A drug-user advocate says the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) conducting over a dozen recent arrests in the Downtown Eastside has the potential to do more harm than good.
On Thursday, the VPD boasted disruptions made to what it calls a “violent criminal network” in the neighbourhood, including seizing cash and kilograms of illicit drugs and making 19 arrests in a single raid on an East Hastings Street property on July 17.
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Elected member of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and host of the Crackdown podcast Garth Mullins says it’s merely part of a troubling pattern that’s continued for over 100 years.
“VPD has been seizing drugs and having drug busts since 1908,” Mullins told CityNews.
“The more they take off the street, the more the street will simply replace it, but sometimes replace it with something worse.”
He warns that taking methamphetamines and cocaine off the street could drive drug users to consider more harmful opiods like fentanyl. He says increased enforcement around fentanyl itself has led to greater contamination in that drug stream, thereby leading to worse, more complicated overdoses.
Police say the 19 arrested suspects have been released for the time being, with criminal charges anticipated but not yet laid.
Mullins says arresting dealers has the effect of creating a vacuum in the local market.
“The street develops in equilibrium. But then when the police disrupt it, a whole bunch of people have to go to new dealers. A whole bunch of new dealers come in and they fight with each other for who’s going to take the patch. But it doesn’t mean that the drugs just go away.”
The VPD credits the July 17 seizures and arrests to the ‘Task Force Barrage,’ the City of Vancouver’s $5 million project launched in February with a purported focus on targeting organized crime, violent offenders, and street disorder.
Last month, the VPD published data suggesting that the rate of violent crime had fallen since the beginning of the year.
“Total crime decreased by 0.9 per cent in Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2024, from 10,012 to 9,921 crimes,” the report stated.
“Violent crime declined by 11.2 per cent in Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2024, with the number of cases dropping from 1,342 to 1,192 – the lowest number of violent crimes on record in Vancouver going back to the implementation of PRIME in 2002.”
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But Mullins says the new task force has changed the Downtown Eastside to feel like an “occupied zone.”
“It feels like you’re in a police state. And the city has just decided that it’s acceptable to carve a bubble out of the rest of the city where it’s a state of exception or something like that. I mean, it’s in the name, ‘Task Force Barrage.’ Who is the barrage against? It’s against the people.”
He says the city needs another solution, adding that police are the “wrong tool for the job.” He says people in the Downtown Eastside need housing, health care, harm reduction practices, and safe supply.
“We have to stop this cycle. We have to admit — from 1908 until today — we have to admit that century-plus record is failure,” said Mullins.
“It has not removed drugs from the street, it’s just made them harder.”
