Legendary Activist Dana Larsen Opens Second Get Your Drugs Tested Facility In Vancouver
Legendary Activist Dana Larsen Opens Second Get Your Drugs Tested Facility In Vancouver
For the people.
Dana Larsen wants to help.
On Monday, December 4, 2024 the iconic and well-known cannabis and drug reform activist opened a second Get Your Drugs Tested facility in downtown Vancouver, right next door to one of his Medicinal Mushroom Dispensaries, just weeks after the cruel and surprising raid on all three of his illicit dispensaries, after years of operation and friendly relationships with the Vancouver police department.
The new testing facility, located at 245 West Broadway Avenue, comes fitted with a brand new Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) machine, a $60,000 investment (comparatively, the raid cost them at least $100,000 in losses) and will be operating for four hours a day to start, from 2 to 6 p.m., and will hopefully take some of the strain off of the original location on 880 East Hastings St , which, during busy times, sees around 100 people a day — though Larsen says people are never waiting more than an hour for their results.
The location also offers harm reduction supplies, he says, alongside safe use supplies and snacks and things that are left over from the next-door Coca Leaf Cafe.
“When we have sandwiches left over, we send them down to Get Your Drugs Tested and they give it out to people. We give out granola bars, snacks, and clean smoking supplies.”
Funded by his Medical Cannabis Dispensary and the Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary, Get Your Drugs Tested is doing incredible and important work within the community, while still operating outside the system — despite being pretty integrated within it in some ways.
“We’re also very integrated into the system as well with Health Canada, with provincial health authorities in different levels working with us. They recognize that we're the only ones doing this and that we have become the experts in this field. No one else on Earth is operating a program as busy as we are. Our database is the biggest one on the planet. And on top of that, two-thirds of all the drug analysis in British Columbia is happening at our location.”
This makes the November 1st raids against Larsen and his shops even more shocking.
“We would work with the police and other authorities,” he says, “and that always ended with a handshake and a very friendly attitude.”
While he definitely doesn’t want to see anyone get raided, it does feel “odd that they would start with us,” when there are well over a dozen psychedelic dispensaries operating in Vancouver, and “only one of them is funding Get Your Drugs Tested.”
That said, Larsen is the only cannabis and psychedelic activist who has been as loud and proud over the years.
“Only one of [the dispensaries in Vancouver] has a name and a person attached to it. I'm the only mushroom dispensary operator who goes into the news and does interviews uses my real name and my face and is an advocate for this.”
No other mushroom shop in Vancouver has been raided before or after, and the choice to attack Larsen’s shop when they’re doing all this “great work” is strange, and leads him to believe that it was “politically motivated.”
“I realized it's tied to the [Drug User Liberation Front] raid,” he says. The Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), is a compassion club organization that was buying heroin, meth, and cocaine off the dark web, get it tested at Larsen’s Get Your Drugs Tested facility, and sell it to their customers, a base of around 40 or so people. Suddenly, the organization lost their funding, got on the news, and were raided by the Vancouver Police.
A week after that, Larsen’s dispensaries got raided.
The connection?
“We were the biggest donors to that organization. I think we gave them around $8,000.”
And so the raid, Larsen says, “has little to do with what we're actually doing, and a lot to do with embarrassing politicians in the NDP [New Democratic Party].”
The Medicinal Mushroom Dispensaries reopened the day after the raids. Larsen was released from jail without charges just before midnight on November 1, 2023. Now, he’s focused on picking up the pieces after the raid, and operating the second Get Your Drugs Tested location.
A place like this is needed not just in Vancouver, but everywhere. In addition to helping further community safety in the drug supply, the presence of Get Your Drugs Tested also helps break the stigma around drug users and drug use.
“Your typical drug user is not, you know, a homeless person or an unemployed person or anything like that,” Larsen says.
“People tend to think, when they see someone who's homeless using drugs, they assume that’s what all drug users are like. But the people who are home, you don't see them using drugs because they're in their house.”
Average people come in to see if the product they’re buying is pure, to help them judge their dosage. Dealers come in to test 10 different samples. This, Larsen says, is good — dealers often don’t know what they’re selling, and they often get their product from someone else. If a dealer wants to be sure of what they’re selling and provide the best product, that’s good for the end user, and that works its way up the chain.
“I feel we're creating a sense of accountability in the Vancouver drug market that's never been there before.”
FTIR, or Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, which is employed in a series of machines at Get Your Drugs Tested locations, is the global standard for drug testing. It’s the most common form of infrared spectroscopy for drug testing, and it works by a using different light spectrums and wavelengths to analyze a substance. Tests can be done with very small samples, and people can get their samples back if they want to. It’s the same technology used by British Columbia’s provincial authorities when they do their own drug testing, though Larsen sometimes uses simple testing strips as an added layer of protection.
“If something is present in very small quantities, we can’t always pick it up. So there’s like a four or five percent threshold, so we use testing strips as well, in case there’s something there we didn’t pick up,” he says.
Amidst a busy month and an upcoming local hearing (scheduled for earlier this week, but cancelled last minute for spring 2024) on whether or not the Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary will get to keep its business license or not, Larsen remains positive and forward-thinking.
“Whatever happens, we will still operate [the dispensaries].”
For Get Your Drugs Tested, however, he has a different, more idealistic, end goal in mind:
“My dream is that we can close down because we’re no longer needed. Ideally, either the government is running a proper programme or better yet, drug users to buy their drugs with labels on to accurately represent what's inside. That’s probably a long way away.”
Sofie Mikhaylova is a drug, pop culture, and travel writer, among other things. Her writing has appeared in Vice, leafie, Psychedelic Spotlight, The Washington Post, Fodor's Travel, Double Dot Magazine, and more. Find her on Instagram, her newsletter Sofieland, her podcast Sofieland, and her website.
thanks for helping out the people!!!