When a B.C. Supreme Court justice found the two founders of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) guilty on drug trafficking charges earlier this month, the provincial government’s top health officials were not in the courtroom, and nowhere to be found.

Which is odd, given that the very activities of which the DULF co-founders were convicted were the same ones government officials had quietly endorsed for years, according to the court record.

Much has been written about DULF over the years, as a compassion club for people addicted to hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and meth in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx were never shy about creating in 2022 a first-of-its-kind model to buy illegal drugs on the dark web, test them for safety and sell them at cost to 43 club members to provide a safe supply during an ongoing toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 16,000 British Columbians.

“They have always been openly and publicly forthright about their activities and their impetus for doing so,” Justice Catherine Murray wrote in her ruling.

We’ve also always known that DULF had to have had some approval from the BC NDP government and top health officials—even if now, in retrospect, they don’t want to admit any of it.

Yet judges have a way of writing rulings that obliterate years of political spin. And in this case, there’s ample evidence that health officials and the government not only knew what DULF was doing, but approved of it and supported it right up until the arrests.

For example, the court heard there were numerous letters of support written by Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, Vancouver Coastal Health’s deputy chief medical health officer, expressing support for DULF.

“Vancouver Coastal Health considers DULF’s community Compassion Club to be an overdose prevention service as we believe that it has the potential to decrease the risk of overdose without significantly increasing risks to the broader community,” he wrote in one of several letters to Health Canada, as part of DULF’s unsuccessful applications to be exempted from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Vancouver Coastal Health, through Dr. Lysyshyn, explicitly endorsed a model that involved DULF........

© BIV