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Everyone deserves to know what's in their drugs
260 Plays2 years ago
The podcast is back from its summer break with an extended conversation with Angus Quinton with Get Your Drugs Tested. This Vancouver based organization has done the most testing of the illicit drug supply of anyone in the world and it's a model that has huge public health implications in dealing with the drug poisoning crisis.
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Transcript
Podcast Return and Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here, and yeah, we're finally back from summer break. We haven't stopped writing stories or doing journalism, but we did take a little podcast break this summer to relax and recharge, but now we are back to our regularly scheduled podcasting. And you are really going to enjoy the episode we have coming up for you. It's an interview with Angus Quinton of Get Your Drugs Tested, and it's about how drug checking is not only good and cool and saves lives, but it could flip the whole script on the narrative around the drug poisoning crisis.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'd also be remiss to not mention that The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, and while there are a ton of amazing podcasts on the network that I could highlight, I just want to make one simple recommendation this time, and that's just follow Harbinger Media on your social media network of choice, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. It's a great way to keep on top of new shows that you should be listening to. Now, onto the podcast.
00:01:03
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the progress report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiscuit, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the Cassis-Cassaw, Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is Angus Quinton, the technician supervisor and training coordinator with Get Your Drugs Tested in Vancouver, BC. Angus, welcome to the pod.
Meet Angus Quinton
00:01:27
Speaker
Thank you very much for having me on.
00:01:30
Speaker
So, you know, we had never spoken before this. You've probably never heard of this podcast before, but you are a person doing interesting work, I would argue, and work that was highly relevant to a piece I just recently wrote for The Progress Report on drug checking. What, like, if you were to describe your job description to, like, someone at a party, like, what would it be?
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, I am the, as you said, the technician supervisor and training coordinator. So I started off here as an FTIR technician, a spectrometer technician, doing the analysis for substances. But now I am responsible for training new technicians, including people who come here from different organizations throughout the province or the country.
00:02:27
Speaker
And I'm responsible for making sure everything that flows through here at the site is proper and well taken care of.
00:02:38
Speaker
And what does that
Daily Operations at Get Your Drugs Tested
00:02:40
Speaker
mean? So drugs show up in the mail, people walk in through the door, they hand you an envelope or a baggie. Walk us through the day-to-day of what it is working at, a full-time drug checking facility. For sure. For most of our existence, because we've been operating through COVID for the vast majority of the time we've been open,
00:03:05
Speaker
They, people would come to the front door. We would take their samples and take a bit of information from them just so we know how to contact them and what they think the sample is, if they've tried it or not. They give that to us. We process that information. We take a picture of it so it can go up on our website. And then we will run those samples through the spectrometer.
00:03:37
Speaker
Now that COVID has eased up a little bit, we're back to letting people in the site, which has been a bit of a change, but has gone really well. People appreciate the ability to come in where it's a little bit more private. And we also have air conditioning.
00:03:55
Speaker
a pretty brutally hot summer. People down here really appreciate just being able to come in, grab some water, grab some snacks, grab some gear, and just be not in the heat. You're talking about it as a pretty sanguine day-to-day
Unique Service in North America
00:04:14
Speaker
thing. This is your job is what you do on a regular basis.
00:04:20
Speaker
Uh, what's the right way to put this? It is like rather uncommon, you know, this, this drug wide scale drug checking kind of like done with any type of volume is not, uh, a service really offered anywhere else in North America. As far as like, unless you're aware of something that I'm not, but like, is there anyone else like get your drugs tested? Like in Canada, the United States, not operating in a full time every day.
00:04:50
Speaker
no barrier, no cost kind of a way. We like the genesis of really this level of drug checking in BC started in the festival scene, which is where I started my harm reduction journey in.
Origins and Evolution of Drug Checking
00:05:06
Speaker
So yeah, you're a player kid. Is that what you're telling me? For sure. Yeah, you know, I started working with anchors at Shambhala Music Festival in 2008.
