'Crackdown' podcast gives drug users a voice in confronting opioid crisis

CTV National News: Channelling his grief A B.C. father who lost his daughter to overdose is channelling his grief to push for more resources for addicts. Melanie Nagy reports.

VANCOUVER — Stories about the opioid crisis are often told through the lens of government announcements, record-breaking death tolls or another life lost too soon.

But a powerful podcast is shifting the conversation by giving a voice to drug users to offer an inside look of what’s happening on the frontlines of one of the deadliest and most complicated public health issues in Canada.

“Crackdown” is a monthly podcast hosted by Garth Mullins, an award-winning documentarian and former injection heroin user who compares his work to being a war correspondent.

“We experience it like a war,” he told CTV News.

Between January and March, 1,018 people in Canada died of opioid related deaths, with 77 per cent involving fentanyl, according to figures from the federal government. A staggering 16,364 people died of apparent opioid overdoses between 2016 and March 2020.

In the United States, nearly 70,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2018.

“Crackdown” uses first-person stories and interviews with drug users to put faces to those numbers. Each episode focuses on a different community grappling with the drug crisis and covers issues such as policing and public-health funding.

Mullins also works through challenging conversations on drug policy and what it will take to curb the public health emergency.

Breaking the stigma of addiction is part of the podcast’s mission. Mullins himself uses methadone, and he wants to reach audiences who might have pre-conceived notions about drug users.

“A lot of people put us into a category to be shunned and pushed away. I should warn them it’s not as easy as you might think, because we are in your families, and your churches and your community centres and your workplaces,” he said.

Laura Shaver, an opioid user, says she is tired of seeing friends overdose. Part of the solution, she says, is for Canada to transition to a safer drug supply so that drug users don’t unintentionally take lethal doses of drugs.

“You can’t know what’s right for us unless it’s from us,” he said.

British Columbia has expanded legal alternatives to illicit drugs, but the federal government is not looking to legalize illegal substances like heroin, despite calls in the past from some Liberal MPs to do so. Only a handful of countries have fully legalized drugs, including Portugal, which saw its drug overdoses plummet.

During the 2019 election, the Green Party proposed decriminalizing all drug possession, while the NDP’s platform said it would "commit to working with all levels of government, experts and Canadians to end the criminalization and stigma of drug addiction."

In August the federal government launched a national consultation on supervised-consumption sites, saying they would be looking for input from a variety of Canadians, including drug users.

“It is needless death and we can stop it, so why aren’t you stopping it? It’s because you are saying we don’t deserve to live, and I think we do,” Shaver said.

At its core, “Crackdown” offers frank conversations that push the boundaries of how Canada is discussing the opioid crisis. Mullins says that, for him, the project is deeply personal.

“I think about the people that I’ve known who’ve died just this year,” he said. “You have to make their lives mean something.”