Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  People were nonplussed. Are they trying to mess with our heads? Is this a trick?

  The addicts started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movements of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: “Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing. They began, haltingly, to find a new language to talk about themselves as addicts. We have certain inalienable rights: to stay alive, to stay healthy, to be treated as people. You are taking those rights away from us. We will claim them back.

  The mayor of Vancouver was a right-winger named Philip Owen—a rich businessman with sharp suits and sharper solutions. He knew how to deal with this problem: round up all the addicts, he said, and lock them away10 at the army base at Chilliwack. He dismissed calls for the supervised injection rooms, and the evidence that they had hugely reduced the overdose and AIDS transmission rates in Frankfurt, declaring: “I’m totally and violently opposed.”11 His solution was “twenty-five years, mandatory life sentence” for anyone selling drugs. “Bango, just like that. Just like that. Throw away the key.”

  This attitude ran right through Vancouver. A senior member of the Vancouver Police Department dismissed addicts as “vampires” and “werewolves.”12 When a serial killer started to murder the mainly addicted sex workers of the Downtown Eastside, the police did virtually nothing for years, effectively allowing him to continue. One policewoman explained to the subsequent inquiry that the attitude among her fellow officers toward these addicts was that “they wouldn’t piss on them13 if they were on fire.” Bud went on radio shows and callers told him: “The only good junkie is a dead junkie.” One asked: “Why don’t they just14 string barbed wire around the Downtown Eastside and let them inject each other to death?”

  In the middle of all this, a killer whale15 named Finna died in the Vancouver Aquarium, and there was an outburst of Princess Diana–style grief in the city. The deaths of more than a thousand addicts, by contrast, were stirring no response.

  Bud believed that it would take a dramatic gesture16 to jolt the city into seeing his neighborhood differently. So the group he and his friends had formed—now christened the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)—headed to Oppenheimer Park, one of the great green spaces of the city, and VANDU volunteers along with the staff of the Portland Hotel Society filled it with a thousand plain wooden crosses. Each cross represented17 a drug user who had died on the Downtown Eastside in the past four years. Their names were written18 on the crosses in black marker. As the crosses stretched across the neat lawns of Oppenheimer Park, it looked like the graves of the First World War—a great swath of lost love. Bud and his friends sealed off the surrounding streets with wire, and hung a vast banner that declared that these blocks were “killing fields.”19 They handed out leaflets20 explaining that overdose was the single biggest cause of death at that time in British Columbia for people between the ages of thirty and forty-nine.

  The traffic stopped and the streets were still, as if these deaths mattered, as if the loss of a thousand addicts deserved a pause. Gandhi said one of the crucial roles for anyone who wants to change anything is to make the oppression visible—to give it a physical shape.

  Bud wrote a poem titled “a thousand crosses in oppenheimer park.”21 It says:

  a question each one of these thousand crosses puts to each of us

  why are we still alive?

  These activists believed that if people knew—if they could see the addicts as human—they would care. Ann Livingstone, Bud’s girlfriend at the time of the protests, tells me they were working on the belief that “Canadians are decent people and they don’t know what’s happening to us and they need to know.”

  Addicts had been persecuted by prohibition since 1914 and none of them had fought back before. It hadn’t seemed possible. Bud wasn’t only creating a rebellion; he was creating a language with which addicts could rebel. It happened in Vancouver and nowhere else for a reason: in most cities in the world, if addicts came out in public and declared who they were and began to fight for their rights, they would risk being fired from their jobs, stripped of their welfare, and expelled from their homes. But the Portland Hotel Society—where Gabor and Liz Evans worked—had a policy of housing Vancouver’s addicts and refusing to throw them out. These addicts, alone in the world, had safe ground on which to stand.

  VANDU built a coffin and started to carry it to every City Hall meeting where drugs were discussed. On it, written in large letters, were the words: WHO WILL BE THE NEXT22 OVERDOSE VICTIM? They forced the mayor, Philip Owen, to see it, and to see the cost of his policies. They carried a sign, with words echoing right from the start of the drug war: DRUG USERS ARE PEOPLE TOO23!

  Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.

  For months, Vancouver’s officialdom watched this movement puzzled and repelled. After a while, the local health board figured it might be able to muffle this force and prevent it from embarrassing them with its protests by getting Bud to sit on the board24 for Vancouver—a powerful body that monitors all the health spending in the city and has more resources at its disposal than City Hall. At one meeting after Bud joined, a top health official for the province explained calmly that the AIDS rate—the biggest cause of death among Bud’s friends and neighbors—would eventually reach a saturation point in the Downtown Eastside and fall of its own accord, because the addicts would simply die out.

  Sitting there, carefully taking notes, Bud slowly realized what was being said. The authorities were nonchalantly declaring that he and his friends would all die, and then the problem would be over.

