Tyler Smith snagged a chance to chat with a couple of Destroy Boys members about the Sacramento music scene, psychedelics, bootlegging, and washrooms for the Punks on Pizza Podcast before they blessed the audience of the Hollywood Theatre in Vancouver with their badass sounds.
On episode 14, Garth Mullins, host of the award-winning Crackdown podcast, drew on his experience as a drug user and activist to discuss harm reduction and the overdose crisis, the challenge of distributing a safe unadulterated drug supply, defunding the police, the positives and negatives of British Columbia’s decriminalization pilot, starting a grassroots drug user activist group, and his new band Low Dead Space.
After six months of operation and over 1 kg of substances provided through the compassion club, there have been no deaths resulting from the club. Further, members of the club are reporting less involvement in crime, less overdose risk, higher financial stability and increased control over their lives.
On episode three of the Woodstein Media Podcast, Eris Nyx, co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), talks about the episodic compassion club actions being done in Vancouver to make sure drug users have a safe, clean supply of drugs to prevent overdoses, changes she would like to see implemented regarding public education surrounding drug use, and the aesthetics of DULF.
In an era when we hear people, predominantly aging white men, whining about cancellation, it would have been easy to see one of the greatest Canadian purveyors of offence, the Dayglo Abortions, digging their heels in but that’s not where the new album hits the audience, and it hits hard.
D.O.A. are still delivering kickass performances of the seminal album Hardcore ’81 over 40 years after its release.
“Our goal each night is to go out and deliver the goods, and at this point, I think I’m going to be going a long time, but every town I get to these days, I go, ‘you know what? I will give it my all because this might be the last time I’m here.’ You never know. I consider myself a lucky guy in life, and I hope that continues and that good luck prevails with many other people,” says Joe “Shithead” Keithley.
This is the first feature in a three-part series diving into aspects of the opioid pandemic, the overdose crisis, whatever you wish to call it. It is a public health crisis which became exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Canada’s Public Health database, there was a 95 percent increase in apparent opioid toxicity deaths from April 2020 to March 2021, with a total of 7,224 deaths, compared to 3,711 deaths from April 2019 to March 2020. Since then, deaths have remained high.
These statistics were published in March 2022 and only went as far as September 2021, but by that point, 5,368 apparent opioid toxicity deaths had occurred. This is approximately 20 deaths per day. For a similar timeframe in the years before the pandemic, there were between 7 in 2016 and 12 in 2018 deaths per day.
I ended up walking away from my job on Valentine’s Day. How romantic was that? In the days before my resignation, it was announced that I would be receiving more awards for my writing. It was just a matter of waiting until April 29th to find out if I would get first, second or third place awards. Well, today was that day, and the Ontario Community Newspaper Association announced that Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrum-roll, please?
Punks on Pizza began as a way for Tyler Smith to get his band booked in his hometown of Peterborough, Ontario, but thanks, in part, to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been reinvented as a podcast where he chats with friends and heroes from his new home base in Port Alberni, British Columbia.
It’s a two-election year, at least in Ontario, provincial and municipal, and it’s time for people to be considering if they are going to step up to get their name on the ballot. Will it be the usual names people will have the option to vote for, or will there be new faces at the all-candidates meetings?
Joe Keithley has persevered in music for over 40 years as the leader of legendary Canadian punk band D.O.A. He successfully stepped into municipal politics in 2018 as a city councillor in Burnaby, British Columbia, and has proven that the will to keep trying can succeed in elections, even if you might be an outsider.
