This editorial is endorsed by Care Not Cops, Pivot Legal Society, BC Civil Liberties Association and BC Nurses United for Social Justice.
On May 27, BC NDP Health Minister Josie Osborne announced her government would be intervening to stop the opening of an overdose prevention site planned for 900 Helmcken Street in Vancouver.
Osborne cited concerns raised by “local businesses and community partners," which she said were relayed to herself and Terry Yung, a former Vancouver Police officer turned BC NDP MLA. Yung is married to Vancouver city councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung, who is part of Ken Sim’s governing ABC party. Kirby-Yung and ABC voted to block the OPS from opening the day that it was announced on May 7.
Vancouver city centre is one of five regions across British Columbia where the greatest number of people died from the criminalized drug supply in 2025, according to the Coroners Service. A 2016 Ministerial Order that mandates the provision of OPS wherever there is need – a need that should be determined by each region’s health authority – remains unfulfilled in Vancouver and across the province.
“We know this OPS would be lifesaving. People live in this area. People use drugs in this area. This will provide a space for folks to use safely and avoid preventable harm,” says Alanna Griffin, a registered nurse at a local community clinic. “The numbers are there, the overdoses are happening, and people are dying. We cannot pretend otherwise.”
As city council attempts to block access to overdose prevention for members of the community, another city initiative is encouraging overdose prevention for tourists attending FIFA soccer games. Osborne’s ABC-aligned capitulation came just one day after FIFA World Cup Vancouver released their “human rights action plan" in partnership with the City of Vancouver. The plan acknowledges the crisis and was released alongside online materials that cite overdose prevention sites as part of their information guide for visitors.
The drug supply is toxic and unpredictable
Meanwhile, the criminalized drug supply has become increasingly complex and unpredictable. In many ways, the toxic supply is causing more harm in Vancouver than it ever has.
Approximately five people continue to die of drug poisoning each day in BC. And the constantly shifting proliferation of adulterants has intensified overdose risk and broader public health harms linked to the criminalized drug supply.
“By accepting the same logic now advanced by Vancouver city hall and business interests to block urgently needed health services, the Health Minister has capitulated to the ideology of criminalization and containment rather than upholding the government’s obligation to prevent deaths in a toxic drug public health emergency.” –Meghan McDermott, BCCLA
Prohibitionist approaches to managing the drug supply – including policing, law enforcement crackdowns, and expanded border securitization – have occurred alongside the erosion of severely limited safer supply programs. In the absence of an accessible regulated drug supply, the dynamic of supply disruption stemming from police raids, busts and seizures contributes to the ongoing instability of the drug supply, worsening risk for the consumer.
Since being elected in 2024, MLA Yung has routinely made celebratory social media posts about police drug busts despite the harm that they can cause.
Recent adulterants in the criminalized drug supply, particularly non-opioid sedatives and novel designer benzodiazepines, have led to a new chapter in the crisis with changes to the everyday impacts in our communities. For example, unintentional use and over-use of these components can contribute to a prolonged diminishing of consciousness, which increases vulnerability to gendered violence.
“This last minute reversal on the opening of an OPS in the city's downtown core is another clear action that shows Eby and the BC NDP view some people and communities as expendable,” says Tyson Singh Kelsall, a social worker and member of Care Not Cops.
“A public health emergency without an urgent response is a sanctioning of the mass death and disabling event. The Eby government is both refusing to allow communities to undercut the toxicity of the drug supply, while also blocking life-saving services. This ensures more death and injury, and continues the strain on existing healthcare infrastructure, which has ripple effects across the city and province,” he adds.
Visible public consumption has become a survival strategy for an increasing number of people – a reality acknowledged in a 2023 BC Supreme Court decision against the BC NDP’s attempt to expand police powers to further criminalize suspected public drug use.
“The Province’s decision to prevent the OPS must be understood as part of a broader retreat from evidence-based harm reduction into the language of public disorder, business discomfort, and police-centred ‘community safety,’” says BC Civil Liberties Association Policy Director Meghan McDermott.
“By accepting the same logic now advanced by Vancouver city hall and business interests to block urgently needed health services, the Health Minister has capitulated to the ideology of criminalization and containment rather than upholding the government’s obligation to prevent deaths in a toxic drug public health emergency.”
When people are heavily sedated in public space there are few – if any – accessible spaces that allow for rest and respite, monitoring, withdrawal, and/or stabilization. This dynamic exists alongside a shrinking number of spaces where people can legally exist during the day. As housing and shelter become increasingly less attainable, people are being forced into fewer and fewer public spaces amidst an inadequate number of supervised consumption spaces.
