Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum, co-founders of the Vancouver-based compassion club Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), have succeeded in their constitutional challenge. This morning at the B.C. Supreme Court, Justice Catherine Murray announced that the co-founders' previous convictions would be stayed. In other words, DULF is free.
The group’s constitutional challenge sought to prove that a section of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) is unconstitutional. Criminalizing DULF’s compassion club, they argued, violated Section 7 and Section 15 of its members’ Charter rights.
Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits the state from depriving people of their rights to life, liberty and security of the person. Today in court, Justice Murray found that Section 7 of the Charter was violated. She declared Section 5(.2) of the CDSA unconstitutional.
She found that the same CDSA section also interferes with the Section 15(1.) Charter rights of DULF members, which protect Canadians from discrimination on the basis of disability (in this case, the disability in question is a substance abuse disorder).
While this ruling is undoubtedly a win, it is still unclear what it will mean for harm reduction advocates and programs in Canada. In recent years, the country’s harm reduction movement has grappled with funding cuts, closures and ongoing political blowback nationwide. All this while overdose deaths continue to climb.
Justice Murray has suspended the declaration for six months to allow Parliament time to rewrite federal drug laws. The decision can still be appealed and DULF continues to fundraise to cover legal costs.
DULF was co-founded by Nyx and Kalicum in 2020 as a response to Vancouver’s toxic drug crisis. Between January 2016 and March 2026, more than 57,000 people died of opioid overdoses in Canada; upward of 5,000 of those deaths occurred in Vancouver.
Wanting to offer drug users a safer supply, DULF formed a compassion club in 2022 and used donated funds to buy cocaine, meth and heroin off of the dark web. They tested these drugs to ensure no contamination, then sold them at cost to their 47 club members in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. The club ran for more than a year and, during that time, DULF collected data for academic research in order to study the effectiveness of this radical, non-medicalized harm-reduction intervention. Throughout that period, not a single club member died from an overdose.
At first, DULF’s work was welcome by mainstream bodies. While their approach wasn’t legal, it often involved deliberately attention-grabbing stunts, and they were operating with the full knowledge of the city and the police. In 2022, they even received funding from Vancouver Coastal Health Authority to conduct drug testing and other harm reduction services.
Nyx and Kalicum also attempted to secure a Health Canada exemption under Section 56.1 of the CDSA in an attempt to carry out their plans legally, but were denied. With the goal of saving lives, they continued their work anyway.
As conservative figures began to demonize harm reduction initiatives more broadly, DULF got caught up in the politicization. An article published in The Economist, along with other media coverage of the group, fueled a political firestorm which targeted DULF in particular. By 2023, the mainstream endorsement DULF previously enjoyed waned. Nyx and Kalicum were arrested in October of that year.
In court this morning, however, Justice Murray applauded Nyx and Kalicum for the work they had done to mitigate the harms of the toxic drug crisis, noting that DULF’s work didn’t have any negative impact of public safety.
"Mr. Kalicum and Ms. Nyx have borne the burden of bringing a successful constitutional challenge, thereby doing the public interest a service at considerable personal cost," Murray said in court, according to the CBC.