00:05:19
Speaker
And, uh, back then it was just, um, reagent testing and stuff like that. But in 2018, uh, through with the help of the BC center for substance use, they started bringing up infrared spectrometers. So it's really sort of wide first wide practical application. Was at a fat was it trouble at music festival. Um, and then those machines kind of ended up in play in.
00:05:48
Speaker
stationary places all over BC, including eventually get your drugs tested.
00:05:58
Speaker
Wow. So there you go. Chambala is the genesis of this actual real working harm reduction program. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. Never would I thought the village stage would be the promulgation of making sure that people aren't dying on the streets from bad drugs. But here we are. Exactly. If we want to think about a real volume,
00:06:25
Speaker
at Chambala this past year, we did over 3,000 tests over the course of five days. That's a full 10th of what we've done here at Get Your Drugs Tested in three years. The volume done there is wild, but even compared to other sites across BC, the volume we do here at Get Your Drugs Tested is wild.
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, so like just doing some basic extrapolation from those numbers. So you're saying you guys have done around 30,000 tests in three years? Yeah, we've done just over 30,000 tests. Oh, wow. So like you guys have done the most drug testing, drug checking of like literally anyone on earth, like of the illicit drug supply. From my understanding, yes.
00:07:12
Speaker
And it's like, this is useful information, right?
Challenges in Drug Checking
00:07:17
Speaker
Like this is wild that it's like some kind of like private, I mean, obviously like you guys do good work and you meanwhile, and you guys hand out harm reduction supplies, but like the fact that like the state doesn't seem interested in knowing what's in the illicit drug supply, considering how many people are dying from the drug poisoning crisis blows my mind. It's true. And there are like, there are some,
00:07:41
Speaker
groups and organizations and elements within the government that do want to know this information and do take the information that we generate here at the site, along with the information generated from other drug checking organizations around BC, to sort of give an idea, try to get a grasp of what's going on.
00:08:03
Speaker
Even still, our sites, all of the sites, we're only catching a small percentage of the substance consumers in BC or in any of our respective areas. It could always be more.
00:08:19
Speaker
Oh, yeah. No, the amount of drugs consumed is far higher than, I mean, 30,000 tests is a lot, but people are doing so much drugs all the time and dying all the time that it's like, yeah, you're a drop in the ocean, but it's still a drop. No one has even tried to collect that drop until you guys started doing it, right? It's true. Now that we've been in operation, we've shown that this kind of thing is useful and is wanted in the communities.
00:08:49
Speaker
Other health authorities in the province have reached out to us to help with their training and get advice and things like that. So yeah, so like that transition from like, you know, plural rave kids kind of getting their MDMA tested to like, oh shit, like people are dying from poison drugs and like, this can help people understand what they're putting into their body and hopefully not die.
00:09:19
Speaker
Was this just like you and the people who were around when this thing got started was like, this is not just for psychonauts and rave kids. This can actually save lives and can actually be a part of a public health response. Absolutely. Building the trust up from more day-to-day survival consumers did take a while.
00:09:45
Speaker
Truthfully, the technology isn't perfect. We always try to emphasize the drawbacks and limitations of these technologies because they're fast and they're easy to use on our end, easy to operate, but they can't see very small amounts of things.
00:10:07
Speaker
Its detection limit is about 5% and its margins of error when identifying things are about 5%. So for some substances, that's not a huge deal. And for some substances and some users, that is a huge deal. So like the difference between 5% and 10% fentanyl can be really big.
00:10:30
Speaker
For some users, it's not. If 5% of your cocaine is carfentanil, that's really bad. Oh, yeah. I mean, if even like 1% of your cocaine is regular fentanyl, you're in trouble because you only need a few
Technical Aspects of Drug Testing
00:10:44
Speaker
milligrams insufflated to really
00:10:49
Speaker
Uh, cause some problems, especially if you don't have a tolerance. So, um, that's, that's where the test strips come in. Um, which are sensitive down to the nanogram per milliliter levels. So, um, those are really good at picking up very small amounts of things that are active in those very low levels. So encephalated that that's like fancy, uh, healthcare language for snort. Uh, yeah. Sorry. I do kind of fall back on my more like.
