Street Roots • May 25-31, 2018
Conversation
Page 4
Journalist Travis Lupick tells
Vancouver, B.C.’s, story in his new
book, ‘Fighting for Space,’ about the
grassroots movement that changed
how people looked at addiction and
saved countless lives in the process
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y OF A R S E N A L PULP PRESS
Travis Lupick (above) is the author o f “Fighting fo r Space: How a Group o f D rug Users Transformed One C ity’s Struggle with Addiction:
BY JOANNE ZUHL
E X E C U T IV E E D IT O R
o major city in North America
pushes the envelope on harm
reduction further than Vancouver,
B.C.
It started 20 years ago, when a group of
drug users forced the city to look honestly
at its drug problem and mounting death toll.
But rather than blanch with shame and
denial, they put convention to the test.
They formed a drug users union and
openly advocated for harm reduction efforts,
for the health and safety of users and non
users alike. In 2003, advocates and addicts
worked against political opposition to open
Insite, North America’s first supervised
injection site. Since then, other mini-sites
have opened across the city to provide a
safe place for injecting drugs, free from
police intervention, with clean needles and
water to prevent the spread of disease. In
later years, the anti-overdose medication
naloxone became freely available over the
counter and is now a common sight on city
streets. Police have reduced the number of
arrests for injection drug users in an effort
to drive it out of the shadows and closer to
health care and recovery.
And yes, it’s working.
Throughout those changes, illicit opioids
remained just as cheap and easy to access
as ever, however, the number of people
N
seeking detox assistance went up and the
numbers of users and overdoses in the
neighborhood went down, according to a
15-year-long study by the B.C. Centre for
Excellence in HIV/AIDS. And there was a
90 percent reduction in new HIV
transmissions between 1996 and 2012, the
study found.
Vancouver journalist Travis Lupick has
authored a new book about that era and the
grassroots movement that not only changed
how people looked at addiction, but also
saved countless lives. In “Fighting for
Space: How a Group of Drug Users
Transformed One City’s Struggle with
Addiction,” available in June, Lupick tells
Vancouver’s story, offering up its lessons for
other communities confronting the opioid
crisis.
At this time, there is no sanctioned
supervised injection site in the United
States, but authorities at Multnomah
County have proposed researching what
such a facility would mean for the
Willamette Valley, and this past November, a
local grassroots group called Safer Spaces
Portland launched its campaign in support
of opening a safe consumption site in
Portland. There are also grassroots and
political movements in Seattle, San
Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City,
Ithica and Boston to become the first city in
the United States to host such a facility.
Lupick is an award-winning journalist with
the Georgia Straight newspaper and has
written extensively about drug addiction and
harm reduction for The Toronto Star and al
Jazeera English. He’s based in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside, a notoriously gritty
neighborhood not unlike neighborhoods all
across North America.
In terms of Canada’s opioid epidemic,
Downtown Eastside is Ground Zero, a place
where addiction, poverty and infectious
diseases converge. But it’s also where a
revolution took root and grew into an
international movement to rethink
addiction.Lupick describes the Downtown
Eastside as a rough neighborhood with a
very strong heart and a strong sense of
community.
“There’s a concentration of poverty, a
concentration of mental illness, a
concentration of drug use, and in more
recent years, a concentration of social
services,” he said. “In the early 1990s, it
was a desert of services. There was not one
medical clinic in this community. In the
early 1990s it was an impoverished
community that was left entirely to defend
for itself.”
J o a n n e Zuhl: A n d then came the people
behind the Portland Hotel Society and the
See LUPICK, page 5