‘This matters’: DULF and their recent trials explained

If you’ve spent time following news related to the Downtown Eastside in the last six years, there is a strong possibility that you’ve at least heard the name DULF, short for the Drug User Liberation Front.  

The small organization gained worldwide attention for their radical approach to harm reduction, namely giving away free, tested drugs to known drug users in the area through a combination of protest demonstrations and operating a small “compassion club.”

Now they are making news headlines again, but this time because of a series of trials that will decide the fate of DULF’s two founders. The case also carries the potential to radically alter Canada’s drug laws. 

Whether you’ve been diligently following the news surrounding DULF for the last six years or are brand new to the topic, Vancity Lookout wanted to answer some key questions about the organization and their ongoing landmark case. 

DULF, also known as the Drug User Liberation Front, was founded in Vancouver by Eris Nyx and Jeremy Kalicum in response to the toxic drug supply crisis. 

When the pair joined forces in 2020, Kalicum was a student in his mid-20s, pursuing his master's degree in public health. Nyx, in her late 20s at the time, is an artist and musician who had been working in harm reduction and social services for the better part of a decade. 

Kalicum and Nyx were propelled to act after they spent years witnessing the immense amount of death in their communities. They were critical of what they saw as government inaction and inability to mitigate the crisis of toxic drugs. 

After 2015, overdose deaths began to rise sharply due to the increased presence of fentanyl in the drug supply. Since it was first declared a public health emergency in April 2016, nearly 17,000 people have died from drug toxicity in the province. 

Starting in early 2021, DULF staged several protest demonstrations where they very publicly gave away small quantities of tested, clearly labelled, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine – purchased off the dark web – to known drug users in the Downtown Eastside.

The giveaways were designed to demonstrate a simple principle: When people know exactly what they’re taking, they don’t die of accidental overdose. During these early protest giveaways, DULF began conducting preliminary research to test this principle. 

This paved the way for several studies that the pair would later publish with researchers at the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, which ultimately demonstrated the effectiveness of their approach at mitigating death and other harms associated with the unregulated illicit drug supply. 

Around this same time, DULF began searching for legal pathways to open a compassion club for currently illegal substances. This included filing an urgent Section 56 exemption request with Health Canada in August 2021.

If granted, this exemption would have allowed DULF to run their not-for-profit compassion club to purchase, test and sell drugs at cost, to protect a small group of adults who use drugs in Vancouver from unintentional overdoses caused by the unpredictable street supply.  

More than a year and a half later, that exemption request was denied. DULF filed an appeal of that decision, which is still pending. 

A compassion club is typically a low-barrier, non-profit organization that supplies illegal substances to populations known to use drugs for the purpose of minimizing harm.

In the 1990s, marijuana compassion clubs operated illegally, providing medicine to AIDS patients. The B.C. Compassion Club Society, an early adopter of a similar model, still operates as a community-driven non-profit.  

The Drug User Liberation Front's Compassion Club and Fulfillment Centre operated from August 2022 to October 2023, supporting just over 40 members.

DULF’s was the first known compassion club of its kind to distribute tested, clearly labelled heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine of known potency at cost to its members. 

After DULF first began operations, it steadily garnered support at nearly all levels of government. 

While the project was not without controversy, DULF’s compassion club model received endorsements from Vancouver Coastal Health, UBC Department of Medicine, the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, and the City of Vancouver in 2021. 

Over the next several years, numerous organizations, including the United Nations, provincial health officers, human rights groups, and federal health experts, all recommended low-barrier options, like compassion clubs, to address the toxic drug supply crisis. 

DULF had been open with police and government officials that, while they were actively pursuing legal avenues for procuring a drug supply for their members, none was currently available to them. Given that, they sourced drugs from the dark web in the meantime.

However, political tides began to change, said DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. “We started to see misinformation and disinformation campaigns around prescription-based alternative programs and around DULF’s operations.”

In late 2023, DULF’s funding from the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority was cancelled.  “We saw the tides change so quickly… There can be little doubt that politics played an outsized and essential role in that flip from DULF operating for over a year and things going well, to suddenly they are being raided.” 

Larkin pointed to the influence that some media coverage had on the pivot in political support for the project, notably an Economist article published in September 2023. This story triggered what Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray called a “maelstrom” of Conservative political backlash. 

On Oct. 25, 2023, DULF’s office was raided, and Nyx and Kalicum were placed under arrest and later charged with three counts of possession for the purpose of drug trafficking. The maximum possible sentence for these charges is life in prison. 

Following a long trial that concluded in November 2025, Justice Murray found that Nyx and Kalicum were each guilty of all three counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking.

“In the judgment on the conviction, the court made it really clear that the judge heard loud and clear that they were not doing this for personal gain,” said Larkin. 

Even though the judge seemed quite sympathetic towards DULF, the goals of their compassion club were acknowledged, and the evidence showed that their compassion club was able to save lives, Larkin said that the question the judge was expected to answer was whether the pair were guilty of those specific charges. 

“Regardless of whether what they did actually improved public health and safety, that's not a legal basis on which a judge can say you're not guilty of the offence,” they said. 

However, according to Larkin, the circumstances under which DULF violated the law can be taken into account in sentencing. It also means that these circumstances can inform the judge’s analysis when she determines if it is actually the law that is the problem. 

If DULF’s actions were not motivated by personal gain, improved health and safety for those at extreme risk of death or serious injury, and were generally well-intentioned, Larkin said, “then you have to ask the question: Is there something wrong with the law? Because why would we be convicting people of something that was essentially to the public benefit?” 