00:11:19
Speaker
a clinical lingo here sometimes, but yeah, yeah. Just stuff going up the nose. Just so we know what we're talking about. 100%. Walk us through the technical part of it just for the layman. How much of the drugs do you need? How much of the drugs do you need? What can you test? I assume there are certain substances that are just like you can't test. You kind of talked to us about how accurate are the results, but how does it actually work?
00:11:46
Speaker
For sure. You only need about a half a grain of rice or about the size of a match head, something like that. 10 milligrams is ideal. Then that ideally is also a really well mixed, well homogenized sample. So if you're bringing stuff in,
00:12:11
Speaker
People who really well mix their stuff beforehand kind of allows for greater analysis. The sensor on the machine is only about a few millimeters in either direction. And it only reads about three microns deep. So we don't need a lot of substance at all. It's just barely anything. And that's also useful for the test strips as well.
00:12:35
Speaker
So we take your substance. It can be almost anything that is powdered or crystal tablets, really not organics. Those become a lot harder to identify. They're very complicated and the active ingredients are usually really small amounts. You're talking about like cannabis flowers. Yeah, cannabis mushrooms.
00:13:06
Speaker
Really, that kind of stuff is kind of ... There are things that get a little bit closer to what we can test. Opium is okay, but it's still kind of difficult to check. Changa, which is DMT sprayed on leaves, where we can kind of sometimes pick up, because the DMT is on the leaf itself, we can usually pick up some of that.
00:13:29
Speaker
Are you saying opium is still around and available? It is. It's wild. But it's pretty rare. It's more common probably than heroin. But yeah, I mean, heroin's just not really anything anymore.
00:13:46
Speaker
people just, yeah, heroin is gone. It has been replaced by fentanyl, I must say. Well, and it's become more like the boutique kind of opioid. I go to the fancy tea shop and I get my premium heroin. Yeah, exactly. Because you wouldn't find heroin in the mixed opioid samples down. 10 years ago,
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, probably heroin could be found in there. Now it's all fentanyl or fentanyl analogs. You guys have done the tests, the 30,000 some tests over three years. Yeah. People are sending you stuff that is just sold as down. You're saying there's not heroin really in the illicit drug supply anymore, or that you're saying there's more opium than there is heroin. At least from what we tested.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah. Like you're, I mean, it's a small sample of the total illicit drug supply, obviously, but it's like the only, you're the only ones doing it. So I suppose my question is, is that like, how often are you guys finding fentanyl in something that is being sold as something else, whether it's cocaine or MDMA or ketamine or like, like people are people, when people get down, like they're kind of expecting fentanyl is expected really in there, right? But like, how often is fentanyl just showing up and stuff that isn't being sold as fentanyl?
Misleading Substances and Overdoses
00:15:11
Speaker
It's quite rare, and when that happens, we will put an alert out on it because of how rare it is and how potentially dangerous it is. People consuming opioids with no tolerance potentially. It's usually identified on the test strip as well when it does show up in non-opioid samples. So still a potentially dangerous amount, but
00:15:41
Speaker
still a small amount. The larger worries are when you get scenarios where someone has sold
00:15:48
Speaker
down as a different substance. We've had people come in who say, I bought this as MDMA. They told me it was MDMA. I took some. I overdosed non-fadily. What is happening? And someone has sold them down. Or cocaine, because down comes in all kinds of colors. So if it's like white, chunky stuff, they sell it as cocaine.
00:16:13
Speaker
It could be down. So it's, it's rare, but it does happen. And so what it like, this seems so bizarre to me. Cause like, if I was a dealer, I'd be like, I mean, hopefully I would know what I was selling and I would sell it to the people when I sold it to the person to be like.
