Including the Chinese community: the forgotten history behind Vancouver’s drug crisis
The year 2026 marks a decade since the toxic drug supply and overdose crisis was first declared a provincial health emergency in B.C., and the 25th anniversary of International Overdose Awareness Day. Throughout this crisis, harm reduction measures and the efforts of countless frontline workers have been and continue to be critical to saving as many lives as possible, especially within the overlapping neighbourhoods of the Downtown Eastside, Hogan’s Alley, and Chinatown. But how does this work intersect with the many Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities who are connected to this neighbourhood? Who might be invisibilized in conversations about local drug policy, and who else might still be slipping through the cracks?
As people who work within and share deep connections to this neighbourhood, whether through the communities we serve or the personal relationships we hold, we often bear witness to the everyday realities of the toxic drug supply and overdose crisis. But we also witness the life-affirming work of harm reduction alongside it. From the many naloxone kits carried throughout the neighbourhood to the determination of countless colleagues, organizers, and neighbours in the community who advocate for access to resources like drug testing sites and safe supply, these remain necessary and life-saving efforts. There are many ways in which this work needs to continue and be expanded upon — including when it comes to understanding how Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities necessarily are, and always have been, a part of the conversation about it, too.
Discussions like these are complex, many of them with no obvious responses to the many questions they raise — and certainly not ones that we feel able to offer clear cut solutions or outcomes to on our own, either. That’s why we believe in the importance of learning and being open to having these conversations together, and to welcome our communities into these dialogues along the way. So we’re inviting you to explore them with us in “Invisibilized Intersections,” a series of three stories to highlight community perspectives on harm reduction and its local intersections with Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities.
For our first story in the series, Bing Yan shares insights from her years of experience as a researcher and former frontline worker in harm reduction and supporting Chinese communities in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her work is often rooted at the complex intersection of language and culture, access to healthcare and resources, and political participation. In the following guest essay, Yan traces the relationship between drugs, drug policy, and Chinese communities interwoven across history and migration to illuminate an often-obscured dynamic of race and culture that remains key to understanding today’s social landscape of the toxic drug supply and overdose crisis.
On Thursday, September 10, 2026, we will be hosting an “Invisibilized Intersections” panel event to bring the perspectives of these stories in deeper conversation with each other. Visit the event page to learn more, register or join the waitlist, and for further updates: Invisibilized Intersections - event registration.
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) has become one of the most visible sites of Canada’s overdose crisis. Since British Columbia declared a public health emergency in 2016, illicit drug toxicity has claimed more than 16,000 lives, with deaths heavily concentrated in the DTES. Yet one community remains largely absent from conversations about the crisis and its related services and policies: the Chinese community.
This absence is surprising: Chinatown is adjacent to the DTES and is administratively part of the neighbourhood. For generations, Chinese residents have lived and worked alongside people who use drugs, building communities, providing mutual support, and forming alliances across social differences. In my years of volunteering and researching in the DTES, I encountered many Chinese seniors who actively engage in drug politics to access social and healthcare services, advocate for affordable housing, and socialize with neighbours. However, their understandings of substance use and harm reduction are shaped by both their commitments to collective care and their everyday encounters with vulnerability and exclusion. While many agree on the urgency of saving lives, some remain uncertain whether harm reduction adequately addresses what they perceive as the harms of drug use to individuals, families, and communities. These concerns are grounded in lived experiences, including home intrusions and late-night harassment by intoxicated individuals, sanitation and hygiene concerns, language barriers that limit their ability to express themselves and participate, and experiences of racial stereotyping within the DTES that portray them as affluent outsiders, exploitative drug dealers, or “greedy stipend seekers”.
These tensions are not unique to Chinese residents in the DTES. Across Metro Vancouver, Chinese communities have strongly opposed supervised consumption sites and supportive housing developments, a housing model intended for those at risk of homelessness but often associated with drug use in mainstream discourse. In Burnaby, for example, some opponents have labelled supportive housing a “hard drug house”, framing drug use as a threat to public safety, family well-being, and community stability. Importantly, they have explicitly linked these contemporary developments to Vancouver Chinatown’s history of opium regulation and racialized exclusion, arguing that placing drug-related services in a Chinese-immigrant neighbourhood risks reproducing the stigma historically attached to Chinatowns and undermining immigrants’ hard-won upward mobility. These reactions thus reflect how histories of racial discrimination, colonial violence, and the criminalization of Chinese communities continue to shape how some Chinese community members interpret contemporary drug policies and public health interventions.