Heather Tunold, a Care Not Cops member, drug user and harm reduction educator similarly says, “Drug users exist across all demographics, however not all drug users are treated equally. Those who exist within socially acceptable parameters under whiteness and respectability, are rarely positioned as threats or burdens of societal “disorder” amidst moral panic discourse and political decision making. Whereas people who use drugs experiencing poverty, displacement and homelessness – those who are predominantly racialized and multiply marginalized – remain scapegoated."
Tunold continues, “Josie Osborne’s decision to reverse the opening of this OPS is an extension of the violent necropolitics that decides who is worthy of care, dignity and safety and whose death and suffering is deemed acceptable. It is clear that this decision prioritizes only the comfort of business owners over the dignity, safety and lives of their neighbours.”
“Many of us know intimately the unimaginable collective grief this crisis brings. We are faced with no other choice but to bear witness to endless tragedy and suffering which cannot be adequately processed since it has never stopped. This mass loss is entirely preventable and leaves many of us in a state of shock and reflection, wondering how many more kin will be added to the growing list of those who’ve already been lost.”
Overdose prevention sites offer some safety and respite in this landscape with medical supervision by healthcare providers, including peer-to-peer support.
The existence of OPS and widespread community knowledge on overdose response may contribute to the likelihood of an overdose remaining nonfatal (vs. becoming fatal) being heightened within Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside compared to other regions in the province.
"Our work is grounded in knowing that real safety is built through community care, mutual aid, solidarity and collective survival. However, when state actors actively obstruct evidence based interventions that they know save lives, we reject the notion that actors such as Osborne and the provincial government should evade consequences of their cowardly decisions.” –Heather Tunold, Care Not Cops
Emergency declaration, Ministerial Order left unfulfilled
Independent branches of government meant to provide oversight have repeatedly given the BC NDP's public health emergency response a failing grade, yet little change has followed.
In 2024, BC's Auditor General characterized harm reduction services as difficult for communities to implement and lacking in access. The Office of the BC Human Rights Commissioner took the position in 2025 that BC’s inadequate overdose response constitutes a violation of human rights. The 2023 Chief Coroner-led Death Review Panel’s primary recommendation to expand provision of a regulated drug supply to reduce deaths was rejected by the BC NDP the same day it was released.
Caitlin Shane, a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, calls Minister Osborne’s decision “cowardly, but in line with the BC NDP’s track record on drug policy to date.”
“The Province is yet again capitulating to unfounded moral panic, this time citing a fabricated barrier of needing to strike community consultations prior to the implementation of a life-saving health service,” says Shane.
The Federal Court of Canada concluded in 2019 that public health and saving lives are the primary consideration for establishing supervised consumption services, and that public consultation is not required:
“The process [to approve supervised consumption services] is both discretionary and non-adjudicative. The principal and mandatory focus of the legislation is on the question of whether [approval] would provide public health benefits. Any consideration of negative impacts on the local community is secondary and discretionary” (2019 FC 236 at para 100).
In 2023, then-Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth acknowledged that people without housing lack reasonable options for supervised consumption. The Coroner reported earlier that year that the annual deaths of people living without shelter in BC by accidental overdose had risen from 95 in 2016 to 437 in 2024.
Tunold says that, “We hold no illusions that the state will resolve the ongoing mass death that they are complicit in, nor do we believe that replacing one politician will change anything. Our work is grounded in knowing that real safety is built through community care, mutual aid, solidarity and collective survival. However, when state actors actively obstruct evidence based interventions that they know save lives, we reject the notion that actors such as Osborne and the provincial government should evade consequences of their cowardly decisions.”
Existing OPS and other supervised consumption sites already operate with a limited capacity, often serving only a small portion of the population that would benefit from such an intervention. This reflects the broader failure to meet the scale of need demanded by the Ministerial Order. And while public health guidance long encouraged smoking over injecting as a safer consumption practice, corresponding infrastructure has never been developed to support the individuals and communities who have followed this advice.
Ultimately, an OPS cannot address the quality of the toxic drug supply driving the public health emergency. Until the root cause of the emergency is actually attended to through the manufacturing and provision of a regulated supply, there is a need for several more OPS to save lives. The BC government's failure to respond to the drug toxicity crisis with even the bare minimum of harm reduction support is not just unconscionable, it is negligent, as the crisis continues to deepen.