00:16:30
Speaker
This is what you're getting is, is it, is it malevolent in this case, or is it just like the dealer being just wanting to get rid of the product? Is the dealer just not know what's in the product? Like, I guess you're, I mean, you're removed, you're one step removed from the actual person. What's your best? What's your best guess?
00:16:45
Speaker
It's so hard to say. Some scenarios, it could easily be just a bag mix up. Some person who sells both the things and they look similar and they aren't marked and they just grab one and they're like, yep, here you go. It's just a baggie. And then there's some folks who will get a supply of something and they'll just sell it as whatever the person asked for. So we've had a few scenarios recently where someone has
00:17:14
Speaker
Different people have brought in stuff that they think is either like a benzo or a fentanyl or whatever. And it was a cathinone, just like an entirely different, not even remotely close, substance that wouldn't get, wouldn't have the results of either, either things that was, it was sold as. It was just, someone has acquired this stuff and to my best guess was just kind of like selling it as whatever people wanted.
00:17:43
Speaker
Jesus. One thing that I mentioned in the article, one thing that comes up frequently when you start reading what people write about
Impact of Prohibition and Emerging Drugs
00:17:56
Speaker
you know, the, the drug poisoning crisis is like the iron law of prohibition, right? Like the idea that because drugs are illicit and because there are these, um, you know, crackdowns by police and the authorities that like drugs are getting more powerful, more concentrated over time. So like, have you seen that kind of play out in real time? Have you seen the iron law of prohibition, like marching upwards in the concentration of the drugs that you guys are testing?
00:18:23
Speaker
It's kind of hard to say whether it's prohibition or the effects of COVID on the international shipping industries that still was kind of rattled out. So we saw an increase in benzodiazepines in the down.
00:18:47
Speaker
And, you know, that could, we don't, it's hard to say why it started, whether it was, hey, there's a crackdown on fentanyl, so it's harder to get, or it was just harder to get no matter what. And you still need something to kind of bump up the potency, so people are still happy.
00:19:08
Speaker
Or things like the nidazine opioids, which are research chemical opioids that aren't really in being produced for authentic reasons, but are starting to show up in down in counterfeit opioid tablets, like oxy and hydroborphone and stuff like that.
00:19:33
Speaker
which could be really tricky because much like fentanyl, there's thousands or over a thousand different nytosine variants with all kinds of different potencies and we don't have test strips for those. You might exist, but they're not as easily acquirable as the ones for fentanyl and for benzos. So yeah.
00:20:00
Speaker
Maybe it's not becoming more concentrated, but it's becoming more adulterated with other things. Is that what you're seeing? Yeah. We're getting a wider spread of different analogs of things or different classes of similar drugs.
00:20:22
Speaker
a lot of research chemicals, uh, like research variants of benzos or opioids where they're just, they're not as constrained by precursor laws. Like maybe the precursors for these aren't as controlled because no one makes them. And now they're just reaching into the books of, of, Oh, what's been made, but kind of tossed away scientifically. And how can we build that? And how could we make that? How can we sell that?
00:20:53
Speaker
So you mentioned benzos, which is, which is good. I have had a whole question laid out for benzos, but so you're saying you're finding, and this has been widely reported by other folks that like people are finding benzodiazepine type drugs mixed in with their fentanyl. Um, can you talk about why that is so dangerous? Yeah, it's, there's a.
00:21:14
Speaker
Kind of from a couple of different angles. So, benzos do repress breathing, not to the extent of fentanyl and other opioids, but they do, it does happen and it can kind of create a more synergistic, difficult to deal with overdose scenario because the benzos don't respond to naloxone. Like only opioids respond to naloxone.
