‘It sure feels better to be fighting than to be doing nothing'

Hamilton Spectator

03-05-2025

Garth Mullins has spent years telling other people's stories — amplifying voices of drug users through his award-winning podcast Crackdown and organizing with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). Now, he's turned the lens on himself.
His memoir, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, is not a victory lap or redemption tale, it's something rarer: a grounded, unvarnished account of a life shaped by addiction, criminalization and collective resistance.
Mullins' motivation to put pen to paper was prompted by what he describes as a 'kick in the pants' moment — the 2022 Ottawa convoy protests.
'I realized the far right in Canada was getting very well organized,' he says. 'It was only a matter of time before they found us and targeted us.'
With that realization came a sense of urgency: to document his experiences as a heroin user, what he'd lived, name the forces at play and help others understand how these patterns repeat, often invisibly, in the everyday lives of people navigating survival in places like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
But Crackdown isn't a political manifesto. It's a personal reckoning — one that includes stories Mullins had never shared publicly, including the abuse he experienced growing up. These details aren't presented for shock value or sympathy; they're context. They explain how shame isolates, how stigma becomes internalized and how the structures around us — from education, to housing, to health care — often fail people long before they pick up a drug.
Mullins is careful not to frame the book as a recovery story.
'Life is messy,' he says. 'It's not just like we're sinners, we get saved, and then we're in the Promised Land.'
The narrative resists a clean arc. There are no big breakthroughs, no final triumphs. Instead, there's a steady refusal to give in to silence. That act alone becomes its own form of resistance.
Still, the book doesn't dwell in despair. What threads through its pages is a sense of connection… to others who've lived through similar things and to a growing coalition of drug users pushing back.
'The hope is that we have a movement. We have each other,' Mullins says.
He recalls a time before any of that existed — before VANDU, before people who used drugs had language to organize or advocate.
'We were atomized,' he writes. 'Contained in our own little cells of shame.'
That shift, from isolation to organizing, is at the heart of Crackdown. Mullins wants readers to understand that this movement didn't appear out of nowhere. It was built slowly, often in crisis, by a community that had already been pushed to the margins — people with little left to lose and no reason to place faith in the institutions that had failed them.
For Mullins, writing the book was a way to take stock. Over the years, he filled dozens of notebooks with fragments of memories, events and conversations. Turning them into a memoir was less about polishing a narrative than about finding coherence in the chaos.
'It was like when you clean up your apartment a little bit,' he says. 'It feels better. Doesn't mean you're not going to make a mess again tomorrow, but it feels better.'
There's also a sense of responsibility in sharing his story. After years of interviewing people for the podcast — often asking them to speak about some of their most painful moments — Mullins knew his time was coming.
'I felt like I owed the people I'd interviewed who shared their lives with me,' he says. 'And it was liberating... to not have that fear anymore, that someone could expose me and I'd get fired, or evicted or ostracized.'
He hopes the book reaches young people who feel as lost as he once did.
'If something like this had come my way when I was 22, it would have been really helpful,' he says. 'Saved a little time. Saved a few decades maybe.'
But he also wants it to reach beyond the movement — especially to people who see drug users as problems to be managed, not people to be listened to.
'I'd love it if the book could get out to all those thousands of people at [federal Conservative leader Pierre] Poilievre rallies,' he says.
A book launch at VANDU is in the works, but Mullins isn't planning a cross-country tour. With a newborn at home (gurgling on his shoulder as we spoke), his priority is staying close to family. Besides, the words are already doing the work. The podcast continues. The organizing continues. The story is in motion.
Crackdown the book doesn't offer easy solutions or pretend things are getting better. What it does provide is clarity — about what's happening, who it's hurting and why that matters.
'Even if we don't win, it sure feels better to be fighting than to be doing nothing,' Mullins says.
Crackdown doesn't ask readers to save anyone. It asks them to show up — not with crocodile tears, but with purpose.
Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs is published by Doubleday Canada and is on sale now.
Amy Romer is an award-winning writer and photojournalist based in Squamish and is Megaphone's Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.