What Really Happens At An OPS

by Nathan Caddell from the Georgia Straight. The door to Molson Over­dose Pre­ven­tion Site (MOPS) at Main and Hast­ings opens up to an alley­way abso­lutely teem­ing with people. Some are loud, some are quiet. Most every­one in the vicin­ity greets Simon Good­speed and John Nel­lany warmly as the pair shows me through the door­way.

Inside, things are mov­ing quickly. Staff move about busily while people of all ages are get­ting treated at eight tables. One older woman, in the middle of treat­ment, sparks a con­ver­sa­tion with me. Good­speed makes small talk with a staff mem­ber as Nel­lany quickly and quietly moves a cur­tain in front of a woman who has exposed her­self. On an aver­age day, the Molson site will see around 100 vis­it­ors.

Upstairs is a crammed office space. The lights are dim­mer. You can still hear most of what’s hap­pen­ing below. Pinned to the wall is a sheet of paper that tracks what day the pro­vin­cial income assist­ance and dis­ab­il­ity bene­fit cheques are sched­uled to come in each month. The facil­ity changes its hours to be open 24/7 on weeks when the money arrives.

“Wel­come to MOPS,” says Nel­lany as we sit down. Ori­gin­ally from Ire­land and a res­taur­ant man­ager before COVID hit, Nel­lany has been the project oper­a­tions man­ager at MOPS for almost six years.

“The people that we sup­port, the com­munity that we look after, are some of the most incred­ible people,” Nel­lany says. “There are some tra­gic moments, I sup­pose, and some very dif­fi­cult moments. But there are an awful lot of really great moments too, right? Ful­filling moments. I like to think that it evens out quite a bit.”

Good­speed, senior man­ager at the PHS Com­munity Ser­vices Soci­ety, which over­sees MOPS and other over­dose pre­ven­tion and safe con­sump­tion sites, feels sim­il­arly.

“The com­munity is really impress­ive and import­ant, and it’s been quite an hon­our to be able to serve it,” Good­speed says. “But also there are some very chal­len­ging and dif­fi­cult exper­i­ences and things to wit­ness. There’s a lack of com­pre­hens­ive ser­vices. It’s so thinly spread out, des­pite this ongo­ing nar­rat­ive amongst vari­ous com­ment­at­ors over the years that there’s been all this money that’s been thrown at the Down­town East­side.”

Good­speed is care­ful to not take aim spe­cific­ally at dif­fer­ent levels of gov­ern­ment. But he reads the news.

Earlier this year, the pro­vin­cial gov­ern­ment opted not to con­tinue its three-year drug decrim­in­al­iz­a­tion pilot plan after the polit­ical winds had shif­ted against the pro­gram.

The founders of the Drug User Lib­er­a­tion Front, who ran a com­pas­sion club dis­trib­ut­ing uncon­tam­in­ated drugs to 47 people, were arres­ted in 2023 and found guilty in late 2025 of drug traf­fick­ing.

this emer­gency is becom­ing nor­mal­ized – Simon Good­speed

At the muni­cipal level, Mayor Ken Sim and his rul­ing ABC Van­couver party took a strong stance against reopen­ing the Thomus Don­aghy Over­dose Pre­ven­tion Site in a new loc­a­tion at 900 Helmcken Street after the pre­vi­ous site on Howe Street in Yaletown shuttered in Janu­ary.

In late May, the province announced that it would not be pro­ceed­ing with reopen­ing the Thomus Don­aghy OPS via a state­ment from Min­is­ter of Health Josie Osborne. The state­ment cited “con­cerns from the city, local busi­nesses, and com­munity part­ners” as the reason for the decision. Mayor Ken Sim and ABC coun­cil­lors cel­eb­rated the news.

“I am aware of the dis­course and the way that this kind of issue has been framed, and I worry more about the way that this emer­gency that we find ourselves in is becom­ing nor­mal­ized,” Good­speed says. “Or that there are people decid­ing that they’re not really inter­ested in doing much about it.”