00:21:43
Speaker
So if you're hitting people with a bunch of naloxone, cause you think they're overdosing and they're still not, maybe they're breathing, but they're definitely still unconscious. Um, you know, that could be a thing. Also, they act really quickly. Uh, so people who aren't expecting them can go, but if they had non-Benzodope would like do their hit and like just get up and walk around. But if it's Benzodope, maybe they'd either hit, they start walking around.
00:22:12
Speaker
10, 15 minutes later, the benzos hit them and they're on their face unexpectedly. They're not enough faster. Way faster. If you're super unexpected to the point where people have complained about the benzo making them vulnerable, vulnerable to assault, to robbery. Yeah, because you're just flopped on a bend. You're nodding. You're nodding way harder than you expected. Yeah.
00:22:40
Speaker
And so this, and is it clear at all that like people wanted benzodiazepines in their drugs, that there was a demand for this or is this just was like, well, fentanyl is hard to get. They shut down the shipping lanes. We can, you know, our scientists in some basement somewhere are like, why don't we try benzos? Like I've never done benzos. I don't know what they do. I've only like my, the biggest
00:23:03
Speaker
knowledge dump I ever got around Benzos was when Jordan Peterson got addicted to them and then fucking wet his daughter kidnapped him and sent him to Russia and they put him in a coma for a month. I know that Benzos are bad and that withdrawal is particularly nasty, but what do Benzos do? What is the effect of them compared to just fentanyl, which is, from my understanding, just a straight kind of painkiller.
00:23:26
Speaker
Right. Benzos aren't painkillers. They have anti-anxiety effects and they have hypnotic sedative effects. And those are their primary uses. So most people, especially when Benzos first got onto the scene, did not want them in there. They were like, Hey, I just, I don't like how this down makes me feel.
00:23:51
Speaker
It knocks me out super fast. It doesn't do anything for my pain because maybe there's a ton of benzos, just a little bit of down or a little bit of fentanyl. Um, and then people, but you know, there's always a portion of people who are like, yeah, I like how this makes me feel. And then there are people who get physiologically addicted to the benzodil because maybe they've been doing it for a while and they don't even really know. And now they have to have it. Otherwise they're going to go through a
00:24:19
Speaker
an especially difficult withdrawal because as you mentioned, the withdrawal scenario for benzos is really bad and really, if you want to get off them, requires very careful tapering and that just doesn't really happen. Yeah, getting dope sick off opioids or fentanyl is awful and bad and terrible, but from my understanding,
00:24:44
Speaker
getting dope sick off and trying to get off Benzos is one, incredibly shitty on a personal and painful and shitty to deal with on a personal level, and then requires actual medical experts to guide you off of the drugs, essentially. To do it safely, yeah. Otherwise, there's risks of seizures, coma, death. It's really serious to just go off Benzos cold turkey.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah. So one of the other things that, you know, I went through your page, I went through, you know,
00:25:21
Speaker
that all the drugs you guys posted recently. And like, I read that cracked article that Dana Larson, your boss, I assume wrote, I think in earlier this year in like February or March. And one thing that jumps out at me is like caffeine, caffeine, powdered caffeine kind of seems to be in every single, well, almost every single kind of drug, especially stuff that's sold as down.
Caffeine's Role in Drug Absorption
00:25:42
Speaker
Why is caffeine in all of the drugs?
00:25:48
Speaker
From my understanding, caffeine works both in conjunction with opioids in kind of a few ways to speed up the absorption process, whether that be to lower its combustion point or synergistically inside the body, which is why in like T3s, for example, there's a small amount of caffeine along with their small amount of opioid.
00:26:17
Speaker
So it's just helps your body absorb it faster and better. And it's also water soluble. So same thing with the sugars that are often found in down, and so is fentanyl. So if you're doing a shot, then you want to have as many things in there that are as water soluble as possible, less crap that needs to be picked up through a filter.
00:26:47
Speaker
Okay. Well, so again, I come back to this and it's like, I'm grateful that like you guys in Vancouver are doing this.
