This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Cool Zone Media.

Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.

Your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening,

there's people who fight like hell to stop those bad things.

Even if the work feels impossible, it's hard to quantify

because they do such amazing work. They don't magically solve all of the problems in the world.

And yet they do such amazing work. That's what this podcast is about. I'm your host Margaret

Kiljoy. And this is part three of a four-parter, six-parter, five-parter,

1,312-parter. I don't know how many parts are in this series. But this is part three of it,

and is a story about the birth of harm reduction as an idea and more importantly as a practice.

It's a story that, since it's being told by me, is going to focus on the direct

actionists who refuse to let the state and the law stand between them and saving lives.

They even refuse to let the non-profits stand between them and saving lives.

They're saving their own lives and other people's lives. It's a story that

takes place mostly in Vancouver, Canada, over there on the left side of the country. I suppose

there's a reason we use West instead of left, because I guess it depends on which map you're looking

at. The primary map projection, it's on the left side of it.

But there's a lot of problems with the primary map projections that we use.

Anyway, Vancouver, Canada.

This story takes place in a specific neighborhood, the downtown east side.

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