The opposition B.C. United party says staff and patients at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital are being exposed to illicit drug use and trafficking with alarming regularity, in a claim that has received pushback from hospital staff.

The party’s mental health and addictions critic, Elenore Sturko, spoke in Monday’s question period at the Legislature about what she said were reports from nurses at St. Paul’s.

“A concerned nurse says, ‘We know they are drug dealers, and yet they come and go,’” Sturko said. “It’s truly mind-boggling.”

Sturko linked the reports to the ruling B.C. NDP’s decriminalization of the possession of certain amounts of illicit drugs under a three-year pilot project last year.

Dr. Seonaid Nolan, an addiction medicine physician at St. Paul’s, says there’s nothing new about substance use at that hospital or any other.

While St. Paul’s is home to a unique peer-run overdose prevention site focused on injection drug use, drug inhalation can be tougher to manage. She said patients are sometimes directed to a fourth-floor garden to inhale drugs.

She insists St. Paul’s prioritizes staff safety and is disappointed by what she called “rhetoric and false narratives” about the hospital and patients who seek care there.