In total, there are cur­rently eight over­dose pre­ven­tion sites and safe injec­tion sites in the city, most of which are a few blocks from each other in the Down­town East­side.

But while gov­ern­ment offi­cials and many mem­bers of the pub­lic have seem­ingly thrown their hands up at the grow­ing street dis­order in the area, those on the ground like Nel­lany and Good­speed warn that the prob­lem with toxic street drugs is just get­ting worse. Restrict­ing the sup­ply fur­ther or tak­ing away safe sup­ply and drug-check­ing facil­it­ies could be cata­strophic.

Num­bers from the B.C. Cor­on­ers Ser­vice show 401 deaths in the province due to unreg­u­lated drugs between Janu­ary and March 2026—a little lower than the 442 that happened in the same three months last year but well above pre-pan­demic levels of 303 deaths in early 2019 or 279 in the first quarter of 2020. MOPS’ own num­bers show a massive increase in over­doses, in large part due to an influx of drugs being cut with animal tran­quil­izers like medetomidine and xylazine.

“Over any 12-month period within the last two years, on aver­age, our over­doses would be around 700. In the first four months of 2026 we’ve had 777,” Nel­lany says.

Nalox­one can reverse opioid over­doses, but when sub­stances are cut with other kinds of tran­quil­izers, it can res­ult in crit­ic­ally lower blood pres­sure and dan­ger­ously slow heart rates that the med­ic­a­tion can’t touch.

“They’re not using it on pur­pose—when the raw fentanyl product comes in, they’re find­ing it has medetomidine in it already,” Nel­lany says. “It seems to be a veter­in­ary sub­stance that you buy very cheaply on the black mar­ket, and it obvi­ously has some sort of a sed­a­tion effect on people. It’s really not good.”

These sub­stances are mostly new to Van­couver’s street drug sup­ply, but Good­speed notes that some Amer­ican cit­ies like Phil­adelphia saw an influx of medetomidine around 2023 and 2024.

“First, it was fentanyl being cut into heroin or whatever, and then it was, you know, after the fentanyl had sort of been there for a bit, ben­zo­diazepines star­ted being added

to the sup­ply as a way of extend­ing the high that people get from fentanyl,” Good­speed says. “Part of the way out of it is that you have to have some form of reg­u­lated safe sup­ply to remove the harms of medetomidine and xylazine, which makes your skin rot and causes all sorts of sec­ond­ary health prob­lems.”

Sim has spoken out against cur­rent harm reduc­tion mod­els and has implored the province to deliver man­dat­ory care beds. Premier David Eby announced in 2024 that the province was expand­ing invol­un­tary care, although advoc­ates like the B.C. Divi­sion of the Cana­dian Men­tal Health Asso­ci­ation say that the prac­tice is at best unproven and at worst can increase rates of death after detained people are dis­charged.

Threat­en­ing to invol­un­tar­ily detain people when there aren’t enough vol­un­tary resources avail­able for people at the scale and sup­ply that’s needed, Good­speed says, likely won’t change any out­comes.

“It’s disin­genu­ous,” he says. “There are a net­work of factors that are influ­en­cing the way that these things exist, and they need to have wrap­around sup­ports. You need super­vised con­sump­tion sites so that people see you from the begin­ning to the end, but you also need some form of reg­u­lated safe sup­ply. The pub­lic health data is sound, inso­far as the fact that these ser­vices work; they release drug-related harms. But it’s not one-size-fit­sall; every­one is dif­fer­ent.”

For Nel­lany, the chal­lenges are obvi­ous, but the job is also a reminder of where he came from.

“My dad said to me years ago, ‘If your mom and I passed away in a car acci­dent, this neigh­bour would raise you, and that neigh­bour would raise your sis­ters,’ ” he recalls. “And I would say, ‘How do you know that?’ He’s like, ‘Because com­munity.’ And the first time I’ve seen that out­side the little town in Ire­land where I’m from was in the Down­town East­side on my first day here.”