 Diane, that paper, please. And your hat. It's a tradition at Vandu to have a moment of silence to remember those that have fallen. Yeah. And those actually just lost one. I'd like to dedicate it to Rob. Yeah, Rob Anderson. Rob Anderson, he was a member and he just passed away in the last week or so. He was a dedicated volunteer. Yeah. So this moment's for him and all the other drug users. And also, because it is a remembrance day for those who have passed away during the birth company, it's day three. Yeah. Vandu mission statement. Vandu is a group of users and former users who work to improve the lives of people who use illicit drugs through user-based peer support and education. Vandu is committed to increasing the capacity of people who use drugs to live healthy, productive lives. Vandu is also committed to ensuring that drug users have a real voice in their community and in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them. I lost a daughter in 94 and I never knew that there was any groups like with peer-to-peer because I am a drug user and still am today. And then three years ago I lost another daughter and for me, I really didn't feel I belonged anywhere and Vandu really helped me in that, where I can speak in front of people now. It gave me a chance to get some kind of dignity back as well as respect. Somebody said I can come in here and get three dollars, come to a meeting and get three dollars. I thought, great, I can get some smoke. And I didn't really care about what the meeting was or what it was or anything, I didn't really care. I just came in, sat down, started listening and realized, oh wow, these are people who use drugs too and they all sit here, so I stuck around. I thought when I came to downtown Eastside that this is where I was going to die and this is where I came alive. Like, I moved here and I met all these people that are people, you know, they're addicts but they know they're addicts and they can identify with that and they own it. Where I used to come in from where people are still hiding it still and it's so bad and it's so dirty because it's dirty. They make it seem like it's something that's not supposed to be right and hey, hell, everybody who's a drug addict knows, even those guys up in their shirts and skirts are still doing dope too but they hide it. Do you know what I mean? And here we are, we're able to bring it out and we're not afraid. Our main goal is to help the most marginalized and poverty stricken people down here. They're the ones that fall through the cracks. They're the ones that don't fit in and they have organizations. They're the ones that need most of it and that's where we, each one of us at one time or another, that's where we work. We have a car reduction like the screens, push sticks, mouthpieces, and then we have the needles, the condoms. The water, the water. Yeah, alcohol, swab. We have an injection site downstairs in our building which is usually assisted injections which is for the people who still come in and can't inject themselves. And there are a couple of us here that don't mind doing that. I've taken lots of different testing and focus groups and stuff on how to do it safer and we do it. We do it when we're not supposed to do it but we do it to save your life. My name is Zoe Dodd. I'm in a number of networks so I'm in the Canadian Association of People Use Drugs. I'm a member of that network. I'm one of the founders of the Toronto Drug Users Union and the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society and the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance. I've been using drugs since I was 12, 13 years old and I've used a variety of drugs throughout my lifetime, both recreationally and habitually and continue to do so. In 2007-2008, the Toronto Drug Users Union was created and that was formally created by myself, Frank Critchlow and Rafi Bally and Cheryl White. I'm one of the co-founders and co-organizers with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society which again is a group of people who use drugs, allies, harm reduction workers and health care providers who came together in the face of the overdose crisis. 1,265 wooden crosses were staked into the lawn in front of the legislature. That's how many people died in Ontario from a drug overdose last year according to the protesters. The vigil was a rally against the provincial government where it asked the federal government for an extension to review the future of safe injection sites. One of the biggest things drug user activists are known for in Toronto in the last years is the opening of the illegal injection site in Moss Park where we've been in this overdose crisis for many years now and just watching our friends and family and loved ones and co-workers and co-organizers die and instead of waiting to open, we went ahead and opened one ourselves. This is a tent that has been erected here in Moss Park inside 140 naloxone kits to be used against opioid overdoses. Unfortunately there's some bylaws that are going to be caught. We know what we're doing and we just want to help save people's lives. We just don't want to go to memorials, funerals anymore. We don't want to see more dead people. That weekend, we didn't know if we were going to last in the park. We didn't know. We thought for sure that we would probably be arrested or kicked out of the park or fined. We had lawyers on hand and we didn't know we'd be operating in a legal site for almost a year. Although Toronto Police doesn't necessarily agree totally with an injection site like this popping up because we do have the aspect of illegal drugs coming and going the crisis supersedes that at this point in time. We didn't anticipate that when we made the decision to go in the park and set up a site. And that changed drug laws in Canada. It changed the laws around opening sites. It changed policy and it changed the overdose response