People First Radio – April 24, 2025People First Radio – April 24, 2025
People First Radio
Musician Opal Dar shares how disability, chronic illness, parenting, and poverty shape their debut album, while harm reduction nurse Corey Ranger outlines stark realities of BC’s toxic drug crisis. Together their stories highlight the strain of surviving under unsafe systems while still creating, caring, and speaking up.
0:00•24 Apr 2025
Art, Illness and a Toxic Drug Crisis: Opal Dar and Corey Ranger Speak Out
Episode Overview
- Disability, chronic illness, and caregiving can coexist with strong artistic drive, even when creating from bed on a very low income.
- Grants and community fundraising can make the difference between ideas staying in a notebook and becoming a fully produced album.
- Creativity often moves in cycles; long periods of silence do not mean it is gone for good.
- Stigma around disability, medication, and productivity can hide the value and capability of people living on disability assistance.
- The toxic drug crisis in BC is driven by a poisoned, unpredictable supply rather than simply “opioids” or “addiction”, making broad harm reduction strategies crucial.
“This is an Us problem, not a problem for others.”
What drives someone to seek a life in art while juggling disability, chronic illness, parenting, and poverty? People First Radio brings together two very different, but deeply connected, stories about survival, creativity, and the toxic drug crisis. First up, Sooke-based musician Opal Dar shares how their debut album, *Birds Hurting Birds Who Hurt Birds*, came to life at age 42 after a decade-long bout of writer’s block and a lifetime of caregiving.
Living on disability assistance and creating from bed, Opal describes the record as “a testament to the truth” of their life as a critically ill disabled artist.
With songs about dissociation, disordered eating, suicide, and emotional pain, they talk about lyrics that “land” months later, like little messages from a past self: “It’s as though I’m giving future me little remedies for my heart and my pain.” Opal walks through the practical and emotional hurdles of making art without money—learning home recording, writing a grant, and recording on Gabriola Island with fellow musicians while managing Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome.
There’s humour and mischief too, like using their own bone cracking as percussion, and a playful insistence that disabled people are not “hidden people” without value. The episode then shifts to harm reduction nurse Corey Ranger, who lays out stark facts about British Columbia’s ongoing toxic drug crisis.
Corey stresses that this is “neither an opioid crisis nor an addiction emergency” and calls it “an Us problem, not a problem for others,” noting over 16,000 deaths in BC and the growing role of benzodiazepines in a poisoned drug supply. He challenges moral panic around safe supply and criticises policies that focus on involuntary care instead of the actual toxicity of drugs. Together, these segments speak to anyone curious about art, illness, and safer responses to drug use.
It’s an honest mix of music, marginalisation, and public health reality—asking, in different ways, how people can keep creating and caring in systems that keep failing them.
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