Guy Felicella's fight for the truth: debunking Adam Zivo's war on "safer supply"
Guy Felicella is conducting a stubborn underdog campaign to defend BC's harm reduction programs from destruction by BC Conservatives
In the upcoming electoral cage match between Premier David Eby and BC Conservative leader John Rustad over BC’s drug policies, the warm-up bouts have featured a two-year series of online clashes between Guy “#Wedorecover” Felicella and National Post columnist Adam “StopSafeSupply” Zivo.
At stake in the battle: Rustad’s vow to “end heroin hand-outs,” effectively terminating the “safer supply” programs that researchers believe have saved many lives in BC’s battle against toxic drug overdoses. (The BC government does not hand out heroin; it does offer prescribed alternatives to fentanyl in a small number of cases.)
Felicella, (@guyfelicella), a survivor of six overdoses during nearly 20 years of drug dealing, homelessness, jail sentences and addiction, is a fervent harm reduction campaigner now marking eleven years of recovery.
Zivo, (@ZivoAdam), a “multi-faceted professional” who says he has advised the head of the Canadian Armed Forces, engaged in counter-espionage in Ukraine, and been a leading LGBTQ activist, is a prolific writer with a sharp focus on what he sees as the disastrous consequences of safer supply, what Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry prefers to call “prescribed alternatives” to illicit drugs.
Felicella believes that Zivo’s opinion pieces attacking harm reduction, amplified on social media, YouTube and in podcasts, paved the way to roll back policies that are desperately needed to save lives. He’s doing his best to set the record straight with his own barrage of tweets debunking, mocking and deconstructing Zivo’s columns.
Zivo claims his research has shown “that safer supply clients often divert (sell or trade) their hydromorphone to acquire stronger illicit substances, which floods communities with the drug and fuels new addictions.” (Zivo often links to his own work to validate his claims.)
To Felicella, Zivo’s focus on diversion – which Felicella sees as wrong but a necessary price to pay for life-saving benefits – ignores the deadly realities of the public health emergency, the role of organized crime, and the fact that many addicts require heroin substitutes like diacetylmorphine to have a real chance at recovery. (It also ignores the fact that organized criminals are increasingly producing counterfeit “safer supply” pills.)
“What nobody seems to keep talking about is that we're in a public health emergency,” Felicella said in a recent interview, “where six people die every day. Do we continue to do things that failed throughout the nineties and the 2000s and just stay there and let people die? Or do we try new things to try to reduce the harms that are caused by these crises?
“When you say ‘safer,’ it doesn't mean they're safe. It means they're safer than the drugs that are on the street run by organized crime.”
Despite Zivo’s claims, BC public health officials have stated that:
there is “no increase in Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) diagnoses amongst youth in any age group . . . since Prescribed Safer Supply was initiated in 2021;”
“some diversion is occurring,” but the extent and impacts are unknown; and
diversion to people at risk of drug poisoning may be of benefit, while diversion to people who would otherwise not use unregulated drugs is harmful.
As for prescribed supply “flooding” the market, fewer than 5,000 British Columbians of the 125,000 with diagnosed substance use disorders have had access to prescribed supply. (The other 125,000 or so users with undiagnosed disorders would have no access to safer supply.)
Zivo has claimed that prescriptions provided to people with diagnosed disorders increased the opioid supply by 30 per cent, a number apparently derived from the “morphine equivalent units” prescribed to people with OUDs as a share of the total prescribed supply.
But as Felicella points out, Zivo’s calculation ignores the harsh reality that a user consuming two or three “points” or $10 packages of fentanyl daily will be tolerating doses ten, 20 or 30 times higher with each dose than a regular medical patient would be permitted in an entire day. That massive tolerance requires an equally large prescription substitute.
What’s more, buyers in the illicit market never really know the strength of their fentanyl, produced in underground labs capable of churning out hundreds of thousands of pills daily. This tsunami of illicit fentanyl is apparently of no concern to Zivo.
Zivo’s efforts have now extended to his leadership of the Centre for Responsible Drug Policy, a non-profit that uses “multimedia digital content to influence conversations around addiction and social disorder” and declares that “Canada’s current model of ‘safer supply’ isn’t working.”
