The struggle for freedom and transformation is not a dream. It’s a fire that’s burning in real time. And the blaze is spreading.

- Kelly Hayes, Transformative Spaces

WHAT WE DO

We organize to dismantle death-making systems, processes, and policies and to build life-saving and life-giving services and resources embedded in communities.

All struggles for decriminalization, regulation, justice, and liberation are interconnected. Liberation requires solidarity-building across intersectional social justice movements. As an independent grassroots collective of harm reductionists, organizers, activists, and advocates from across Canada, we work to dismantle and transform policies that disproportionately stigmatize, target, criminalize, and incarcerate oppressed communities.

In the spirit of reciprocity, we support, raise awareness, and amplify harm reduction information, education, news and media, regional harm reduction service updates, calls for mutual aid, support for legal challenges, direct actions, and other intersectional social justice struggles – for example: labour rights, anti-war and anti-poverty activism, racial justice movement-building, Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and land defense, 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and gender-affirming care, disability rights, climate justice, and the rights of youth and young people.

Coordinate, organize, and galvanize the harm reduction movement across Canada to build solidarity and support our co-strugglers.

Plan and host regular monthly meetings for harm reduction organizers from across Canada to share regional updates, exchange resources, increase capacity, and strategize collectively.

Raise awareness and increase access to evidence-based harm reduction information and education through resource-sharing and knowledge exchange.

Circulate and spotlight calls for mutual aid, funding for legal challenges, direct actions, events, and other intersectional social justice struggles across Canada, Turtle Island, and around the world.

WHAT WE STAND FOR

  • Interconnected solidarity and collective liberation

    We recognize that our liberation is interdependent and interconnected to the liberation of all others. All social justice struggles are intersectional – interconnected solidarity brings immense power to our movements. We know that some people and groups disproportionately experience higher levels of oppression, trauma, stigma, and social and structural discrimination and violence. These communities are disproportionately marginalized, criminalized, and incarcerated for a variety of oppressive, intersecting structural and systemic factors. These communities include, but are certainly not limited to: 2SLGBTQIA+ and gender-diverse communities; Indigenous, Black, and communities of colour; people who use, sell, and trade drugs; people living with HIV and/or Hepatitis C; sex workers and people involved in survival sex; disabled people; and, people living in precarious housing situations, unhoused people, and people living in encampments. Those who find themselves at the complex intersections of multiple marginalized and criminalized identities are those who are the most targeted, harmed, and incarcerated. By building interconnected solidarity and social justice struggles, we organize to realize a world free of criminalization and oppression.

  • Transformative justice and healing justice

    Transformative justice recognizes that oppression is at the root of all forms of harm, exploitation, and violence. Transformative justice as a political framework and approach aims to address and confront those oppressions on all levels – an integral part to transparency, accountability, and healing in communities. Transformative justice seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. Healing justice refers to a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts, and minds. This framework builds political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation movements and organizations.

  • Bodily autonomy and self-determination

    Exercising bodily autonomy and self-determination are foundational, universal rights for all human beings. This means that each person has inherent human rights to be protected from attack, infringement, violation, or interference, and has the freedom to make informed decisions about their own body, health, reproductive care, and wellbeing. Ongoing settler colonialism, structural and systemic discrimination, and regressive health and social policies disproportionately target, restrict, and persecute criminalized, racialized, and stigmatized communities – robbing them of their bodily autonomy, personal agency, self-ownership, and self-determination. We see the universality of bodily autonomy and self-determination as fundamental to the liberation of all criminalized and oppressed communities.

  • Living and lived expertise of criminalization

    People with living and lived experiences of criminalization (e.g., criminalized drug use, poverty and homelessness, sex work, survival sex, living with HIV, etc.) are unequivocal experts in their own lives and in how policies and practices directly impact their daily experiences. We affirm that those with experiences of criminalization are the primary agents of harm reduction and seek to empower criminalized people to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their needs, desires, and wellbeing. Our organizing strives to be power-aware by continually challenging the intricate power dynamics and imbalances that exist within and across groups, organizations, and communities. We commit to ensuring the full and direct leadership and participation of people with living and lived experience of criminalization, and to asserting their expertise as fundamental to harm reduction movement-building.