overnight and something people who used drugs who were actively involved feel very proud about. The drug users rights movement started in the 80s around HIV and the rates of HIV infection. Drug users became actively involved in addressing HIV making sure that people who inject drugs are well supported and needle exchange started. I live in the city of Toronto where needle exchange has been around since the 80s and has some of the lowest rates of HIV amongst injection drug users because of the expansion of needle exchange programs and how many there are. And then drug user groups specifically in Toronto started the first one that I'm aware of is I Do It which started in the late 90s and Cheryl White and Rafi Balian were some of the key players in that first union. Then that kind of morphed into the safer crack use coalition which was a group here in Toronto that was there to support people who use crack. Safer crack use kits really were developed here and they're like all over the world now. I think a big success in Canada is the supervised consumption services so that started with drug users. It started with the Vancouver area network of drug users. They were really the first to implement supervised consumption service sometimes in our history that gets ignored but really they were so instrumental at bringing that forward. The main thing that was going on that really had the drug users want to get organized was a lot of drug overdose deaths so every year there was almost 400 in the province and probably 200 in this little area so people were really really traumatized. They also couldn't get on methadone and people were getting kicked off methadone so there was a lot of trouble. First year 400 people joined, the second year 800 people joined and the third year 1200 people joined so it just kept growing and growing. When Fandu started we were despised. The only thing they had going was that I was savvy enough and always wore flower dresses and had little children with me and I could go into a room suss out who is who and figure out how I could basically embarrass them into continuing the fun. You know that's how it happened it wasn't because the needle exchange wanted drug user group. The needle exchange did not want us doing needle exchange. The very first meetings that we had in Vancouver we didn't say oh we're starting a drug users union because we want injection sites and heroin prescription. We said well we have quite a few people in Vancouver who use drugs which is like the other statement and then I said many of them who aren't able to stop using the support group. You don't mind letting us use a room here for that do you? It sounds like you know like who's going to say no and you have to use the language like that because that's what got us the room and that's what got us going. By the time they realized that we were actually doing a drug user's union we came one day and they had changed the law. Harm reduction saves lives. Harm reduction saves lives. Needle exchange saves lives. Needle exchange saves lives. Needle exchange saves lives. It's time that we unite. I can't tell you how happy I am to see everybody here. This is just so beautiful to see this unity. The voice of the most disenfranchised person is the one that can't be ignored because even though I tend not to be someone who uses drugs and I can spot all the facts about how many people have died when someone gets up and tells their own life story about what's happened to them directly people actually start to cry in the room and they can be you know provincial health officers and big shots and politicians. So that's the voice that's the most important voice to bring. People who use drugs become experts in epidemiology that you know how drugs I mean how disease spreads and you know how to prevent disease and you know what studies have been done and you know what the results of those studies are and you know that there's been at least 50 studies of needle exchange to show that they don't increase the amount of drug use in any area but in fact stop the spread of disease amongst people who are already using drugs in that area. About 6 years ago the highest rate of HIV in the downtown east side was women who needed help injecting because they're always the last to you know when a partner in a relationship they're always the last one to get fixed they're depend on somebody else to do it they can't do themselves because their veins are small. One of our members especially her she was blind and her husband had ended up in jail and he's the one who used to help her all the time right and since he went to jail she was getting beaten up in the alleyways she got raped and all kinds of stuff so we had to do something so with no funding or anything we started talking about it and going out in pairs to every day we'd go out and our main initiative wasn't to inject people it was to educate them to help them to learn how to do it themselves and do it safely but if somebody really needed help we would help them. The lights at Hazens and Main it comes down it's Van Du that did that that was the pedestrian safety right outside here where it says 30 kilometers an hour that Van Du did that too a lot of our members down here were getting hit by cars I mean there was somebody dying out there at least once a week and people were getting hit and so the city gave us some money to find out what was happening and what could be done about it well we did a good good job better than anybody else could have done our members went out we counted cars we counted pedestrians we counted anything we could count we had a radar but anything that we could count that would make the distance and show so anyway so we got speed bumps things like that so it was a big win for us and right after that we got the toilet project there's no toilets down here you get a ticket at 10, 11 o'clock at night you got to go to the bathroom