  Bud managed—after a lot of arguing and lobbying—to get some small funding for VANDU from the health board, over the protests of Mayor Owen, and the group’s members voted for a detailed agenda. Their first demand was simple: establish a safe, monitored place where people could go to inject their drugs. That would mean they would live, and not die.

  Across Vancouver, people were starting to look at the addicts in a different way. These people who had been lying and dying alone were now campaigning together, and often they seemed to have more dignity than the people screaming at them that they should just go away and kill themselves. Many people had believed what Bruce Alexander was taught by Batman and his dad—that addicts didn’t care about their lives, or about anything but their next fix. But here they were, organizing to defend themselves and each other.

  And the addicts were starting to look at themselves differently. Bud said, “People would work sixty hours a week” at VANDU. “To see people’s faces and how they changed—they saw, I have worth, I have value. I’m able to help somebody else. I’m no longer just what they call me in the newspapers.” And Bud discovered, as a side effect, something else: “If we’re off demonstrating, we’re having board meetings deciding what to do, and thinking about what our next actions could be, how is so and so doing, how can we help so and so because he got busted again—all that’s taking you away from just being totally fixed on ��I got to get a drug, I got to get a drug, drug drug drug.’ ”

  Ever since he was five years old, Bud had wanted to die. But now, faced with a barrage of abuse saying people like him are better off dead, he was discovering something deep inside himself—the will to live. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he had a home, and a community, and people to fight for.

  Bud’s story can be read as proof of Gabor’s theories that childhood trauma creates addiction, but he can also be seen as proof of Bruce’
s theories. Back in Toledo, when he stopped taking heroin and drinking alcohol but was still in an empty cage alone, he was chronically suicidal. Now his life was becoming like Rat Park, where he had friends and everything that gives life meaning—and he was finding his desire to use drugs ebbed.

  “That’s what I wanted—for my spirit to wake up. I didn’t just want to stop drugs and feel like shit, feel even worse,” Bud says. He wanted to be fully alive as a person making a difference in the world, and now it was happening.

  Yet even as the most active members of VANDU were starting to feel better about themselves, people were still dying all around them. “We had twenty-five board members,” one of the cofounders, Dean Wilson, says, “because you never knew who was going to be alive at the next meeting.” When Bud came out of one health board assembly, he watched a man methodically going through the trash in an overflowing dumpster, and he saw empty syringe packages floating and a pink blouse in a heap.25 And there were still the sirens, all the time.

  When you are confronted with historical forces that seem vastly bigger than you—like a war on your people that has lasted nearly a hundred years—you have two choices. You can accept it as your fate and try to adjust to being a pinball being whacked around a table by the powerful. Or you can band together with other people to become a historical force yourself—one that will eventually overwhelm the forces ranged against you.

  Bud chose the second way. He appealed for more and more people to join VANDU. He studied in the library to find out what the official definition of a public health emergency is in Canada, and discovered that Vancouver had never declared one. He started maneuvering for the health board to formally do it—and under his pressure, they finally agreed. This was now, officially, the city’s first emergency. Suddenly, VANDU was an international news story, and Bud was interviewed by everyone from the BBC to the New York Times. He wrote a poem explaining that “the war on drugs26 / is a war against hope and compassion and care.”

  Now that they knew there were addicts at the meetings and that helping them to survive was now an official duty, the city bureaucrats started to talk differently. It’s hard to dismiss somebody’s death as irrelevant if they are looking you in the face. Bud was able to persuade the health board to provide funding for VANDU, and they established a permanent center in the city—a big old storefront in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. They voted to use their public money to fly in experts from Switzerland and the Netherlands to explain how those countries had massively reduced the death rate of addicts by abandoning the war on drugs. (I traveled to Switzerland later to see how this worked.)

  But still the mayor, Philip Owen, was determined to block all progress. He actually declared a moratorium on all new projects to help addicts—in the middle of the emergency. VANDU cofounder Dean Wilson stood up at a city council meeting, looked him in the eye, and said “It almost seems like you are sentencing us to death . . .27 One [addict] a day is dying, and if one of you were dying every day—every day you woke up and there was one less person working in City Hall—I tell you, that problem would be solved in two minutes.”

  Owen stared on, pale, his face drawn, as if he couldn’t understand how this was happening. Who are these people?

  Bud won the City of Vancouver Book Award for a collection of his poetry. Normally, the award is presented by the mayor, but Owen refused to do it. Bud was beginning to despair. He had fought so hard—but the mayor seemed to be an insurmountable barrier.

  But then something nobody could have predicted happened. Embarrassed by this endless protest, Mayor Owen decided he had better find out who these addicts were, and how they could be shut up. They were from a different world: he had been a businessman for thirty years, and came from a privileged political dynasty in which his grandfather was the chief constable, and his father the lieutenant governor. He hadn’t ever known any addicts, so he decided to walk around the Downtown Eastside incognito, and sit with the addicts, and hear what they had to say.

