The ARYS team at the Granville office The drug poisoning crisis in British Columbia and Canada is having devastating effects on young people and their loved ones. Since an official public health emergency was declared in B.C. in April 2016, over 14,000 people, including over 1,800 young people under 30 years of age, have lost their lives to toxic drug poisoning in the province. Youth experiencing homelessness, poverty, or mental health issues are particularly vulnerable. Yet despite these realities, evidence-based approaches to support young people are still badly needed. Since 2005, the At-Ri ..read more

Vancouver may be considered by many as the “best place” to live, but many young people living in the city are facing unprecedented challenges that are making their futures more precarious than ever. Hundreds of youth who call Vancouver home are standing at the intersection of a housing affordability crisis and a toxic drug poisoning public health emergency. For the past 15 years, Dr. Danya Fast, a research scientist at BC Centre on Substance Use and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Medicine, has been following the lives of young people who use drugs in ..read more

Including people with lived and living experience in harm reduction services is an essential component to any interventions’ success, and drug checking is no exception. Mountainside Harm Reduction Society is an entirely peer-led organization that employs people with lived experience, or ‘peer workers’, to deliver low-barrier harm reduction services like drug checking. Their peer-led model differs from some more traditional models of care where people with professional schooling may be favoured over people with lived experience. “People who come in to get their drugs checked, especially people ..read more

Summer time in British Columbia means the start of music festival season and one of the busiest times of year for drug checking. There were 735 samples checked at Bass Coast alone this year, according to the data collected in the database maintained by the BC Centre on Substance Use. The number of samples checked at the Shambhala Music Festival are estimated at close to 3,500. How does drug checking at festivals make it through testing that many samples in the multi-day event? There were some new innovations tested out at Shambhala this year. In the past, ANKORS harm reduction services at Sham ..read more

It is common practice in the health system to evaluate novel (ie. new, different, or innovative) solutions to urgent and emerging public health crises. Examples of previous such life-saving research include HIV medication buyer’s clubs, needle distribution programs, and supervised injection sites. Consistent with this history, the BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) has supported the scientific evaluation of the compassion club operated by the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF). The work involved qualitative interviews with program participants and secondary analysis of quantitative data. The ev ..read more

The BC College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) has approved new and amended standards, limits, and conditions creating a new designation of certified practice for opioid use disorder (OUD) for registered nurses (RNs) and registered psychiatric nurses (RPNs) effective November 1, 2023. In September 2020, a Public Health Officer (PHO) order temporarily permitted authorized RNs or RPNs to diagnose and treat OUD. With the creation of Certified Practice for OUD (CP-OUD), this expanded scope of practice will now be a permanent amendment to the Health Professions and Occupations Act and designation th ..read more

Last week the City of Vancouver forcibly displaced people living in tents along Hastings Street on the Downtown Eastside. City workers and police removed people and their possessions, the majority of whom had nowhere else to go. Since then, people setting up structures on Hastings Street have been displaced daily. Unfortunately, this strategy is one that is employed again and again, not just in Vancouver but in communities both large and small across the country. Rather than constantly displacing people, an alternative approach that is grounded in evidence and respects the health, human rights ..read more

At least 1,095 British Columbians are believed to have been lost to the toxic drug supply between January and June 2022, according to preliminary data released by the BC Coroners Service on August 16. The number of deaths from toxic drugs in B.C. between January and June is the highest ever recorded in the first six months of a calendar year. More than three quarters (78%) of the lives lost in 2022 were male and nearly the same percentage (73%) were between the ages of 30-59. On average, more than six lives have been lost to illicit drugs every day this year. Ten thousand lives have been lost ..read more

Vancouver and Lisbon, while worlds apart, are both boasted for their global leadership in innovating progressive harm reduction policies and services. A group of researchers from both cities partnered with a committee of young people who use drugs to share whether their respective cities were meeting young people’s needs in the context of unstable housing and homelessness. This committee, the Youth Health Advisory Committee (YAC) at the BC Centre on Substance Use, collaborated with these researchers to identify ten essential calls to action related to harm reduction practices for youth that us ..read more

Youth have unique experiences with opioids and the myriad systems of care. That’s especially true for those who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+. Listening to those youth about their experiences with opioids can help inform how programs and services are designed to better support them. We spoke with Trevor Goodyear, a research assistant with BCCSU and PhD candidate at UBC’s School of Nursing, about a recent photovoice project documenting the experiences 2SLGBTQIA+ youth have with opioids. Photovoice is a participatory action research method that uses photography and group dialogue as a means to deepen u ..read more