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8 street roots March 2, 2012 P H O T O : R E U T E R S /A N D Y C L A R K Lance, who asked not to use his last name, smokes m arijuana he is legally allowed to grow. Vancouver, B.C.'s drug revolution The Canadian city continues to push the envelope o f harm reduction and recovery Megaphone in Vancouver, B.C. is a sister paper with Street Roots through the North American Street Newspaper Association and the International Network o f Street Papers. BY BEN CHRISTOPHER vulnerable to HIV and Hepatitis B and C. These recent developments, which led oots, resistance, and survival in author and recovering addict Peter Ferentzy Vancouver’s war on drugs began to dub Vancouver “the most enlightened city when William Lyon Mackenzie King in North America,” are underscored by a came to Vancouver, B.C. in the spring of long and complicated history. It’s a history 1908. The battle, in some ways, continues that has been written chiefly in the to this day. Downtown Eastside, where the impact of The previous September, members and addiction overlaps so messily with the sympathizers of the newly formed Asiatic depredations of poverty, illness and social Exclusion League had descended upon fragmentation. It’s a history written by cops Chinatown by the thousands. Smashing and community organizers, by healthcare plate glass windows and ripping signs from workers and academics, by politicians, storefront overhangs, the rioters were addicts and survivors. It’s a history of finally repelled at Powell Street by club- overdose, epidemic and societal neglect, but wielding residents of Japantown. And so the also political leadership, community future prime minister found himself in activism, and improbable, tentative hope. Vancouver, assessing the damage claims of aggrieved business owners. The birth of harm reduction What King found in Chinatown was a thriving opium industry. Even more In 1952, something had to give. troubling to the deputy minister, the drug Since Mackenzie King had warned of was regularly being consumed by English- conniving Chinatown opium peddlers in speaking whites. Just a month later, a long 1908, federal anti-drug legislation had been title bill, now known simply as the Opium moving solely in one direction. In 1911, Act, passed through both chambers of stricter punishments were introduced for Parliament with minimal debate. This was opium users. In 1917, Vancouver’s Chief Canada’s first anti-drug law — the opening Constable, Malcolm MacLennan, was salvo in a war on drugs that continues to gunned down in an apartment shootout on this day. East Georgia. His killer was Bob Tait, More than a century later, Canadian drug described in the next day’s papers as a policy is still being hashed out on the “drug-crazed negro.” The incident helped to streets of Vancouver. Last September, the rile up local support for the flurry of Supreme Court of Canada ruled sometimes draconian anti-drug legislation in unanimously to allow Insite, North the 1920s. America’s first legal supervised injection “Up until the 1950s, if you were a regular facility, to keep its doors open on East drug user, you’d typically spend about a Hastings. Two months later, Mayor Gregor third of each year in prison,” says Vancouver Robertson joined four of his predecessors in historian Lani Russwurm. “You had a an open call for the legalization of revolving door between prison and the marijuana. Last month, Vancouver Coastal street. It was expensive, and it wasn’t Health began offering free crack pipes to stopping the spread of the drug trade.” stem the oral transmission of disease And so, in 1952, the Community Chest among users, whose crack use-related lip and Council, a precursor to the United Way, and mouth injuries can make them formed a committee and published a report S T R E E T N E W S S E R V IC E R on drug addiction. “Narcotic addition,” the report read, “is a medical problem.” The committee went on to call upon the federal government to begin dispensing drugs to addicts. A heroin user with a steady supply of heroin, the report argued, could live a stable, crime-free life and, once in the program, could be ushered towards rehabilitation. Today, says Russwurm, we would call such an approach “harm reduction” - the novel idea that the first priority of drug policy should be to keep people alive, safe, and healthy. But in 1952, “it was just a sincere and pragmatic attempt to deal with the issue.” Celebrated in editorials in both The Province and Vancouver Sun, the recommendations of the report were finally quashed by federal opposition. It would take another 40 years before this kind of thinking was again given so much official credence in Vancouver. “Canada’s most notorious underground rendezvous” Now it’s called the Downtown Eastside. In the years after World War II, it was called Skid Road. It might be difficult now to imagine the neighborhood as it was - a seemingly incongruous overlap of vibrancy and squalor. But the area still comprised the downtown core. There was the streetcar, the ferry terminal, the Interurban rail station; there was Woodward’s department store, the Pantages theater, and the library. At the same time,” says Russwurm, “it all coexisted with a seedy drug scene. It was much more discreet. It wasn’t in your face like it is now. But it was there.” The decline of the neighborhood came quickly. In the last few years of the decade, See VANCOUVER, page 9
