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Court Battle
From: Fighting For Space
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For four years, the Conservative administration had made it increasingly difficult for Insite to obtain annual exemptions from drug laws that it requires to operate. By 2007, it was clear that Prime Minister Harper’s aim was to shut the facility down. In response, a court challenge was launched naming Dean Wilson and Shelly Tomic as plaintiffs. It would make them "the most famous junkies in Canada", according to newspaper headlines, and represent a new precedent wherein drug users would insist they had the same rights to health-care as any other Canadian citizen.
Contributors
Travis Lupick
Travis Lupick is an award-winning journalist based in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He has more than a decade's experience working as a staff reporter for the Georgia Straight newspaper and has also written about drug addiction, harm reduction, and mental health for the Toronto Star, the Walrus, and Al Jazeera English, among other outlets. For his reporting on Canada's opioid crisis, Lupick received the Canadian Association of Journalists' Don McGillivray Award for best overall investigative report of 2016 and two 2017 Jack Webster awards for excellence in B.C. journalism. He has also worked as a journalist in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Malawi, Nepal, Bhutan, Peru, and Honduras.