As the opioid crisis continues to ravish communities across Canada, one cannot help but wonder who is actually benefitting from the war on drugs. Similar to a hammer landing on an unsuspecting nail, the legal system is swift to administer its forceful justice on average citizens but rarely connects when aiming at the pharmaceutical companies themselves. In Alisher Balfanbayev’s thought-provoking documentary Searching for Drug Peace, one observes how this sense of misguided priorities have led men like activist Dana Larsen to take matters into his own illegal hands.
Taking audiences to the streets of Vancouver, the epicentre of the overdose crisis in Canada, Balfanbayev’s film explores Larsen’s quest to curb the drug related deaths in his community by providing recreational and medicinal access to psychedelics and other banned substances. Obtaining a business license, which becomes a point of contention in the film as the city’s licensing classifications do not fit the products he sells, Larsen runs the Coca Leaf Café and Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary. A place where customers, as long as they are over 19-years-old and have ID, can purchase shrooms, coca leaves, LSD, vapes, etc. and get educated on the drugs in the process.
Unlike the legalized cannabis shops, whose goal are solely to make a profit, Larsen uses the funds he raises to help sustain Get Your Drugs Tested, a non-profit centre he started which offers free drug checking and fentanyl screening. Considering that so many overdoses are caused by fentanyl and other dangerous chemicals being mixed into everything, Larsen views the simple act of checking the purity of the drugs people consume as a vital life saver.
Larsen may view himself has a heroic disrupter fighting on the side of good, but his decades of civil disobedience in the cannabis legalization movement have not made him many friends on the governmental side of things. His detractors, ranging from politicians to authors to members of the community, believe he is merely adding to the crisis by creating more addicts.
The line between independent healthcare provider and dealer is further blurred by the fact that Larsen’s contemporaries have their own illegal dispensaries with even more controversial products. While Larsen sells items with minimal health risk, at least in his opinion, fellow activist and entrepreneur Jerry Martin sells cocaine, heroine, meth and MDMA in his shop.
Believing they are throwing a vital life vest to a drowning community, Searching for Drug Peace ponders at what point do the drugs that Larsen and Martin peddle actually become an anchor?
One of the fascinating aspects of Balfanbayev’s documentary is the way privilege not only dictates what laws are enforced, but also who has the freedom to defy them. Both Larsen and Martin are men who operate their businesses with little fear of the police actually doing anything. They know there is a chance they could be raided, however, the idea of going to jail never feels like a true reality. Larsen openly acknowledges at one point that, as a middle-age white man, his experience with drugs in general will always be different than people of colour living below the poverty line.
In exposing the long leeway that Larsen and Martin are given to be righteously defiant, Searching for Drug Peace forces the audience to constantly reexamine their own views about illegal dispensaries, those who are allowed to operate them, and the bureaucracy that allows the opioid crisis to remain in a static state. Speaking with paramedics, city officials, and those who were prescribed opioids for injuries where less potent medicine could have sufficed, the audience gets a broader understand of how vast the opioid crisis is.
Everyone in the documentary agrees there is a severe problem that needs to be address, but few seem to know how to best do it. Even when there appears to be the political will to make significant change, it does not necessarily mean there will be any actual action. Larsen’s approach may be unconventional and defiant, but there is clearly a need for his services in the community. A fact that hits homes when he points out that many incorrectly assume that his Get Your Drugs Tested non-profit is government funded.
Raising intriguing ethical questions for the audience to reflect on, Balfanbayev constructs a film that lingers in the mind. Both an urgent call for change and a sobering reminder of the lives at stake, Searching for Drug Peace shows that it will take radical thought and innovated action to truly turn the tides of the opioid crisis.
