Leif Gregersen on the educational work he does with the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta, and his own experiences with mental illness.

John McCormick, incoming executive director of Nanaimo’s new Systems Planning Organization explains how it aims to coordinate the community’s strategy on housing and homelessness.  

This month nearly one hundred people gathered at the Vancouver Island Conference Centre to discuss solutions to the toxic drug poisoning crisis in Nanaimo. Among the voices included on the episode are Snuneymuxw elder Yetta (Connie Paul), Central Island’s Medical Health Officer Dr. Sandra Allison, Community Action Team co-chair Sarah Lovegrove, Lanae Silva, Sarah Doyle, […]

Historian Chris Elcock discusses George Peters and the LSD Rescue Service. Peters founded the service in Chicago in the 1960s. It helped psychedelic drug users through negative experiences, and Elcock argues, was an early form of harm reduction.

Vancouver Island University History Professor Cheryl Warsh discusses gender, class, alcohol, and drugs in Canada since 1850. An essay by Warsh on the subject appears in the book “Pleasure and Panic”, published by UBC Press, which Warsh also co-edited.

In the first part of a series of conversations on stories from the history of drugs and alcohol, People First Radio speaks with Dan Malleck about pharmacists and liquor laws in Victorian Ontario. Malleck is a historian of medicine at Brock University and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock. He wrote about […]

In The King of Jam Sandwiches, author Eric Walters gets personal. The story follows 13 year old Robbie, but it’s heavily informed by Walters’ own childhood. It deals with themes like mental illness, poverty, and foster care, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for young people’s literature in 2020. Walters, a Member of the […]

If you’re on a low income, and have been living in the same building for years, what happens to you if that building gets torn as part of a new development? It’s a question Brian Doucet has been trying to answer. Doucet is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Change and Social Inclusion, and an […]

Because TikTok has so many younger users, alcohol companies aren’t allowed to advertise on it. But as Dr. Jessamy Bagenal recently wrote in British medical journal The Lancet, there are a number of non-traditional ways that liquor could be being promoted to youth on TikTok. She spoke with People First Radio to share what these […]

"We all have a role in calling for accountability from platforms"