Stuerzbecher’s first day at the Portland was a case of trial by fire. Evans and Townsend had left town for the weekend and so Stuerzbecher was greeted at the hotel by a man named Raul wearing a white lab coat. “He said hello to me, handed me a set of keys, showed me where the mop bucket was, and said, ‘Okay, here you go,’” Stuerzbecher recounts. Raul left for the night, and the hotel was hers. “I was the only staff there for seventy residents. I had never set foot in the building before, and Mark and Liz were on a ferry to Victoria. And then Raul left. So I thought, ‘Okay.’” Stuerzbecher spent the next few hours exploring the hotel and attempting to introduce herself to its tenants. “I got sworn at a bit,” she says. But most people just said, ‘Hello, and nice to meet you.’”
Stuerzbecher was given the regular night shift at the Portland Hotel. “There was a group of people who were always up,” she says. “You had people running around the building.” There were safety concerns for a woman working the night shift alone at a time before cell phones were common. Stuerzbecher found the best way to address any potential risk of violence was to build relationships. She found at least one tenant on every floor who wouldn’t be too startled should she have to burst into their room in the middle of the night and take shelter there.
“Once I had this teenager who was flying on something,” she recalls. “God knows what. And he was chasing me down the hall with a skateboard trying to kick my head in. I had to be aware of my space and where I could go if something went sideways. Another time I was chased down the hallway by a guy who was a torture survivor from South America. He was high on coke. He’d ripped a sink off the wall and grabbed a machete and chased me down the hall. I was chased down the hall a fair amount by people with various instruments. So you wanted to make sure that you could be okay somewhere.”
In addition to drug abuse, many early tenants shared a history of violence that was almost always related to a mental-health issue and for which they had been judged not criminally responsible. These people came from the Forensic Psychiatric Institute (later renamed Forensic Psychiatric Hospital and commonly referred to as Colony Farm), located in Vancouver’s neighbouring city of Coquitlam. “We took loads of their people because nobody else did,” Evans says. “I think they only had about forty people on their caseload, and we had ten of them living in our building.”
Back then, the Portland was the only housing agency in Western Canada that was willing to offer these people a room. “We were housing all of these people that the system itself couldn’t deal with, and we had one staff member on at night with seventy people in the building,” Evans says. “It was insane.” It wasn’t until six years later, in 1997, that they were finally able to secure enough funding to keep a minimum of two staff members on at all times. “We had so many people with mental-health issues that were attached to the forensic system that eventually [the Forensic Psychiatric Institute] gave us some money,” Evans says. “They considered it a safety issue.”
The first year at the Portland was a learning experience for everyone. No one on staff was ever hurt, but Evans has stories similar to Stuerzbecher’s. “There was a woman screaming at somebody in the hallway,” Evans begins. “I had to ask her to leave. And she reacted to that badly and came after me, chasing me all through the building.” Evans raced down the stairs to her office on the ground floor with the woman running after her. “I tried to shut the door behind me but she shoved her foot in the door and grabbed my necklace. She started twisting it with her finger around her giant hand until I was choking. And I thought, ‘Oh, she’s going to kill me. This is actually a way I could die.’ It had never occurred to me before that a necklace could be used that way.” Evans laughs as she continues telling the story. “It was scary, but I did get the necklace off before she actually killed me. She was very psychotic, but she was actually a lovely woman and, of course, she came back to the hotel and it was all fine.”
Incidents involving a direct threat to staff were a relatively rare occurrence, and in the majority of cases, Evans, Stuerzbecher, and Townsend found they could rely on the relationships they’d established to return a disturbed tenant to a state in which they could walk them back from the edge. Evans recalls one such episode with a woman she was close to named Angela.
“One time, Angela pulled a knife on me,” Evans says. “I just grabbed the knife out of her hand and was like, ‘Angela, don’t be an idiot. It’s me. Don’t pull a knife on me.’ And she said, ‘Oh. Oh yeah.’ So relationships can go a really long way.”
To that end, Evans had the brave idea to take Portland residents on an annual camping trip. Stuerzbecher recalls the weekend from 1992. “The first year that we went, it was literally into the wilderness,” she says.
