Vancouver: Hippie City, Heroin City

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“Vancouver has been, since at least the 1880s, the alpha and the omega of drug use in Canada,” says Dave Hazzan a Ph.D. candidate at Toronto’s York University who studies subcultures of drug users from the 1960s to the 1980s. At a time when thousands of Canadians are losing their lives every year to street drugs spiked with synthetic opioids, Canada’s History senior editor Kate Jaimet interviews Dave Hazzan to uncover the roots of drug culture in Vancouver and other big Canadian cities.

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