Government's Role in Drug Checking
00:26:56
Speaker
And honestly, it seems like an extremely important public health service. And in that vein, like, would you be mad if the government just started doing this at scale, like in the same way that you do it? Like with no barriers for free, that sort of thing.
00:27:09
Speaker
Not at all. We want that to happen. Like I said, we're only catching such a small amount of the overall clientele that are using substances and even places throughout BC that are open and available in Kamloops, in Kelowna, in Nelson.
00:27:32
Speaker
you know, places opening up in Terrace, there's a bunch of places on the island like Substance, Ubik. They're just, they're all available, but they don't have nearly the amount of flow as we do. And that's because, you know, the populations are a lot smaller and things like that. But if, you know, if each health authority wanted to open up
00:27:57
Speaker
a site like ours in every spot, like every neighborhood in town, in the province, wherever, I'd be all for it. I think it'd be a great idea. It's just that no one really wants to foot that bill.
00:28:12
Speaker
Well, and money-wise, is it a bill thing or is it really just a this is gross thing? How much money are we talking about here? We're talking about a piece of kit, a mass spectrometer, which I don't know, how much is a mass spectrometer, roughly? Are the infrareds that we have cost of around 50 grand?
00:28:32
Speaker
Okay. So like a decent capital cost on like the original set of kit. And then you got to like, you got to have a few staff, like a few people who work there who like know how to operate a few people to work at the front desk. Like at the end of the, and you got to pay rent. Like you're not talking about a super expensive, high-end healthcare operation. You're not running like surgeries. You're not like, you don't have like intensivists and surgeons and nurses and like fancy high paid healthcare people everywhere. Like this, this is.
00:29:02
Speaker
at the end of the day, relatively affordable? For sure. Right? Oh, no, absolutely. It is as far as these kinds of more scientific interventions go, this model is the least expensive with this kind of stuff. Even places like Insight, which does like VCH does have
00:29:29
Speaker
a like Vancouver Crystal Health does have a machine that does go there a couple of days a week and do testing and stuff like that but it's just not very well supported it's just not it's not there every day and I don't know I don't really know why
00:29:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, I have my own speculation about why, which is that like large or like wide scale drug checking really kind of makes clear one of the kind of contradictions at the heart of the public health or the public response, the government's response to the drug poisoning crisis.
State's Approach to Drug Crisis
00:30:03
Speaker
Right. Which is like it has been framed as like an opioid crisis. Right. It's been framed as it's this evil molecule that's killing people.
00:30:11
Speaker
And it's like molecules, a molecule. Like my, my partner was offered fentanyl at the hospital when she had our baby, like hospital grade fentanyl administered in a way that is monitored by a medical expert. So you know what you're getting, you know, what's on the tin, you've got the potency and the whole thing right there. Like that's, I mean, it's, you got to treat it with care, but it's not dangerous. What's dangerous is when all of these, you just.
00:30:35
Speaker
People are just spinning the wheel every time they go buy drugs. They don't know what's on the tin. They don't know the potency. They don't even know what's in it. Imagine going to the grocery store and buying food and just being like, what's in it? I don't fucking know.
00:30:52
Speaker
You know, like it's food, be happy you're getting food. It's, it's wild to me that like the state is so dramatically uninterested in knowing what's in the drug supply that's killing so many people. And so like my hypothesis is that like, Oh, if wide scale drug checking was to become real, it's really just makes clear that like, okay, the problem is poison drugs. The problem is, is that these drugs need to be legalized and regulated.
00:31:22
Speaker
Right. And that's just like a bridge too far for the people who are in charge, right? Like actually saying, Oh, well, we just need to be able to have a place where people could go where they know what drugs they're getting. They know the potency, they know the name of the drug, but like there's simply, uh, you know, no appetite at our current, you know, political leaders to actually take that step. Right. Absolutely. You know, um, drugs, they're,
00:31:48
Speaker
Humans have been using substances since probably before we were humans. It's like a natural thing. Neanderthals getting whacked on whatever they could find. On rotting fruit. It's just how it goes.