Bright and early one summer morning, Evans pulled up outside the Portland Hotel in a big minivan. Stuerzbecher and a couple other staffers similarly arrived with their cars, and everybody piled in for a drive more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) east, away from Vancouver and into the forest. Evans and Stuerzbecher only had two or three other staff members with them on that trip.
“You were taking fifty residents who are using various substances and who may or may not be on meds to stabilize their mental health into the middle of nowhere,” Stuerzbecher says. “So a few things happened that were somewhat distressing. But we dealt with them and they were always managed.”
Evans bought meals from McDonalds for everybody on the bus ride up, she remembers. And then the whole weekend was filled with activities that would normally be completely out of reach for anyone living on social assistance, addicted to drugs, or struggling with a mental illness in the Downtown Eastside.
Stephanie Blais remembers these camping trips as the highlight of each year. “We’d go go-kart racing, and horseback riding,” Blais says. “We’d go down to the lake and go inner-tubing, pulled behind a speedboat! It was a blast.”
There was one incident where the police did have to be called. A tenant with a history of violence had come along and, on the second night, had fallen into a psychotic episode. “He’s manic, he’s in the woods, he has a knife, and he’s saying he’s going to kill people,” Stuerzbecher recalls.
There were fifty other Portland campers there, plus another 200 members of the general public who were also sleeping in the park that night. So Evans took a van they had rented for the trip up to the gate of the park, where there was a payphone, while Stuerzbecher remained with the Portland campers. “This was pre-cell phones,” Stuerzbecher notes. “It took the police three hours to get there.”
The psychotic individual with the knife was found and taken into police custody without too much trouble, but his trip was over. By that point, it was approaching four in the morning, just about time for Evans and Stuerzbecher to wake up—had they slept—and begin making breakfast for everyone.
For just about everybody on those camping trips, however, the camaraderie Evans aimed to build at the hotel worked wonders. “I remember brushing Andrea’s hair one time, just sitting by the lake,” Evans says. “She was a woman who worked as a sex-trade worker, used drugs a lot, and was very, very uncommunicative when she was running around doing her stuff all day, often getting into fights with people. And there we were, sitting by the lake. She had gone into the water and I remember brushing her hair and having a really wonderful conversation. The fact that she let me brush her hair felt very intimate.”
Staff at the Portland sought to build relationships with every one of their tenants. But Stuerzbecher recalls one man she had trouble with named Max. “He was a heavy drinker, and he would come in every single evening blasted out of his mind,” she begins. “Then he would stand in the entryway of the building and try to tear off his shirt and swear up a storm and be extremely nasty to me.” Every single evening, she emphasizes.
“And he came on a camping trip. I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, of all the people, really, did you have to come too?’ But then I thought, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I actually here at the Por
tland?’”
That year, the group was camping at Manning Park, which sits on the edge of a picturesque lake surrounded by forested mountains. Stuerzbecher decided she would ask Max if he would accompany her on a canoe trip, and he agreed. They set off, but once they were up an arm of the lake, away from camp, it started to rain. “Pouring, heavy rain,” Stuerzbecher remembers. “Of course.”
An hour into the trip but still without having said a word to each other, Max and Stuerzbecher paddle under a bridge to wait out the storm. “We’re in the canoe, sitting under this bloody bridge,” Stuerzbecher says. “So we started talking. He told me about his life. We sat there and chatted for two hours, starting with his life story and then just chatting about the world.”
Two nights later, Stuerzbecher was back at the front desk of the Portland and Max was out somewhere drinking. When he returned to the hotel in the early hours of the morning, he resumed his usual routine.
“I’m on the night shift, he comes in, and again he’s drunk,” Stuerzbecher says. “He started to swear, he started to tear off his shirt, and then he looks at me.” Max froze, caught Stuerzbecher’s eyes with his, held them for a second, and a calm fell over him. He walked up the stairs to his room and never resumed his nightly lobby outbursts again.
The Portland Hotel became something of an oasis. The building itself was falling apart, but it was safer than the streets. The tenants whom Evans brought to live there no longer feared being robbed while they slept in a stairwell or harassed by police for using drugs in an alley. At the Portland, they had a room where they could be themselves, however difficult a person that might be.
14A Report on the Health of British Columbians: Provincial Health Officer’s Annual Report 1996 (Province of British Columbia, 1997), 120, C-51.
