Safe Supply On Trial

fascinating decision, and it also serves as an interesting sort of repository of evidence about what's been going on with drugs in British Columbia.

So the case itself originated with respect to the two co-founders of an organization called the Drug User Liberation Front, the acronym D-U-L-F, DULF, I guess.

So the Drug User Liberation Front.

is an organization on the Lower Mainland.

And it had, it sounds like from the decision, funding from the provincial government via Vancouver Coastal Health for a number of years.

Back in 2022, they started receiving $200,000 a year to provide a drug checking program and overdose prevention services.

But the DULF decided to provide things in addition to what was being funded by Vancouver Coastal Health.

And they got into the provision of drugs to people who were drug users.

And the way they went about doing that, was that they purchased the drugs described as the dark web, and then they would perform testing on them to see what was in them, and then they would sell them at cost, not to make any money to people who were drug addicts.

And that sort of trundled along for a period of time, being consistent with the provincial policy on drug use, I suppose, until it's clear from here.

The inflection point was in September of 2023, The Economist magazine ran an article about what this drug user liberation front was doing, including pictures of the people who were involved with it.

And that produced a bunch of political controversy over it.

And they were federal criticism there of the BCNDP, quote, giving hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to illegal drug dealers in addition to decriminalizing hard drugs.

That's how that was characterized.

And.

It then produced a political response of ending the funding from Vancouver Coastal Health to this group.

And then six days before this organization was to shut down for, I guess, not getting the money any longer, the police conducted a search of their premises, and they found in the safe 192 grams of cocaine, 237 grams of heroin, and 364 grams of methamphetamines.

And that resulted in these criminal charges for being in possession for the purpose of trafficking, which is a different and more serious offense than simply being in possession

of drugs.

And so, first of all, the judge heard the trial and found, subject to this constitutional argument, the people involved guilty.

They were the people doing this.

They weren't doing it in secret.

They were quite open about it, including magazine articles and pictures of them doing it, and it was very clear they had all this drugs.

all these drugs.

And so that then brought the judge to the challenge brought by the accused here.