00:32:07
Speaker
finding ways to support that in sensible, safe ways. I'm totally down for the idea of safe supply. If I didn't need my job because everyone could just go to a shop to get what they need, that'd be fantastic. It's so difficult to get that kind of political will to fight the whole concept of the drug war and
00:32:38
Speaker
the stigma involved and just kind of sit back and understand that it's a natural thing to do and we should be supporting that. We do it for alcohol, we do it for cigarettes, probably to our detriment, but it's been shown that people can acquire these regulated substances and use them and it being socially acceptable. So why not everything else?
00:33:03
Speaker
Diet Coke, man. Man, people getting off Diet Coke can have had some very negative reactions. You just go to the grocery store and get that shit. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of those sugar substitutes have their own interesting effects on the brain and caffeine. Yeah, absolutely.
Alberta's Drug Checking Efforts
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, like, so I did write a piece that, you know, I will link to in the show notes and like, which does kind of walk through where we're at in Alberta when it comes to drug checking. The nonprofit AWARE, which is an acronym that I'm not going to try and read out online, but the organization AWARE is, has got approval from the federal government and has lined up the funds to do
00:33:49
Speaker
a drug checking, a mobile drug checking pilot that they're going to run out of a van in Calgary.
00:33:54
Speaker
And I spoke with them and they are hopeful to get that program off the ground by like first quarter of next year. Um, you know, they did complain and they did have real concerns about, you know, how much paperwork and work they had to do just to kind of get the program off the ground because, uh, decriminalization and is such a thing. And because AHS, the health authority here is like,
00:34:21
Speaker
There's just a lot of hoops for them to jump through in order to get this pilot off the ground. They're working on it, but they're frustrated. There is no other near project that is near to getting off the ground when it comes to drug checking in Alberta. One of our city councilors here in Edmonton has asked
00:34:43
Speaker
uh, city administration to look into drug checking. Um, and that report is going to be coming back to city council in September. And so I will be keeping an eye out for that at Edmonton city council to see what city admin comes up with. Um, you know, I, I did mention de Krim, like the city of Calgary is not looking at de Krim, but the city of Edmonton is currently looking at de Krim. They haven't put in the request to
00:35:09
Speaker
the government of Canada yet on Decrim, so they're still kind of looking at it, but has Decrim made your lives any easier? I mean, I guess Decrim just happened recently in BC. You guys were operating before Decriminization was a reality, but has Decriminization noticeably changed anything about the way you folks run your operation? Not particularly.
00:35:33
Speaker
officially in play until January anyway. There's been a kind of unofficial decriminalization for a lot of people here where the cops have just kind of said, yeah, there's a lot of provincial go ahead as far as safe consumption sites go. There's very few federally mandated ones.
00:36:01
Speaker
Uh, but there's lots of provincially mandated ones, including ourselves, even though we don't offer consumption site or consumption spaces, we operate under the same kind of go ahead from the health authority. Um, but, uh, you know, the hope is that it, it really ends up easing up for our clientele. You know, it's, it's a bummer to hear, Oh, well, you know, I, from a client, I just got all my stuff taken and now I gotta go find new stuff.
00:36:31
Speaker
because that's not harm reduction. That's just causing a problem. Yeah, that's just cops taking people's property, right? Yeah, taking people's property, taking people's medicine. They don't think about it that way, but that's how it is. Hopefully, when that shuffles down a bit and Decrim officially kicks in, then we'll hear fewer of those stories.
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah. Like one of the more, um, incoherent arguments you hear, uh, especially from the Alberta association of plea chief police chiefs who have, who have come out very publicly against decrim here in Alberta. And they said, well, there's already defacto decrim anyways. So we're not going to support decrim because there's already defacto decrim. Well, it's like, what, what's the, what's the problem then? Why are you against decrim?
