
AT-A-GLANCE
• CPDDW: People who use drugs.
• DUDES Club: Men, Indigenous men.
• TORO: Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel tenants.
• WAHRS: Indigenous people who use drugs.
ABOUT THE GRANTEE
“The Vancouver Community Coalition Against Prohibition and Overdose (VAN CCAPO) was a collaboration between the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War (CPDDW), the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society (WAHRS), the Tenant Overdose Response Organizers
(TORO), and the DUDES Club. It was made up of justice seeking community members of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DTES) and consisted of the grassroots peer leaders of the present, and the future. Although the coalition is currently unfunded and therefore inactive, its constituent membership continues to resist and fight back against the drug war and colonization, and to work together to create a vibrant, safe, and beautiful community in Vancouver’s DTES by keeping each other safe, housed, and alive. The membership of our coalition continues fighting for a safe supply of all drugs, for safer spaces for marginalized people, for our rights, for ending the war on drugs, and for the end of 400 years of colonization. To this end, despite our current lack of funding, we continue to collaborate informally in order to put grassroots organizations front and centre in the overdose prevention movement and to focus on continued clear intergroup communication, including building a strong community response to the ongoing crisis of prohibition based on self-directed and autonomous community organizing and solidarity.”
“Van CCAPO made all its decisions at a drug user led, monthly steering committee, which occurred in person at a central location in the DTES. All decisions were made with one hundred percent consensus by all of the groups’ representatives present. Decisions or issues that were contentious were discussed in person until resolved.”
Overview of Overdose Response Work
• Direct outreach to, and advocacy alongside, people who use drugs, including education.
• Storytelling and narrative production; this includes releasing resources for people who use drugs on how to survive the current genocide against them, and information that combats the current medical narrative that safe supply must be institutionalized.
• Drug user capacity building, resource development, and interagency collaboration; this includes best practice policy development and ongoing expansion and moderation of a peer-to-peer education curriculum.
• The production of research and information dissemination to the community as warranted and requested.