Garth Mullins has experienced first-hand the way society disenfranchises people who use drugs, making them out to be “monsters” while withholding the health care and services that could improve their quality of life and protect them from overdose and death.
A punk, organizer, radio documentarian, podcaster — and frequent source for the Tyee, Mullins has published his debut book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, a memoir.
As Canada careens into a fresh round of anti-drug policies where politicians promise more policing and fewer services to keep people who use drugs safe, Crackdown is an important read.
Important strides were made in harm reduction efforts, like when unregulated drug deaths dropped in 2019 as take-home Naloxone kits, which could temporarily reverse an opioid overdose, were widely distributed across the province, or when the BC NDP introduced the decriminalization pilot project in January 2023, which allowed people to carry small amounts of otherwise illegal drugs.
Despite that, Canada’s anti-drug sentiment has been back on the rise since the early days of the pandemic, Mullins says.
Mullins says he remembers the first time he saw how well the far-right could organize.
“I remember when I first saw the convoy and was like, ‘oh, we’re f*****. They’re going to come for us and it’s not going to be pretty,’” he told The Tyee.
People who use drugs have always provided a handy bad guy for politicians or movements to scapegoat, he added.
Crackdown, which Mullins describes as “part memoir, part manifesto,” does an impressive job laying out the complexity of the toxic drug crisis, the ways that existing programs support and punish people who use drugs and the nuance that is required in a governmental response.
Ever a punk, Mullins points to how today’s political climate is ripe for the start of a social movement, where disenfranchised groups who have been getting trampled by public policy join together to fight back.
Seem impossible? So did writing a book about his experience as a person who uses drugs, he says, or thinking that anyone would one day want to read it.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: You did such a good job describing your best friend Jeff in the book. How does he feel about it?
Garth Mullins: I got to read him all the parts about him. He was in the hospital for three months last year.
He gave me pointers, for example, “don’t print anything that we haven’t been convicted of. Don’t get us in trouble.”
But you know, he said he really liked it.
He’s a pretty private guy, so for me to use his real name required a great deal of trust. I felt really honoured by that.
He’s actually doing pretty good now, he’s out of the hospital. It was really scary at times because we weren’t sure whether he was going to make it. The fact that he did, and he’s out, I’m really happy about that.
Our plan is to do some kind of book launch together, him and me, and I’m really glad that he’s going to be around to see the thing in print.
You’re quite critical of 12-step programs in the book. Is there anything they do well?
They bring together groups of people, who are affected by this thing, as peers to each other. They don’t have a social worker, they don’t have a profit principal. They’re not slick with lots of advertising. That’s a really good starting point.
It’s just a place where people can come together as peers. People can’t really get kicked out for failing the program. In fact they say, ‘keep coming back.’ A lot of recovery places don’t do that.
But there’s also problems with it.
Could you share some of the problems you’ve noticed? What would be a better way to offer community and peer support to people trying to rebuild their lives?
Focusing on rebuilding, not on sobriety, might be a good place to start.
The assumption built into the 12-step program is that you’re a morally defective person, that you need to be fixed. That’s troubling, right? Because I don’t think it’s necessarily true.
They say the only way out is abstinence. There’s no move you can make in 12-step that’s not abstinence.
A way to support people is to recognize there’s ways people can greatly reduce the harm in their lives from the drug war without being abstinent.
In 12-step you’re told you can’t really be part of it if you’re on methadone or getting a substitute treatment of some sort. I think that cuts off a hugely advantageous way for people to get their lives under their own control.
I’ve spoken with addiction medicine specialist doctors before who say opioid agonist therapy [which prescribes medications like Suboxone or methadone] is the gold standard for treating opioid use disorder.
Why do you think 12-step and the larger for-profit treatment industry isn’t focusing on that gold standard?
We’ve got this deep temperance streak in North American society going back over a century of trying to strive for people not drinking, not being on drugs and trying to drive it out of our society.