you're homeless there's no place to go to the bathroom you go to the bathroom in the lane way you get fined and then you end up in jail through this the toilet project they're open and it's the people from Van Du that go and work there and keep it open we're getting more and more respect in our community as being a voice and as leaders and being part we're getting a lot of allies like we're joining forces with other groups women's groups housing groups community groups all sorts groups down here and realizing that Van Du is not just a drug user group we're also we're for people's rights that's why we have to keep their foot to the fire and when they promise us something we have to make sure they follow through with it Canada is a settler country so people are really impacted by colonialism and that has continued on there are drug user activists who are indigenous who really impacted by the historical context of the country we always have an opening prayer for being on Coast Salish Territories it's always an honor to be able to have these meetings on their land and I just pray to the creator that we have a great meeting and we take what we need to and leave the rest behind all my relations wars is a group of Aboriginal people who use illicit drugs or illicit alcohol who work together to improve the lives of war's members and president of western Aboriginal harm reduction society which we call wars Adam Andrew John S. K Rob M Claude Lisa Marie is not here Roberta down here it's over 50% of the people are native down here and a lot of them we find have HIV or Hep C and they don't go in for the treatment and so we're still trying to find out why that is another thing is about the residential schools and how many people are affected by it they would take young individuals from the reservation and they would take them away from the parents and put them in the school to assimilate them the assimilation part would go down but there would be other aspects like sexual molestation and physical abuse and stuff and that's what would happen to them and they would come back to the reservation and perform whatever they learned on their family and then their family gets all messed up and then they get into the alcoholism and they somehow wind up in here it's because of bad stuff and Roberta switched to those type of devices which is heroin crack or alcoholism or weed whatever or even cutting themselves I grew up in as Claude was talking about residential system and I'm one of the products of that and me and my three brothers were taken away I learned very early at that age to pen for myself and when I went into residential school that's where I learned all the words that's associated with abuse sexual, mental, physical nobody cared about you so you had to learn to make do with what you have throughout life we got into selling prescription drugs like Valium, T3s like all these little round happy pills we made good money and my ex was sick we had like two to five grand in his pocket every day so much pills we used to work out and then 2004 is when I got into the crack cooking and from all the nice stuff that we had in three weeks all that was boom, gone, nothing and we ended up picking cans to get our benefits you know if you look at the arrest rates and the numbers way more Aboriginal people get charged for drugs and the judges give more time to Aboriginal people and then once they're in jail they end up doing their full sentences every possible unfairness happens to Aboriginal people and it only keeps fueling all of this if you go to a jail for an unfair reason when you get out don't you think you get high as our movements go it's always important for us to be rooted in other people's movements it's important for us to be rooted in the movements that are addressing poverty that are fighting against colonization in our countries that fight against other types of criminalization and marginalization I just don't want us to forget about the sex worker movement there's a lot of drug users who are in the sex worker movement and there's a lot of sex workers in the drug user movement and we cannot forget about their fight too I am in a missing women inquiry right now so I go there like every day as the world keeps coming up consistently you're very witness for all of us here yeah so the missing women over a period of from the early 90s till 2002 60 women went missing and probably 60 were murdered as well it's just been terrible the inquiry now is to examine that for four years they knew there was plenty of evidence to show that there was a serial killer and he was killing a lot of the women and in the end they found 33 women's DNA on his property so the real tragedy is that no matter how many times we would say one of the women is my sister-in-law we would report and report and report and the police of course wouldn't take any of this seriously so after the trial which took a long time they said they would do an inquiry we have full rights of cross-examination of the witnesses and right now they're all police so Marlene and I are trying to figure out what we're going to ask that officer and it's been I think a really empowering experience for Marlene through Vandu they taught me how to public speak and how to have the confidence to and I'm able to express what is needed to be said and I don't just flip out and just start yelling at the person that's talking so it's taught me restraint and common sense the purpose of Vandu being involved in the inquiry is there's a kind of way that if you say someone's a sex worker everyone goes ooh sex but the real story that keeps coming up over and over again from the families and the police and everyone the police go we couldn't warn them about a serial killer because it doesn't matter if you warn those women they'll do anything because they have to get their drugs they'll do anything so our approach is to keep saying did it ever