  • Human rights, dignity, and safety

    We consider respect for and the upholding of inherent human rights, liberty, dignity, and safety of each person essential to all organizing work. We value all people and firmly believe each person has the right to agency, choice, and independence. This means nurturing a collective built on safety, solidarity, care, compassion, collaboration, and learning – allowing all to bring, be, and move through the world as their full self.

WE DEMAND BETTER

Between January 2016 and September 2024, over 50,000 people died from toxic drug poisonings. The loss of these lives exceeds the number of Canadian casualties lost throughout the Second World War.

This is a war on people who use drugs, and harm reduction is under attack. Life-saving programs are losing funding because of misinformation, disinformation, and lies. This is affecting many organizations across the country that have already been shutdown, or are barely holding on. Disinformation makes things worse by feeding moral panic, stigma, and intolerance – directly impacting the most targeted people in our communities.

Because of the drug war, some communities experience higher levels of violence. This includes – but is certainly not limited to – people who use, sell, share, and trade drugs; Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities; queer, trans, and gender-expansive communities; people living with HIV and/or hepatitis C; sex workers and other people who sell or trade sex; disabled communities; and people living in precarious housing situations, unhoused people, and people living in encampments. Members of these communities are treated unfairly, criminalized and left to die.

Governments continue to waste money and shift the blame. This strategy is wrong and distracts attention from the root causes of the toxic drug crisis: criminalization, extreme poverty, lack of affordable and available housing, inadequate universal healthcare, and state-sanctioned violence and punishment. Our communities continue to suffer. Governments continue to lag and backpedal. This situation is simply untenable.

We must demand better. We must demand justice. As a non-partisan, independent grassroots collective of harm reductionists, organizers, activists, and advocates from across the country, we work to change unjust policies.

These are our demands:

1. Decriminalize and Destigmatize

  • Decriminalize: We demand the full decriminalization of all activities related to drug use, all elements of sex work, HIV non-disclosure, poverty, homelessness, encampments, and use of public space.

  • Destigmatize: We call for the destigmatization of all criminalized and disenfranchised people and communities. This means unequivocally supporting policies that enable the inherent human rights, dignity, self-determination, bodily autonomy, and collective liberation of all criminalized and oppressed communities.

2. Establish and Expand

  • Establish: We demand the establishment of a regulated supply of pharmaceutical-grade drugs and for the legal regulation of drugs across Canada. This provides people with an alternative to buying toxic, unregulated drugs available via the illegal market. We insist on the immediate mass scale-up and expansion of access to prescribed pharmaceutical alternatives, as well as permitting non-medicalized forms of drug alternatives that are community-led to function within their communities without barriers.

  • Expand: We call for the expansion of a wide and robust continuum of accessible, voluntary, and non-coercive substance use, harm reduction, and mental health support services. These services and programs must be community-led and deeply rooted in abolitionist and liberatory harm reduction philosophies and practices.

3. Repeal and Dismantle

  • Repeal: We demand the immediate and full repeal of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). We believe that “reform” is simply not enough – only “non-reformist reforms” that address the root of policy failures and do not maintain the status quo are considered sufficient.

  • Dismantle: We assert that for justice and liberation to be fully realized, we must disentangle all death-making systems, processes, and policies (e.g., Correctional Services of Canada, Canada Border Services Agency, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, etc.), and instead, rebuild communities grounded in constellations of care and mutual aid, accessible community-led services, and transformative and healing justice practices.

4. Release and Support

  • Release: We demand the release of all drug war prisoners incarcerated under the CDSA and the expungement of all criminal records and charges related to this prohibitionist legislation.

  • Support: We call for the establishment and maintenance of a wide and robust continuum of accessible, voluntary, and non-coercive substance use, harm reduction, and mental health support services available to all prisoners before, during, and after their incarceration and release.

5. Defund and Divest

  • Defund: We demand the defunding of all policing and law enforcement services across Canada, and the redistribution of these funds as reparations.

  • Divest: We insist that all governments and institutions divest from all corporations and institutions that profit from the criminalization, marginalization, displacement, and brutalization of oppressed communities across Canada, Turtle Island, and around the world.

6. Redirect and Invest

  • Redirect: We demand the redistribution of funds away from law enforcement and policing institutions and towards the communities most harmed and impacted by criminalization and colonization.

  • Invest: We call on all governments and institutions to invest substantially and permanently to address the structural and social determinants of health.

This is a call for transformative justice, for humanity, and for lasting change. We demand better — because our lives, our communities, and our futures depend on it.