It’s almost part of the Protestant work ethic. If you’re feeling anything but raw sobriety then you’re not as productive a worker.
Other countries don’t have this obsession with abstinence the same way we do.
Politicians really go after it, even in the recent election here in B.C. It runs deep.
I appreciated the chapter in Crackdown dedicated to the history of the drug war and its deeply racist foundations. We’ve been using this prohibition model for more than a century and we’re again heading into a federal election with this policy that has created an enormous death toll.
Oh f***, 2025 is just going to be the year of not learning from history. We’re engaging in some deep, awful historical deadheads in the U.S. and perhaps Canada.
Most people don’t have time to be a drug-policy research nerd and figure this all out. I’ve gotten the opportunity to be going to school and living through it but most people just want to pick up their kids, go to work and maybe pick up a bit of news.
That ability to control information is robbing people of their ability to participate in democracy properly.
We have political leaders who lie about this crisis and that makes it very difficult for people to participate. It makes people vulnerable to fear.
Fear is a big political tool these days. Going into the federal election, are there any comments from political leaders that have you worried?
Since I finished writing the book, Donald Trump got elected and started threatening tariffs and insisted we have a fentanyl czar. That’s just a terrible idea. The more you police a substance, the stronger and more deadly a substance gets. That’s the iron law of prohibition.
We have fentanyl because they tried to stamp out heroin. If they try to stamp out fentanyl, we’ll get something worse.
They can’t even stop drugs from being in jails. I don’t know how they think they can stop drugs from being on a continent.
Do you think there’s a tipping point when everyone in Canada will say, ‘Enough. This is too many deaths. Whatever the government is doing — it’s absolutely not working’?
We’ve had mass social movements organized across society before where all kinds of different groups demanded their rights together. Think of the civil rights movements in the ’60s.
That’s the kind of thing that’s needed. Drug users aren’t the only groups being attacked. Trans kids are being targeted, Indigenous people have always been targeted, and migrants.
There could be organization for a more humane way of doing things and to stop scapegoating people based on solidarity between all of those groups.
That’s the way to get to the average guy who just wants to go to work and pick up his kids on board.
The other way to get to that guy is if one of his kids dies. It’s really unfortunate that this is how it happens, but I’ve seen the pattern a lot. It makes the guy angry and want to seek revenge, but then that initial rush of anger passes and people start to see the system and policies in place.
Those guys go on to join Moms Stop the Harm. So many of these parents have said to me, “geez, I wish I’d known.”
So I just hope for that guy, whoever he is, that it’s not his path.
You wrote about your anxiety around being outed in your advocacy as someone who also uses drugs. What do we lose when we expect advocates to be on a pedestal or sober?
I don’t claim to have my life together or to be perfectly sober. By most people’s definition, I’m not. I’m on methadone. And I’ve slipped up.
For people whose advocacy is bound up in sobriety, I worry for them. It’s a lot of pressure.
We need a mass movement, not just a few inspirational people.
I’m a soldier in the drug war on the harm reduction side. I’m not trying to inspire or role model to anybody. I think that the best role I’ve known is to just take the skills I’ve learned as an organizer and apply them as a drug user.
You want to build a wide democratic movement where leaders are elected, not anointed or self-selected, so you get all of the diversity and expertise of those people’s lived existence.
The theme of shame comes up a lot in the book. Your shame, friends dealing with shame. How can we help people avoid shame when they’re working on their recovery?
There are so many forces causing, maintaining and strengthening shame.
Twelve-step programs tell people they’re powerless, morally defective and fundamentally flawed. Of course you’re going to feel bad because of that.
Politicians weaponize shame. Like when the government says everyone’s at risk from the very sight or presence of a drug user. It’s really difficult to be thought of as a monster.
In the book I focus on one government press release, with typical wording, which said people ‘felt like they were unsafe’ from drug users. Not that they were actually unsafe.