occur to the police or to anyone that we needed to make sure we had accessible drug treatment substitution therapies for heroin substitution therapies for crack cocaine real stuff that will really work we're able to get all the documents and see that every single one of those women now they've got all the records there's like a million documents evidently so Marlene and I can get documents and it tells you the last date that woman went to detox and how many hours she stayed and there's a real trend of course that when you offer people abstinence based treatment and that's all you offer them it kills them they can't do it and then they go back and each time they try exactly they feel that they can't do something that they're expected to be able to do and to be able to raise the issue whether drug use in and of itself is a reason to take a woman's child away and the damage it causes to the woman because of this unnatural grief and this complete unfairness there's no fair hearing when they take her child and then her return to the street is often with accelerated drug use and a lot of self-destructive behavior and a very very bad feeling here in Canada if you're a person who uses drugs and you're a mom and you're living in poverty you're black, you're indigenous you are more likely to have your children removed if they find out that you use drugs there was a scandal called the mother risk scandal here that tested hair follicle and it was a faulty test and thousands of these tests went out and people lost their children and people did not get their children back in the future they were not compensated for the pain that they went through and it didn't make them a bad parent just because they used drugs neglect is what makes a bad parent drug users rights movement is really about drug user liberation and it's about liberating all people and it's about liberating people from chains, from cages it's about liberating people so that they can thrive in this world for me it's all about liberation liberating people from systemic oppression and marginalization from criminalization and you know I think being part of that movement I just for me it's a driver to see the drug war end in my lifetime and I'm completely committed to that everybody wants the drug war to end if they don't want it to end they're not in the right movement because that is the number one oppressor that is what criminalizes people unlocks them up and lets them die you know we and it stigmatizes and discriminates people against people it takes one drug and says this drug's okay and another one and says this one's not okay for this one that you consume you should be locked up and thrown away and for this one it's totally acceptable in our society that you can consume this drug we will end this war on drugs in your lifetime so if you don't have to live with it anymore then we will keep fighting because that's the end that we need to see because I love you one of the problems that I see with the drug issues down here is the fact that they are still criminalized and these are substances that have been around longer than we have any of us these problems have not changed and currently a little over six years ago I was a reject from the inventor of drug wars and just say no I was illegally deported from the US which threw me from being a marginalized functional user into full blown depression and totally dysfunctional and using and being in a different country with completely different views and all of a sudden after being in a stroke of homelessness of being put in a hotel right here all of a sudden after a little period of time it's starting to come out and explore again I found Vandu and Vandu has started to reawake the activist that has always been in me and to show me that just because I have gone through such a major life change that I still matter Vandu has shown me that I have a voice that I have rights to be here whether I use illegal illicit drugs or not I'm not a forgotten person Vandu has shown me that that I'm still valuable as a human being and part of it with me is I want to really want to see big changes in the drug law policies because I think it's a shame that because of criminalization we have thrown it into the black markets which is just feeding people who don't give a flying shit about any of us as a drug user that's all we are and we're putting them in Cadillacs and condos and they're putting us in caskets and that's wrong hell yeah that was a good one why stigmatize anything exactly it's no different yeah whatever your choice of drug is you should have the right to do it if you're not harming yourself or your community and that's all we ask and that's what harm reduction is about as long as you're using you're doing whatever you're doing as long as you're not harming yourself or your community and be safe you've got to be safe to live through tomorrow whether it's abstinence based treatment whether it's like myself I'll use drugs for the rest of my life I've been using drugs since I was 17 I know functioning addict I'm very functioning and I'll never quit using drugs I know that but then you give me a voice to be able to do it and do it with dignity yes I know back in the 80's I was talking to Angela Davis who used to be a black panther and back in the early 70's in the United States and she said the prison industrial complex is going to be the number one industry and that was back in the 1980's and what is the biggest industry is prison industrial complex they want to build prisons it's become people who go to jail become profit centers and that's the way they do that's the way they want to do things and they want to make money off us the prison system the mandatory minimum will guarantee people that will go to jail and then they're going to be able to make money off people and as she said it will be the poor that will be in the jails the middle class will be hired and the