The B.C. Supreme Court has given the federal government six months to retool a federal drug law as it tossed criminal convictions against the founders of a Vancouver compassion club who “made it their mission to save lives by offering a non-medicalized safe supply of drugs.”
Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx, founders of Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front, had been convicted of possession for the purposes of trafficking last year for sourcing heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine off the dark web, then testing and selling it to members of their club at cost.
Justice Catherine Murray told a Vancouver courtroom of supporters and media on Tuesday that the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act’s section around the conviction infringed on rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Murray found the section of the act prohibiting possession for the purposes of trafficking “criminalizes life-saving conduct in a manner that undermines, rather than furthers, the law’s purpose of advancing public health and maintaining public safety.”
Kalicum and Nyx had sought a legal pathway from Health Canada to run such a program but were never granted an exemption.
“This challenge is about the lack of ability to obtain an exemption,” the judge said in her decision.
Kalicum and Nyx found there was no such “pathway” to permit a non-medicalized safer supply program, she said.
They were found guilty in November 2025, but the judge put the convictions on hold to hear their constitutional challenge.
“After losing countless friends, colleagues, and neighbours to the crisis, they resolved to take action to address the problem of the unpredictability of the drug supply,” Murray’s ruling says. “Their mission was to save lives by offering a non-medicalized safe supply of drugs.”
Murray found the act infringes on the rights guaranteed under Sections 7 and 15 under the Charter, although she has suspended the invalidity finding for six months to give Parliament time to implement a plan that would allow for a non-medicalized safer supply program to operate.
Murray said such a program is “urgently needed to save lives” in the face of the toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 18,000 people since the B.C. government declared a public health emergency in 2016.
The ruling said that running a safer-supply program was precisely what the applicants were doing and that formed the basis of the criminal charges against them.
Kalicum and Nyx, the judge found, “have borne the burden of bringing a successful constitutional challenge, doing a public interest service at considerable cost to themselves.”
“I think you should be very proud of yourselves, and it’s people like you who make a difference and you just did. So, go do great things. I have no doubt that you will,” Murray told Kalicum and Nyx during the brief hearing.
Murray said the defect in the legislation needs to be addressed with some urgency.
“It has been over 11 years since the toxic drug crisis was declared a public health emergency. It remains an emergency,” her ruling said.
The compassion club reduced the harms associated with the toxic drug crisis and didn’t negatively impact the community or public safety, the decision said.
There is no legal source of drugs available for the non-medicalized safer supply program, it said.
It said the government should be given “full opportunity to craft its own response to the issues identified in this ruling.”
The existing legislation is capable of a range of responses that address the defects, including legislative changes and regulatory reform, Murray said in the decision.
The judge did not read her full decision in court but concluded her remarks by lauding Kalicum and Nyx for the personal risks they took in their work.
Nyx declined to comment after the hearing, but Kalicum said outside court that he felt “excellent.”
“That’s all I think I’m going to say, but I think everybody felt really good,” he said.
Tim Dickson, one of their lawyers, said outside the courthouse in Vancouver that the ruling was a “vindication of what DULF was doing.”
“The court found specifically that their compassion club did save lives. It reduced the risk of overdose. It did not cause negative impacts on society at large. It was a beneficial, positive, evidence-based program that they conducted, and that they were arrested and prosecuted for implementing,” he said.
He said the case was about the federal and provincial governments “refusal to implement” that life-saving measure, and how federal law “blocks any effort” to implement that measure.
He said Kalicum and Nyx ran the program with no profit or benefit to themselves and “always with the sole intention of trying to reduce the terrible rate of death in this crisis.”
“This case should never have been brought to trial. They never should have been prosecuted,” Dickson said.
Dickson said an article published in The Economist magazine about DULF’s activities mentioned public funding, which went to operating expenses and not to source the dark web drugs.
He said the article was seized upon by politicians, including Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who Dickson said tried to “cash in on this debate.”
Dickson said the pressure culminated when the NDP government decided to cut them off, with Vancouver Coastal Health pulling its funding, and BC Housing evicting them from their site before it was raided by police.
He said the decriminalization of small amounts of drugs in B.C. and safer supply programs also caused controversy, which conflated non-medicalized safer supply programs with alleged diversion of prescribed safer supply drugs.
“But those issues all got swirled together, and drug policy just turned to a more conservative stance,” he said. “It’s clear that there was a lot of political backlash, and the political debate was not able to disentangle the issues properly.”
He told reporters that the Crown has 30 days to appeal the ruling.
The Public Prosecution Service of Canada said in a statement that “as in any case, following a decision, prosecutors review the judgment and assess any potential next steps.”
This report by Darryl Greer, The Canadian Press, was first published Sept. 29, 2026.
