On the addiction frontlines
The "War on Drugs" is failing says Garth Mullins.
March 28th, 2025
Harm reduction activist and host of the podcast "Crackdown", Garth Mullins. Photo by Steve Myers.
In an interview about his memoir, journalist and musician Garth Mullins shares his addiction experiences, activism and joining the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.
Harm-reduction activist and host of the award-winning podcast Crackdown, Garth Mullins has released Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs (Doubleday Canada $34.95) about his own addiction experiences and battles against societal oppression of drug addicts. BC BookWorld’s David Lester interviewed Mullins in this exclusive feature.
BC BOOKWORLD: What were the origins of your early activism?
GARTH MULLINS: I was born with albinism – no pigment in the skin, hair and eyes—and I’m blind. So I identified with the underdog from a young age. I was radicalized when I found out that the superpowers were ready to blow us all up with nuclear weapons. I started a group at my school. We joined with other activists from around the city, borrowed a bunch of little boats and formed a picket line on the ocean in English Bay. Our little flotilla tried to stop a US nuclear warship from docking in Vancouver harbour. The ship blew right through us. After we got everyone safely back on shore, I realized I had a taste for organizing. I spent my life in the labour movement and community organizing against fascism, police brutality, global capitalism, colonialism and climate apocalypse. It was only much more recently that I found the courage to get involved with harm reduction activism. Shame kept me on the sidelines for years.
BCBW: What about your experience as a drug user?
GM: Growing up, I started feeling like a ghost in my own life. The 1980s was this pastel era of Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney, “just say no,” mandatory optimism, there is no alternative. I felt like a loser. I was alienated and couldn’t see a future for myself. I hated myself. I was even suicidal sometimes. I just didn’t want to exist. At age twelve, I started drinking and smoking weed. I did anything I could get my hands on.
But one night on a San Francisco rooftop, I injected my first taste of black tar heroin, and I knew I was home. All my self-hate and that demon-haunted feeling just melted away. The background howling of self-disgust was silenced. It was replaced with sunshine in my veins and a warm blanket wrapped around me.
For me, opioids were never about getting wrecked but about getting whole. I wasn’t getting high. I was accessing a calm, safe place of forgiveness and love. All the pain and tension melted away. Nothing and no one could touch me here. I felt good about myself. I felt normal. So of course, I would do anything to return to this place as often as I could.
I got wired and my habit lasted years. I was often broke, sometimes arrested and I overdosed. Early on, before harm reduction programs, I shared needles. I survived the China White overdose crisis of the 1990s.
Through it all, I felt deeply ashamed and tried not to let people know I had a habit. I tried to kick cold turkey. I tried to get on methadone. I tried 12-step. Nothing stuck. Now I only use prescribed opioids—mostly methadone. But it took me a long time to get here. Friends got locked up for long stretches. Many died. After so much death, my shame started to give way to grief and anger. And I joined the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and started to put my anger into action.
BCBW: How did the “war on drugs” fail society?
GM: Fifty thousand people in Canada died from overdose in the last decade and it didn’t need to happen. The vast majority died from illicit street fentanyl. Politicians vow to stamp out drugs. Trump had Canada appoint a Fentanyl Czar. But this is a childish dream. You can get drugs anywhere. Even in jail. Police in Canada have been trying to stamp out drugs since the early twentieth century. Back then, people smoked opium, which wasn’t nearly as lethal as what is on the street now. But a racist moral panic swept BC. Politicians and columnists argued that the white race was imperilled by the “nefarious foreign influence” of opium. Once opium was outlawed, the drug supply chain innovated, creating smaller, more potent narcotics. Heroin gave users more bang for the buck and was easier to smuggle. Police spent decades trying to stamp out heroin—and it is all but extinct in Vancouver. But it was replaced by fentanyl, which itself is giving way to benzodope and tranqdope. The heavier the enforcement, the more potent the drugs get. Prohibition created the illegal drug market, where there is no regulation over potency or ingredients.
When I was 19, I was briefly locked up in a huge US jail for drug possession. As I got to know my fellow prisoners, I realized that most of us were in there for drug related offences. And most of the prisoners were Black or Latino. All communities do drugs, but some communities get over-policed. As the years went by, I realized that I couldn’t just quit. It’s not that easy. But it seemed to be the only option—other than dying or going to jail. It didn’t need to be like this.
BCBW: Being an activist takes great courage, and requires working collectively. Are there any stories you can share about those you’ve worked with on the frontlines of the struggle?
GM: I have been an organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users for over a decade. When I first started working with VANDU, I was pretty quiet, with my cap pulled low, trying to fade into the background. I felt a lot of shame about being a drug user, but I was also angry that my friends and community were dying. Then I met Laura Shaver. She encouraged me to work with her on a campaign related to methadone. I went with her to meetings with government officials. I watched her do interviews with the media and speak to students. Laura’s a straight shooter. She just tells it like it is. She talked about her own drug use without being embarrassed or ashamed. As an activist, I was pretty outspoken about many issues but not this one. Organizing alongside Laura, I was able to lose my shame and speak openly about my own life.
Hugh Lampkin, another VANDU leader, told me “VANDU is a place of redemption. No matter who you were before, this is where you become who you were supposed to be. As we make the world new, we make ourselves new too.” I knew I was in the right place.
BCBW: Crackdown asks us to re-imagine our response to drug use. What is the way forward?
GM: As a society, we have to recognize that human beings have always done drugs. We have to grow up and abandon infantile dreams about a drug free world.
We need to rip up the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The illicit drug supply is a wild west. With alcohol, there are rules around age, potency, business hours, taxation. But with drugs there are no rules. That’s why people die. To stop the mass death, prescribed pharmaceutical alternatives to illicit street drugs need to be available. This will starve organized crime and greatly reduce fatalities.
Simple drug possession should not mean arrest, eviction, getting fired, being ostracized or having your kids seized. Criminalization has made drug users into pariahs who are forced to live outside of society and to hide our drug use in the shadows and alleys. True decriminalization is an invitation back into society.
Before our governments thump their chests and talk about involuntary treatment, there needs to be voluntary treatment—culturally safe, properly regulated, trauma informed and patient-centred and available on demand. Mental health should be covered under the Canada Health Act. Post Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment was huge for me, but I could only access it because I have a union job with extended benefits. Otherwise, you have to pay out of pocket.
But we are moving in the wrong direction. Not only do we have toxic drugs, but we have toxic politics too.
The classic hallmarks of Trumpism are at home north of the border: disinformation, scapegoating, targeting the marginalized, fear mongering. And now those ingredients that have propelled the US into fascism have deepened the misery of Canada’s overdose crisis. Right wing politicians have used Trump’s playbook to scapegoat harm reduction and drug users, seeking high office on a tidal wave of fear they helped to whip up. If elected, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievere promises to close safe-consumption sites, calling them “drug dens.” But these facilities have saved many thousands of lives in Canada. Clients often get connected to treatment there as well. Poilievre vows to take all federal dollars out of programs and facilities that use prescribed drug alternatives. I have been prescribed methadone (a prescribed alternative to heroin) for 20 years, allowing me to avoid street drugs and stay alive. The election of Poilievre could mean a jacked-up drug war and a death sentence for thousands more—including me.
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An edited version of this interview will be published in the 2025 Summer issue of BC BookWorld newspaper.
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