00:37:20
Speaker
Well, exactly. And de facto decrim doesn't actually mean anything because it's not protected in any way. A cop can still, with de facto decrim, decide to be an asshole and rough somebody up for using. That's just like, no, it needs to be legally enshrined if you want to actually put some force behind it and put some emphasis behind it. Otherwise, you're just saying, well, it kind of exists, so it's fine. That's not fine.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's fundamentally incoherent and like, it's so, uh, like makes me so frustrated to read that statement. Like Kenny said the same thing too. It's like, Oh yeah, there's already defacto decrim. So like, but it would be dangerous to move ahead with real decrim for reasons that are never fully explained. It's, uh,
00:38:05
Speaker
So yeah, I think drug checking has both power in two ways, right?
Changing Narratives Around Drug Crisis
00:38:13
Speaker
One, it has the power to just give people more information, help them make safer decisions so that they hopefully do not die. And the other power that I think drug checking has, and which is why I think the authorities have been so reluctant to kind of embrace it on a wide scale, is that it has real narrative power.
00:38:32
Speaker
If this information was collected and we had a reasonable snapshot of what was in the illicit drug supply, all the fucked up shit that was in the illicit drug supply on a regular basis, it would really bear the realities of the crisis that we face, the drug poisoning crisis that we face. If we knew what kind of poison drugs that people were dealing with on a daily basis, less people would die.
00:38:53
Speaker
But that narrative power I think is why you see reactionary forces like the UCP, like police chiefs kind of push back against drug checking or decriminalization because it's far easier to just blame the evil people who are using drugs or even the evil molecule that they're putting in their body rather than
00:39:14
Speaker
actually getting to the real solution, which is like legalizing and regulating criminalized drugs so that people don't die because people are dying every day. Yeah, that's my there you go. There's my soapbox pitch for drug, drug checking. Tell your congressman, your MP, your city councilor. Quinton, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really do appreciate it. How can people if people do want to get their drugs tested at get your drugs tested, what is the process? How can people do that?
00:39:43
Speaker
Well, if they want to send stuff in by mail, we take stuff from all over Canada. You can email us at info at getyourdrugstested.com and we will relay to you the mailing address and the mailing procedures. You can also double check all that information on our website, getyourdrugstested.com.
00:40:05
Speaker
If people are in Vancouver or in the lower mainland or feel like making the journey for whatever reason, our physical location is at 880 East Hastings in Vancouver and we're open 12 to 8 every single day.
00:40:23
Speaker
Brilliant. And yes, we will link to the website. I mean, drugs do come in to your shop from Calgary and Edmonton and other places in Alberta. So like, it never hurts to check as well as to see if something that you might have, might have made its way to get your drugs tested. Quentin, I want to thank you so much for coming on and having this very fun conversation about
00:40:44
Speaker
the important service that you folks are providing at Get Your Drugs Tested. Also, folks, if you like this podcast, feel like what we do. We're finally back from our summer break. So that means that I've got to ask for money. So if you want to join the 500 other folks who help keep this independent media project going, it's very easy.
00:41:03
Speaker
There is a link in the show notes, or you can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, putting your credit card, kicking a little bit of money every month. We would really appreciate it. Also, if you've had any notes, thoughts, comments, I am very easy to get ahold of. You can reach me by email at dunkincay at progressupboarder.ca. I am also on Twitter far too often at Dunkin' Kinney. Do you have any socials that you want to put out there for yourself or forget your drugs test at Quintum?
00:41:28
Speaker
For Get Your Drugs Tested, we're on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Our Twitter is gydtcanada. And Instagram and Facebook should just be Get Your Drugs Tested. And yeah, we love comments. We put posts up about different stuff we see, including alerts of particularly worrisome stuff. So always good to keep an eye on that.
00:41:52
Speaker
All right, well, thank you to Jim Story for editing the podcast. Thank you to Cosmic Famicominist for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.