On one hand, the city's known to be ahead of the curve on progressive drug policy—always adopting the latest harm reduction practices and testing new addiction treatments. On the other hand, it's suffered more drug panics than any other Canadian city, and has a reputation for higher-than-average drug use and addiction rates. Vancouver is simultaneously a place the globe looks to for drug policy guidance, and a cautionary tale of recurring out-of-control epidemics.

Kerr says heroin and cocaine in particular often arrive in Vancouver first from drug-producing countries. "What happens, I think, is that often when the drugs arrive here, they're in their most potent form, and as they make their way to distribution networks throughout the country, they increasingly get stepped on, as they say—other fillers are added, and the potency tends to be reduced."

"I know for example I published a study around 2003, and at the time the available data from RCMP labs suggested cocaine in Vancouver was something like 40 percent more pure than the cocaine seized in Western Europe."

"Vancouver has always had a high diversity of drugs and a potent supply of drugs," Dr. Thomas Kerr, associate director of the BC Centre on Substance Use, told VICE. Kerr says many port cities around the world are known for "alarming" levels of drug use, in part because the dope is so strong.

This has led many outside Vancouver to assume new drug policy developments are somehow a contributor to the crisis—that safe injection sites and similar harm reduction practices actually encourage more users. But if you ask the doctors and researchers who have been studying the city's drug waves for decades, this is a categorically false narrative that goes against a near century of history. Experts told VICE Vancouver has long been an international drug distribution hub, and that reactionary criminalization efforts, as well as failing social policies, have created a concentrated underclass of marginalized drug users.

Neither of these reputations are new, of course. Vancouver was the first city in North America to open a supervised injection site in 2003. And its history of drug panics spans a full century.

This potency theory might partially explain why drugs have had such a devastating impact on Vancouver, but Kerr admits it isn't the whole story. Why, for example, hasn't Seattle also become "ground zero" for opioid overdoses? (Seattle, it turns out, is quickly catching up to Vancouver, with a record-setting 345 deaths in 2016. Between 2012 and 2016, Metro Vancouver including Surrey saw 1,031 ODs, compared with 995 in Seattle.)

To understand how we got here, according to University of Guelph researcher Catherine Carstairs, you have to look back to Vancouver's first recorded drug panic in the 1920s. Drugs like morphine, cocaine and opium got an early start in the city before any of these were ever made illegal because of its position as an international port. "The supply chains were established and they kept coming," says Carstairs, the author of Jailed for Possession.

Carstairs told VICE Canada's early drug prohibition laws grew out of a xenophobic panic rocking the West Coast. At the time "opium dens" were breathlessly reported as a scourge on (white) society, and politicians brought in laws that basically aimed to punish and ostracize the Chinese. Police began raiding dens and deporting immigrants.

"The drug panic was not so much about the drugs and really about finding an excuse to keep the Chinese out of Vancouver," Carstairs told VICE. Emily Murphy of Maclean's, one of Canada's best-known writers of the era, painted Chinese people as villains somehow taking advantage of white "victims." At the time, Carstairs says media played a "huge" role in creating a sense of panic, demonizing drug use along the way. "The Vancouver Daily World was clearly selling papers on the drug panic it created," Carstairs told VICE. "It featured drug stories on front pages for weeks on end."