Don’t get me wrong — all people should get to feel safe. But on the one side there is real, lethal danger coming for people. It’s coming for the drug users, not the rest of society.
Politicians on the right and in the centre scapegoat people and say society is in decay because of people who use drugs. That’s a huge vector of shame.
Decriminalization was the very beginning of an invitation to come back out of the shadows of shame, for people to rejoin society.
We saw the very beginnings of drug users being more present in society. That was horrifying to people. I don’t believe that we saw much more drug use. Even the Vancouver police agree we didn’t see much more public drug use, but just the idea that people couldn’t be arbitrarily punished as easily was shocking to people. The police and government didn’t help people to understand why this was happening. They just folded like a cheap tent.
And now everyone seems to be saying treatment, treatment, treatment. What’s wrong with that strategy?
If I was 10 or 15 years younger, I don’t know if I would have made it through the fentanyl time we have now. Treatment doesn’t work for a toxic drug crisis, it’s not the right intervention. Treatment places tell you that you have a chronic relapsing brain disease which means you’ll be at risk of relapsing for life. When you [relapse] you could die because the supply is so toxic.
There’s oceans of people who tried and it didn’t work. We have to think of them too, not just the poster boys who made it.
Would it be helpful to define what we mean when we say ‘treatment’ so we can distinguish between abstinence and opioid agonist treatment or therapy?
Right now when people say treatment they mean recovery, which is abstinence.
If you want a good treatment system, it has to be evidence-based and regulated. It can’t be a religious-based abstinence experience, which a lot of them across Canada are. Particularly if government is funding or subsidizing them at all, they should use the best evidence, not the Bible.
Methadone was a good substitute for heroin but now we have fentanyl and need something stronger for a substitute. That’s why we’re talking about Dilaudid and even prescription heroin now. We’re got to actually embrace these things and build them into treatment. The main goal should be to actually keep people alive and separate them from the toxic drug supply.
A lot of people say that’s not enough and I agree, it’s not enough to just be alive. But we all have to agree that a life is worth protecting to begin with.
Our system of laws and government created this danger. We decided not to regulate drugs and that anything goes. So now this is their responsibility.
What do people get wrong about public drug use?
People think all drug users look like people on the 100 block of East Hastings, but that’s not true. Drug users are everywhere and the coroner finds their bodies in all neighbourhoods, working all jobs and in all walks of life.
Visible drug use has a lot more to do with the housing crisis. We’ve created this place where people can’t afford to live. When you have nowhere to live you’re going to be visible. There’s a lot of research that shows people often start using after they wind up in that situation. Stimulants help them stay alert, guard their stuff and protect their personal safety.
In 2020 and 2021 we were organizing the Drug User Liberation Front and had a lot of doctors and researchers on our side.
But then the right started organizing against us and they’re connected to institutional power like Conservative parties. They’re well-funded and Post Media, the biggest newspaper chain in the country, is on their side. We can’t compete with that. They out-organized us.
What we would need is all the groups of people affected by this to join together to have a say in what happens.
We got universal health care because the working class, community groups and coalitions of people worked together. That’s how we got the weekend and only have to work for eight hours: because people fought for it.
Final question. Do you feel optimistic?
Hard question. As I was writing I thought of all the places I’d been in time. Right now we have the solution to this. In the ’90s I was living through another officially declared overdose crisis and the HIV crisis and there were no solutions. That’s huge.
We can go to the moon. There was a time when that was impossible too. And solving this crisis is a hell of a lot f****** easier than going to the moon. Cheaper too.
So I have some optimism. Drug users have started thinking of ourselves as agents in our own history. Not just broken, shameful people who get swept along under somebody else’s agenda. We’re starting to write our own story.
There will be people who are thinking, “oh my god, fascism is marching across the world, how can this guy be optimistic about anything?” But don’t underestimate the power of a common enemy to unite and organize people. Once the organizing gets going, once it catches fire, it’s amazing how things can change.
