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Prescription Heroin
From: Fighting For Space
$0.58
The Downtown Eastside had accomplished a lot as a community. In 2004, Dr. Martin Schechter had secured funding to launch a heroin-maintenance program out of a small clinic in the Downtown Eastside called Crosstown. He had run it as an academic study, getting around federal regulations that way. Three times a day at set intervals, patients with severe addiction issues would visit the clinic and receive prescription-grade heroin, paid for by Canadian taxpayers. By 2013, the study had produced encouraging results, and efforts began to expand access to other addicts. That’s when the Conservative government in Ottawa stepped in to intervene. With Livingston quietly organizing in the background, a group of heroin addicts were mobilised. The following year, they would mount a court challenge. Another fight, like the one that had won the community Insite, had begun.
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.