However, DULF will not face sentencing until the most recent trial — a constitutional challenge — concludes.

A constitutional challenge is designed to ensure that all levels of government are consistent with the Canadian Constitution. The challenge can be criminal or civil, but must be against the government, not private institutions. 

In DULF’s challenge, which began in late November 2025 and ended just a few weeks ago, Nyx and Kalicum argued that the subsection of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act under which they were convicted violates Section 7 and Section 15 of their members’ Charter rights. 

Essentially, in this case, these rights outline compassion club members’ rights to life and security of the person, and to be free from discrimination and to have equal protection and benefit of the law. 

“They argued that there is no plausible way to operate [a legally authorized] compassion club and meet the needs of the community the way that DULF’s did,” said Larkin. 

By closing the compassion club, DULF’s legal team — lawyers Tim Dickson, Stephanie Dickson, and Kaelan Unrau — are further arguing that the government put its members at risk of overdose because they were left with no alternative but to buy drugs from the unpredictable and unregulated street drug supply. 

In Canada, two existing pieces of federal legislation work in parallel, Larkin explained. First is the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which essentially creates prohibitions on possessing and interacting with certain drugs and carries a criminal conviction. “That’s the place where people who are at risk of dying from unregulated drugs get caught up.” 

Second is the Food and Drug Act, which allows private companies to manufacture and sell new, regulated drugs after completing certain regulatory processes, such as clinical trials, which are often lengthy and expensive.

“The problem we run into,” Larkin said, “is that there’s nothing in the middle that allows us to reduce harm for people who are taking unregulated drugs because there’s no way to use that Food and Drug Act system to get those market authorizations and licenses.” 

What is happening in that gap is that tens of thousands of people are dying because “the drugs available on the street are unpredictable and can be very potent, and the pharmaceutical legal framework is totally inaccessible,” Larkin said. 

Essentially, the Crown’s argument was two-fold. One, they relied on a clause that Larkin said had “previously never been mentioned” in the Narcotics Control Act. 

The Crown claimed that DULF had access to legal means to run their compassion club by obtaining authorization for prescription-based programming, and that they “did not try hard enough” to obtain it. 

The Crown’s other argument is that since government decision-makers “decided not to issue that authorization, then there’s nothing wrong with the law,” Larkin said, and that what they should instead be doing is pursuing a judicial review of that decision to determine whether what the government decided was unreasonable. 

The court had a lot of questions for both DULF and for the Crown, in particular noting how “highly theoretical” the Crown’s arguments were, Larkin said. “It was very much based on, in theory, they could have [done this], rather than based on what is actually sort of happening on the ground.”

Ultimately, the question the judge must answer in the charter challenge is: Was there a reasonable pathway in the legislation to do this legally?

If the judge decides to rule against DULF’s constitutional challenge, then the next step would involve sentencing for Kalicum and Nyx.

While technically the maximum possible sentence for the pair is life in prison, Larkin said they are fairly confident that the judge would use her “fairly wide discretion” to determine what is fair and just in this specific case.

“The evidence is just so overwhelming that they acted in good faith,” said Larkin. “It seems almost impossible that they would receive a really harsh sentence.” 

Most likely, no. Larkin said that regardless of whether DULF or the Crown win this most recent round, the other is likely to appeal. 

If DULF loses the constitutional challenge, they will likely appeal on the grounds that the decision was unfair. Similarly, Larkin added that “there's absolutely zero chance that the Crown would not appeal [a decision in DULF’s favour].” 

That means that once a decision is made in January, we can expect the next round to go to the B.C. Court of Appeal, and then, almost certainly, to the Supreme Court of Canada. “I could be wrong, but I just don’t see any universe where [this doesn’t happen],” Larkin said. 

Given the appeals likely to be involved in this case, Larkin estimated that legal proceedings surrounding DULF’s compassion club and the review of existing legislation will continue until 2029 or 2030. 

If DULF is successful, then section 5 subsection 2 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act “will have to change,” said Larkin. 

They added that, to implement changes to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in response to a court decision, they suspect the government will also need to amend the Food and Drug Act, as the two pieces of legislation interact.

“If [Nyx and Kalicum] win, there is going to be a lot of work to do and some substantial changes to the law,” Larkin added. 

There are also implications for future compassion clubs and similar programs. If DULF is successful in its constitutional challenge, and in the likely appeals to higher courts, then not only would there need to be a change to this specific piece of legislation, but also a change to how future judges will be expected to conduct their judicial analysis based on this decision. 

“We live in a system called a common law system, which means what judges decide becomes [the authority] for what other judges decide… if another case comes up that has a similar context but doesn’t strictly fall into this category, suddenly that same analysis applies,” said Larkin.  

While this case wouldn’t automatically clear the way for a tidal wave of compassion clubs to set up shop, it could make it easier for compassion clubs that function in ways very similar to DULF’s model to gain government clearance. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Larkin added that this decision could “shake the foundation of the notion that prohibition … eradicates the demand for and supply of drugs at a street population level, or that it actually promotes health and safety in the way that communities need.” 

“I can’t walk down the street without saying ‘hi’ to someone who knows a friend or family member who has been impacted by the unregulated drug crisis,” Larkin said. 

“The government’s own documents say that unregulated drugs are vastly killing our friends and loved ones… so if we don’t want to lose [more people], this matters.”