For Chinese communities in Canada, the history of drugs is inseparable from the history of racism.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese migrants were among the first groups racialized by Canadian drug laws, including the 1908 Opium Act which quickly imposed racial and class hierarchies on opium use. Chinese immigrants, mainly working-class labourers, were targeted for using opium for recreation, self-care, and relief from strenuous labour1. Media and political discourse portrayed Chinese men as a racial menace, claiming that their opium use threatened the moral purity of white society23. In response, Chinese community leaders supported anti-opium campaigns, partly to shield Chinese communities from further policing and overwhelming race-based attacks4. Opposition to drugs thus emerged from a complex historical context: public health concerns coexisted with struggles for racial survival.
In China, opium did not always carry the meaning it has today. Historically, it was used for medicinal and recreational purposes and was embedded in systems of trade, taxation, and urban life. However, after China’s defeats in the Opium Wars and the imposition of unequal treaties under British and Japanese imperial violence, opium became increasingly associated with foreign domination, national humiliation, and social devastation. Chinese political leaders and reformers came to portray opium as a major threat to individual well-being and national strength, making anti-drug campaigns part of broader efforts to protect society, resist colonialism, and rebuild the nation. This narrative persisted throughout the twentieth century, as successive governments continued to frame drug control as essential to public health, social stability, and national development. While the political meanings attached to anti-drug campaigns shifted over time, the devastating consequences associated with addiction, such as racial degradation, poverty, individual struggles, and foreign invasion, remained influential in shaping contemporary anti-drug narratives in China.
When Chinese migrants arrived in Canada, these ideas travelled with them across the border. Narratives about the Opium Wars, memories of national humiliation, and the social devastation associated with addiction continue to circulate within Chinese communities through interpersonal conversations, community organizations, and Chinese-language media, including newspapers and social media like WeChat.
These histories do not determine how Chinese communities understand drug use or harm reduction, as Chinese people hold diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives. However, they continue to shape the moral and emotional frameworks through which community members interpret drug use, addiction, and public health interventions.
For example, opium dens, historically portrayed as spaces of vice, racial danger, and foreignness, attracted both state surveillance and Orientalist fascination from outsiders seeking an exoticized and eroticized experience of addiction567. As a result, while public health workers may view a supervised consumption site in a Chinese neighbourhood as a critical, life-saving intervention, some Chinese residents may interpret such spaces as perpetuating the same racist stigmatization attached to opium dens.
Understanding this history should not require choosing between acknowledging past harms and supporting harm reduction. Rather, it calls for a more expansive understanding of public health—one that listens to the communities whose lives have been shaped by drug policies, including both people who use drugs and those who live alongside them. Chinese residents in the DTES are not simply “hard-to-reach populations” or communities defined by cultural barriers. They are communities whose relationships with drugs, addiction, care, and survival have been shaped by intertwined histories of colonialism, racialization, migration, and state governance. Addressing the overdose crisis requires creating space for these histories, fears, and lived experiences—not as obstacles to public health, but as forms of knowledge that can help us imagine more inclusive approaches to care. It is thus an invitation to reckon with histories of exclusion, rethink belonging, and ask whose experiences and voices are recognized in shaping the future of our neighbourhoods.
Footnotes:
Carstairs, Catherine. 2006. Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961. Vol. 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Brégent-Heald, Dominique. 2014. Leaky Borders: Smuggling Opium and Chinese Labour in Progressive-Era Motion Pictures. Journal of American Culture (Malden, Mass.) 37 (4): 393-403.
Carstairs, Catherine. 2006. Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961. Vol. 26. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Carstairs, Catherine. 2006. Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920-1961. Vol. 26: 31. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Light, Ivan. 1974. From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880–1940. Pacific Historical Review 43: 367–94.
Hickman, Timothy A. 2000. Drugs and Race in American Culture: Orientalism in the Turn-of-the-Century Discourse of Narcotic Addiction. American Studies (Lawrence) 41 (1): 71-91.
Berglund, Barbara. 2005. Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Racialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. American Studies (Lawrence) 46 (2): 5-36.
