Last fall, Aaron Gunn published his "documentary" Vancouver is Dying. It was an hour-long piece that was by far his most popular video ever—and it hit on all the points right-wing commentators make about the more progressive coastal cities like Vancouver, Seattle and San Fransisco. Crime is out of control, says he, and it's all because the Woke Mayor defunded the police and governments are flooding the streets with free drugs.
But... is it? Did he? Are they?
When Vancouver is Dying first came out, I watched maybe five minutes of the video and got mad and turned it off. I know a lot of other people who did the same. But in December last year, I was laid off from my position as a staff writer for the Burnaby Beacon (RIP) and New West Anchor, and I got some time to work on a personal project I’d been kind of working on for the Beacon but kept getting distracted from. Somehow, that project (still unpublished, still distracted) led me to watching Vancouver is Dying more closely, and I had a realization. While the video was tackled in traditional media, I haven’t seen much of anything—if anything at all—on its native platform: YouTube. I know there’s a kind of saturated market for YouTubers tackling the faults of alt-right media (PragerU and Jordan Peterson responses especially), but there’s been this growing backlash in particular to harm reduction that I think needs to be addressed on all fronts.
In particular, Vancouver is Dying represents a backlash to a set of things that simply haven’t even happened to any meaningful degree: safe supply and defunding the police.
The problem, you see, according to Aaron Gunn, is that we just don’t have enough cops and the freeloading unhoused drug users are running rampant with all their human rights and whatnot!
I got started on doing a YouTube video essay on Vancouver is Dying in January. At the time, I had a lot of time on my hands, but I’ve been more and more occupied with freelance work over the last few months, and it has kind of drawn out the process. I’m relieved and anxious and excited and terrified to finally put a final product out there, so I hope you’ll watch it and tell me good things like “Dustin, you sure are a brain genius!” or “By golly, Godfrey, you sure did it!” etc.
But it’s also a two-hour video, so, you know. Watch what you can when you can. It’s divided into parts, so you can pretty easily watch 20 minutes here, half an hour there. Or you can binge two hours of ME all at once. Either or.
Between this and tackling Adam Zivo’s piece, I’m considering changing my job title to Investigative Reply Guy. (A note on the Adam Zivo piece: I mentioned in my last newsletter that I’m considering doing a more full analysis of it, and I got mixed responses. As a result, I think what I’m going to do is something a bit more general—a resource on misinformation on the toxic drug crisis, the kinds of arguments you’ll see why they’re either not backed up by evidence or outright contradicted by evidence.)
Another thing.
The latest unregulated drug deaths report from the BC Coroners Service came out this week, and it’s once again grim.
Two hundred and six people died in April from unregulated drugs (that is, street drugs, not regulated drugs like safe supply or pain medications) for a total of 6.9 every day on average. Only seven of the previous 23 months saw more deaths than April.
It’s pretty hard to say exactly why there were more deaths in April. One of the biggest factors is always changes in the—again, unregulated—supply.
What’s more difficult to say is the role—if any—of decampment in the Downtown Eastside. Sarah Blyth, operator of the Overdose Prevention Society, said on Twitter that she believes the two are linked.
Vancouver does appear to be more affected this year than others, particularly when compared to BC as a whole. A third of the way through 2023, BC’s total number of deaths was just slightly over a third of the total from 2022. Vancouver, however, is a bit higher, already at about 40% of the total number of deaths in 2022.
What’s more, the BC Coroners Service also notes the place of injury that led to a given death, and outdoor overdoses are on the rise this year. While outdoor overdoses accounted for 14.3% of all unregulated drug deaths in 2020, that figure bumped up to 14.9% in 2021. It rose slightly again in 2022 to 15.0%, but climbed somewhat significantly to 15.8% this year.
And as Blyth noted on Twitter: “People hiding in the alley alone isn't helping the situation and leads to death from what I've seen over the years.”
A couple of weeks ago, she told me April’s cheque week had seemed worse than others, and indeed, statistics from Vancouver Coastal Health showed that to be true.
As I said, it’s hard to show conclusively that the two are linked, but there seems to be some evidence to back this up, particularly as research shows displacement to be a factor in death among unhoused drug users.