rich will own the jails because most jails being built now are owned privately they're not run by the government how could we invent even if we tried to how could we invent laws that were more harmful than the laws we have today how could we think of other ways to do it any worse than we've done it I think that's a big telling factor especially as it applies to a very poor community like ours whatever we've been doing so far and locking people up putting them in jail is not working let's take it out of the hands of the cartels and let's put it in the hands of people that care and love one another I think people who fought for cannabis legalization on some level it was a big win on another level it was a big loss really the whole cannabis legalization is a real demonstration of sort of how capitalism works because the folks who are in charge of the cannabis companies who got to open shops, legal shops are mostly white rich men and have really cut out people who helped bring legalization to Canada so the cannabis industry is also full of cops like ex-cops and politicians who also enforce drug laws we should have had it so that those people who had brought legalization here those who had provided cannabis should have been in the industry I used to think this activism is killing me and it's really bad for me and I should stop and then when I stop it was actually worse because I felt so bad not doing the activism so it's one of those balanced things and I think we need more people to really take that view I don't try to pretend I'm a drug user and like as I say who didn't snort cocaine in the 70s I didn't want as much drugs as I could get a hold of but I find it really offensive for me to keep kind of acting like just because I did drugs I think that the kind of way we're moving forward with social justice for drug users is the drug users who need social justice and who are the most marginalized and I don't think that non-drug users should veer away from getting involved I think drug user groups need non-users who are capable of understanding what a democracy is of standing aside and letting the group make their own decisions but doing the bits of stuff that are really tough for people who use drugs because they're constantly arrested constantly in hospital constantly they fight so much danger to their health with contamination in drugs so much danger with violence being beaten up and all of the other kind of violence they really need non-drug users to stand with them we all fall but we're going to get back up knocking us down when we're down it's keeping us up when we're down we can write letters to people like at city hall and stand up and do presentations and go to conferences all over the world and all of us have done this and this is because of van do they invite us because they want to know what it's like to be this and who would ever thought that you could become a healthy person using drugs and still be making a difference nobody would ever think that there's a bunch of drug users who can change the world and that we deserve to change the world just like anybody else but because we're using drugs just means we've got a little extra stuff to carry that's all our drug user movement is like super harmed by criminalization because people are forced to go to a toxic drug supply during prohibition in Canada with alcohol people died of poisoning of alcohol and then they stopped prohibiting the sale of alcohol and they regulated and make sure people don't get a toxic supply but we can't do the same in this drug market and so criminalization has also fostered these new drugs these new chemicals they're slipping through borders or manufactured here or you know you can get them over the internet and so new drugs are constantly being introduced to our market into the drug market and they've created the crisis that we're in and that stems from criminalization stems from prohibition criminalization of drug use has killed the people that were part of our movements and you know Rafi Balian he helped start the program at my workplace and so he started counterfeit which was a needle exchange and he worked there for many years he was so foundational in Toronto and like he wrote this book with Cheryl White at harm reduction at work and he's won awards and he was just so phenomenal he overdosed and died going to a meeting in Vancouver about supervised injection size which he was supposed to speak at and he never made it to the meeting he overdosed and died in his hotel room because the drug supply was so different out there and he died it's hard to be on your own so like Rafi for me was like Rafi and Becky actually Becky Brooks in the US used to check on me all the time and she died last year and you know those people they look out for each other they look out for you and checking in on you and giving you advice especially older activists I wish they were here because I like really need it right now because you get chipped away at in a particular way that you don't want to be public about um especially when you're a woman and um it can really take a toll on you and then what happens to activists is they also take their lives and that isn't just you know they're not just overdosing but people also make a decision to take their lives because it's just so it's become too much for them too and fair enough if they don't want to be here anymore but it's also really painful that loss so I like actually brought Rafi's a deep edge I still have it I keep it at my desk just a reminder of him and like the other day I listened to a radio show of him talking and I hadn't listened to his voice in three years because I couldn't bring myself to do it after he died I had a breakdown because he was my fifth friend friend to die in that in that year and like I just miss him a lot and so in our movements we just really need to take care of each other because there aren't too many of us