Zivo’s columns dominate the CDPR’s posts, and the centre has a strong BC focus. Its team includes biologist Collen Middleton, founder of the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association; Nanaimo lawyer Tamara Kronis, now federal Conservative Party candidate for Nanaimo-Ladysmith; and SFU professor Julian Somers, an addiction psychologist and harm reduction critic.
Who pays for the CDPR? The centre’s “donor transparency policy” says anyone who gives over $500 can remain anonymous, as can anyone who donates through “trivially mediated” corporate channels. No donors are disclosed. (Felicella has disclosed he is paid a “five-figure” salary as an addictions counsellor and some speakers’ fees, his sole sources of income.)
Yet Zivo did disclose last month, in a burst of journalistic transparency, that he provided an unpaid presentation on safer supply to lawyers preparing a class action suit for a Port Coquitlam man acting on behalf of two girls, one his daughter, who allegedly developed opioid addictions due to diverted drugs.
The suit, flowing from a case Zivo reported earlier, alleges negligence in providing “safer supply” by a range of federal and provincial health authorities. He highlights the case, helps launch the suit and then reports the lawsuit.
September’s column turned an obscure report on how to reduce overdose deaths in public toilets – more than 50 overdoses happen each month in bathrooms in BC -- into a “plan from BC to turn public washrooms into comfortable drug dens.” Jennifer Whiteside, minister of mental health and addictions, furiously denied Zivo’s story.
Even when Zivo is forced to correct or retract his claims, the potent links between his coverage, the political responses of BC Conservatives like addictions critic Elenor Sturko, and the growing public anger at public drug consumption have set harm reduction back on its heels.
Against Zivo’s research centre, columns, videos, podcasts and social media posts is Felicella, armed only with an X account, a sense of humour and a lifetime of lived experience.
Felicella triggered outrage and abuse last month when he retweeted a picture of a John Rustad rally in a Vancouver Island pub, congratulating “@Conservative_BC enjoying their drugs at a supervised consumption site, and I hope there are designated drivers in order to make sure everyone arrives home safely.”
Felicella is adamant that NDP investments in treatment and recovery are making a difference.
“We do have the Road to Recovery, and the recovery community centres that we’ve created through Vancouver Coastal Health. We’ve got treatment, we’re addressing public safety. We’re scaling it all up, moving in the right direction. This is going to take people struggling with their addictions off the street into treatment facilities.”
Felicella is resolutely non-partisan, however. He believes Whiteside should step up her efforts to tell the government’s story, but was quick to warn that involuntary care, as promised Sunday by David Eby, was a step in the wrong direction.
In the meantime, he does what he can. On September 9, Felicella was walking in downtown Vancouver when he bumped right into BC Conservative leader John Rustad.
“I said, ‘John, if you become Premier, that thing [the Road to Recovery] ain’t going away. Like, that’s the baby. You don’t get to cancel it because there are a lot of plans that have gone into that. It’s already funded.” Rustad said, “I’m just humbled to hear your story that harm reduction and recovery got to you to a place where are you today.”
Felicella added that Rustad asked if he could share Felicella’s story and name. “And, of course, I agreed.”
Felicella is not reassured. He agrees with Rustad’s commitment to treatment, but “I’m very scared because I think of it, in two ways. They get in, and they’ll burn it all to the ground in four years . . . Or you now, by some squeaky margin, the NDP pulls it out.”
Within hours he was back online, duking it out with Zivo. In this battle, my money’s on Guy “#wedorecover” Felicella.
One reader asks what Guy Felicella earns and how. His salary last year, according to a public source, was about $78,000. Here's his post on the matter from September 8:
I am NOT a “government shill,” PR, or paid lobbyist. I am not paid by any political party, or by any entity, to share my opinions. I do this on MY time.
Like most people who use X to express themselves, I also have a real job. I work in health care - supporting individuals who have substance use disorder - for which I’m paid a salary. I love what I do and I’m grateful to be alive to do it.
I call out misinformation because I’m sick and tired of people politicizing the toxic drug crisis. It’s not OK to USE people who are struggling, getting injured and dying at record rates to get yourself votes.