yet again, that the province’s extremely brief experiment with decriminalization was a “failure.”
Prohibitionist and drug war rhetoric continues to mount in BC as electoral politics continues to slide further right. Even Elenore Sturko, a former RCMP drug war veteran who has made law and order into the cornerstone of a single-issue political career, is now considered too “liberal” for the BC Conservative caucus — a caucus from which she was recently expelled.
The unregulated drug supply and the policies that shape it have been the cause of a “forever” public health emergency in BC since April 2016. In 2024, BC’s Provincial Health Officer endorsed compassion clubs like DULF as a means to stop the deaths. November’s ruling will indicate whether or not DULF and other community-led groups can hope for a legal chance to save lives.