Jerry Martin, 51, opened the store in Vancouver because he wanted to give people access to clean drugs and challenge Canadian drug laws.
The man who opened the first store in Canada openly selling tested heroin, cocaine, meth, and MDMA has died of an overdose.
Jerry Martin died in Vancouver on Friday, a few days after he was hospitalized due to a suspected fentanyl overdose, according to his partner Krista Thomas. He was 51 years old.
Although Martin survived the overdose initially, he remained unresponsive in hospital and his family eventually decided to take him off life support. He previously told VICE News he had been addicted to cocaine and had been homeless for much of his youth.
“Jerry believed that people were self-medicating their trauma and so long as they were doing that, they needed a safe supply to do it,” Thomas said.
“People are dying,” Martin previously told VICE News. “Especially now, they’ve allowed the entire province to do these drugs… But they’ve provided no clean, safe supply. They’re getting it from the same supply that everybody’s overdosing from.”
www.vice.com/en/article/m7b7p3/jerry-martin-man-opened-cocaine-heroin-dead