Surrey Drug Users Union fights for better harm reduction in B.C.’s second most populous city

Get the best of Vancouver delivered to your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Every Tuesday, people who use drugs, along with their allies, gather in a Surrey library meeting room with a larger capacity than all of the city’s overdose prevention sites combined.

During the meetings, which are run by the Surrey Drug Users Union (SUDU), a peer-led advocacy group for people who use drugs, members discuss the needs of the community as well as new policies that they affect With the provincial election looming and the recent announcement of the expansion of BC’s involuntary treatment for addiction issues, they have a lot to talk about.

“People are dying rapidly from toxic and unregulated supply. In Surrey alone, we’re losing four to five people every week,” says SUDU board member Gina Egilson. “There’s a lot of festering pain and a deep desire for people to want to change the system.”

According to an August report from the BC Coroners Service, Surrey has seen more than 130 drug-related deaths this year, the second highest rate in the province after Vancouver.

SUDU has amassed more than 350 members and has existed in various iterations for more than a decade, but recently gained nonprofit status and expanded its advocacy. This year, the union established a South Asian Committee with meetings held in Punjabi to address what organizers identify as Surrey’s lack of culturally competent harm reduction services.

“In just a few months, we have over 50 members in this group, but when you ask politicians why there are disproportionately high rates of drug poisoning deaths in the South Asian community, they will tell you it’s cultural stigma” , says Egilson. . “Our South Asian members oppose this stereotype and make it clear that it’s not the culture that’s killing them, it’s the politics.”

One policy failure that SUDU points to is the lack of overdose prevention sites in the city’s densely populated Newton area, a community with more than 70% of the population from South Asia, according to 2021 data from Statistics Canada.

Surrey, a city that is geographically three times the size of Vancouver, has only three overdose prevention sites compared to Vancouver’s nine. All three sites are centered around the Whalley neighborhood and only one offers a smoking area, even though more than two-thirds of drug-related deaths in BC are caused by inhalation.

After an internal survey of its members found that the hours of the safe inhalation site, which closes at 9pm, were too limited, SUDU responded by setting up an after-hours pop-up tent used by 47 people during two nights last July.

“If we hadn’t been there that night, where would the people have gone?” Egilson asks.

Plans for a supervised mobile site in Newton were scrapped in the spring. Now, according to the Fraser Health Authority, there are currently no plans to expand hours or introduce new overdose prevention sites in Surrey.

“We have worked for two years to secure an additional location for a mobile overdose prevention site in Newton to support people in the Surrey community who use substances,” the Fraser Health Authority wrote in a statement . straight. “However, this process was unsuccessful.”

Since then, the health authority has made other efforts to address the toxic drug crisis. Last August, it launched an online portal offering free harm reduction supplies, including glass pipes, syringes, naloxone kits and fentanyl screening tests.

But just weeks later, the provincial government asked that the website’s offerings be scaled back to just naloxone and testing kits.

This was not the first sign that the NDP, which oversaw the launch of BC’s decriminalization pilot in January 2023, was changing strategies on drug policy. Late last year, new legislation that sought to ban public drug use was blocked by the BC Supreme Court, citing “irreparable harm.” In April 2024, the provincial government amended the original decriminalization rules through Health Canada to recriminalize drug use in public spaces.

That amendment is currently being challenged in court by a coalition of 13 advocacy groups, including SUDU.

“Instead of obeying this court order and listening to what the court had to say about how this law would effectively kill people,” says Pivot Legal Society attorney Caitlin Shane, “these amendments to this policy have basically recriminalized the possession of drugs in almost every public location.”

Shane identifies that the NDP’s returns to decriminalization are aimed at the growing popularity of right-wing rhetoric. This election season, the NDP is in tight competition with the BC Conservative Party, which is possibly poised to win the leadership for the first time since 1928.

Last month, both parties announced support for involuntary treatment for people who use drugs, drawing criticism from addiction experts and advocates.

“Both the Conservatives and the NDP echo and amplify the same harmful messages and are equally complicit in the loss of human life,” says Egilson. “It is disgusting that politicians are scapegoating people who use drugs as the cause of increasingly visible poverty when it is their own failure to act on the housing crisis.”

Surrey saw an estimated 65% increase in its homeless population between 2020 and 2023, according to a report by the Homeless Services Association of BC.

Shane and Egilson emphasize addressing Surrey’s housing needs as key to their harm reduction response, particularly as recriminalization targets street people more adversely.

“People need a roof over their heads. They need a place to call home,” says Shane. “Otherwise, you’re homeless and you’re on drugs, and now you can’t do drugs in public, and it’s just this cycle of criminal justice.”

Despite the bleak outlook for drug policy outcomes in the upcoming election, Egilson remains focused on SUDU’s success in fostering community for people who use drugs.

“For the two hours that we meet each week, they have a place where they really care about what’s happening to them,” he says. “They know they have an organization that supports them and amplifies that voice, that they matter.”