  And this man who had argued that they should all be rounded up and locked away on army bases—this local Anslinger—was amazed.

  When he described his memory of it in 2012, he still seemed startled by what he had witnessed. “The stories you hear,” he said to me, “blow you away.” These people, he found, had had such hard lives. He remembered a fifteen-year-old girl on the streets, and shook his head. They’re not malicious, he came to see. They’re not bad. They’re just broken. So he arranged “an afternoon tea party” for “the most hard-core addicts” and sat and listened to them talk about their lives for hours. “The stories were just unbelievable,” Owen repeated, shaking his head again.

  Now that addicts were no longer phantasmagorical bogeymen but actual people with real stories, Owen realized he would have to learn more. He met with Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war. Friedman had grown up under alcohol prohibition in Chicago, where he concluded that prohibition causes more problems than the drug itself. The drug war, he believed, was the ultimate big government program—a criminal waste of money. Owen, who had always been a fiscal conservative, started to look at the cost of the drug war, and said to his fellow conservatives: “You want to balance the budget and get our fiscal health in shape? Let’s get realistic.”

  Mayor Owen knew that politicians were supposed to ignore the facts he had learned and keep pledging endless warfare. But he said: “I just get so sick and tired of bullshit.”

  He decided he was going to change the way he conducted his public meetings and press conferences about drugs. From now on, sitting on the platform with him, he had the chief of police to answer questions about crime, the medical officers to answer questions about health, and an addict from VANDU to answer questions about drug use and addiction. The mayor admitted he knew nothing about it: Why not have an addict there to provide a firsthand answer? With addicts by his side, he pledged to open the first safe injecting room in North America, to keep his new friends in VANDU alive, as the start of a wave of policies to protect addicts.

  “Just think about it,” he implored his fellow politicians. “Think about the country. Leave politics at the door.”

  The more the mayor looked and learned, the more he came to believe the prohibitionist policies were rotten right through. “Let’s start by legalizing marijuana, taxing it and putting it under the control of the federal government. It’s not rocket science. It’s a fairly simple proposal, and it works,” he said to me. “Let’s start with marijuana. We’re not talking about cocaine and heroin, [although] I hope we get there eventually. You got to crawl before you walk . . . Then we’ll come to the others and gradually go through the process . . . The evidence is in. The facts are in.”

  Other politicians told him he was mad—not because of the substance of his policies, but because of the politics. “People said—you’re going to get defeated, mucking around with a bunch of no-goods,” Owen tells me. In fact, he was reelected at the next two mayoral elections in landslide victories.

  When he and I met in a café on the Downtown Eastside, people interrupted us spontaneously to thank him for what he had done.

  But for his conservative party, it was all too much. They eventually deselected him for the next mayoral race in favor of a more prohibitionist candidate, who lost. His successor as mayor, Larry Campbell, was a strong supporter of the injection site, now named InSite. I walk there, past Oppenheimer Park where the crosses once spiked through the grass, and I find that on the inside, it looks rather like a hairdresser’s. As you enter, you are taken through the lobby, shown to your booth, and given clean needles. You inject yourself, while a friendly trained nurse waits unobtrusively in the background. The booths are small and neat and lit from above. Once you have injected yourself, you can walk through to get medical treatment or counseling or just to talk about your problems. Any time you are ready to stop, there is a detox center right upstairs, with a warm bed
waiting for you.

  Because of the uprising by VANDU, and a conservative mayor who listened to the facts, opened his heart, and changed his mind, Vancouver now has the most progressive drug policies on the North American continent.

  But many people had understandable fears about this experiment. Wouldn’t it open the floodgates to even more drug use—and therefore end up with more death, not less? It seemed like common sense. The local business owner Price Vassage28 reflected the opinion of many people when he warned at the time: “People say drug injection sites are going to save lives because there’s all these deaths from drug injections. Bullshit. People die of drug overdoses because they do drugs. If you encourage them to continue to use drugs, there’s a greater chance they will have a drug overdose.”

  In 2012, the results of a decade of changed policies came in.

  The average life expectancy29 on the Downtown Eastside, according to the city’s medical health officials, had risen by ten years. One newspaper headline30 said simply: LIFE-EXPECTANCY JUMP ASTOUNDS. The Province newspaper explained: “Medical health officer Dr. John Carsley said it is rare to see such a shift in a population’s life expectancy.” Some of this improvement is due to the fact that the neighborhood is no longer seen as a disaster zone, so some wealthier, healthier people have started to move in; but the Globe and Mail newspaper reported,31 using figures from the British Columbia coroners’ office, that drug-related fatalities were down by 80 percent in this period. To find a rise in life expectancy this drastic, you’d have to look to the end of wars—which is what this is.