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The article highlights the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, British Columbia as the core of the first narcotic drug laws in Canada. Topics discussed include neighbourhood history of resisting punitive and prohibitionist drug policy, the legal and social discrimination against Chinese Canadians, and the demonization of non-white and poor people who consumed criminalized drugs.

Abstract: In December of 2000, the City of Vancouver released its Four Pillars Drug Strategy in response to a serious public health crisis driven by illicit drug use in Vancouver. Following initial actions in the area of harm reduction and enforcement, in June 2005 the City of Vancouver developed its draft prevention plan titled “Preventing Harm from Psychoactive Substance Use”. The plan is based on a synthesis of international research and evaluation, examples of successful programs from other jurisdictions, and a community dialogue process. Its recommendations fall under five key prevention priorities, including reducing risk factors and increasing protective factors across the life course, community centred interventions, addressing impacts on communities, legislative and public policy change and regulated markets. Together, these prevention priorities form an integrated plan to prevent harm from substance use. This article provides a description of the process leading to the development of the plan and seeks to articulate its key strategies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: Harm reduction interventions reduce mortality and morbidity for people who use drugs (PWUD), but are contentious and haphazardly implemented. This study describes volume and content of Canadian newspaper coverage of harm reduction produced from 2000 to 2016.Methods: Searches of 54 English-language newspapers identified 5681 texts, coded for type (news reports, opinion pieces), tone (positive, negative, or neutral/balanced coverage), topic (health, crime, social welfare, and political perspectives on harm reduction), and seven harm reduction interventions.Results: Volume of coverage doubled in 2008 (after removal of harm reduction from federal drug policy and legal challenges to Vancouver's supervised consumption program) and quadrupled in 2016 (tracking Canada's opioid emergency). Health perspectives on harm reduction were most common (39% of texts) while criminal perspectives were rare (3%). Negative coverage was over 10 times more common in opinion pieces (31%) compared to news reports (3%); this trend was more pronounced in British Columbia and Alberta, a region particularly affected by Canada's opioid emergency. Supervised drug consumption accounted for 49% of all newspaper coverage.Conclusions: Although federal policy support for harm reduction waxed and waned over 17 years, Canadian newspapers independently shaped public discourse, frequently characterizing harm reduction positively/neutrally and from a health perspective. However, issue framing and agenda setting was also evident: supervised drug consumption offered in a single Canadian city crowded out coverage of all other harm reduction services, except for naloxone. This narrow sense of 'newsworthiness' obscured public discourse on the full spectrum of evidence-based harm reduction services that could benefit PWUD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]