15Statistics throughout the book for drug-overdose deaths in British Columbia are sourced to the BC Coroners Service. http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/public-safety-and-emergency-services/death-investigation/statistical/illicit-drug.pdf
16Bernard Harcourt, “Reducing Mass Incarceration: Lessons from the Deinstitutionalization of Mental Hospitals in the 1960s,” University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper 335 (January 26, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1748796
Chapter 5
Rat Park
In 1970, Bruce Alexander was a rookie professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), located on a small mountain that overlooks Vancouver from the neighbouring city of Burnaby.
“Because I was new, I had to teach whatever they told me to teach—what nobody else wanted to teach,” he recalls. “So I had to teach a course called social issues, which, in those days, meant heroin addiction.”
It was a topic Alexander knew nothing about. So he paid a visit to the Narcotic Addiction Foundation of BC, a quasi-government institution that primarily existed to distribute methadone (before the task was passed on to pharmacies). He was put to work as a counsellor, seeing heroin addicts who were mostly from the Downtown Eastside.
“They would say, ‘I dropped out in grade nine and really, I’m not very good at school or anything like that, but this is a place where I belong,’” Alexander says. “I would go back up [to SFU] and tell those stories to my class.” For many students, that message resonated and sparked new ideas. Perhaps feelings of social isolation had something to do with drug abuse, some of the students hypothesized. Were these people using drugs because they were unhappy? If that was the case, there could be implications for treatment.
Other students dismissed the question outright, insisting they already had the answer. “Don’t you know about the rats?” they said.
A Skinner box is an uncomfortable place for an animal to live. It is small, keeps whatever is inside of it in total isolation, and can be equipped to deliver different forms of rewards and punishments. Subjects can be given a treat when they exhibit one kind of behaviour and an electrical shock when they perform another. A Skinner box (also known as an operant conditioning chamber) can also give the animal inside a small amount of control over intakes such as food and water with a button or lever that, when activated, will release, for example, a food pellet.
In the early 1960s, experimental psychologists at the University of Michigan developed a new application for the Skinner box. In addition to food and water, they added a device that allowed the rats inside to produce another kind of substance: narcotics. In this sort of Skinner box, there is a lever on a wall of the cage and when a rat pushes down on it, a simple machine releases a set amount of morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, or heroin, depending on the experiment. From a tube that enters the cage, the narcotic flows down to where it is taped to the rat. The drug then rushes through a catheter inserted straight into the animal’s jugular vein. The animal presses on a lever, and nearly instantly, it receives a flood of powerful and mind-altering drugs. It’s a cause and effect that even a rat figures out very quickly.
“The rats would just press and press and press,” Alexander says. “Sometimes they would starve to death while they were pressing the lever for dope. So they were very dramatic results.”
A few years later, similar results were observed in experiments with monkeys that were strapped into restraining chairs and given the ability to inject themselves with morphine. The rats and then the monkeys were obviously addicted. But why? For quite some time, nobody bothered to ask. The assumption was that the rats were addicted because they were doing drugs.
This was the pharmaceutical theory of addiction, or what Alexander calls the “demon drug” view. Experiments that appeared to support this analysis were repeated and, over the course of two decades, the theory gained widespread and firm acceptance among academics and then politicians across North America.
In a typical example of the thinking of the day, a 1979 paper by Avram Goldstein, a highly distinguished addictions expert and the founder of Stanford University’s pharmacology department, describes the power of narcotics observed in such experiments as irresistible.
“If a monkey is provided with a lever, which he can press to self-inject heroin, he establishes a regular pattern of heroin use—a true addiction—that takes priority over the normal activities of his life,” it reads. “Since this behaviour is seen in several other animal species (primarily rats), I have to infer that if heroin were easily available to everyone, and if there were no social pressures of any kind to discourage heroin use, a very large number of people would become heroin addicts.”17
Substances so powerful could not be allowed to freely circulate within a productive society. Earlier the same decade, on June 17, 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared that illicit substances like cocaine and heroin would be considered “public enemy number one.” The war on drugs was underway.
But Alexander’s conversations with addicts from the Downtown Eastside made him and a growing number of his students wonder if the drug itself was really where the story of an individual’s addiction began. “I was, at that time, not at all a rebel against the accepted theory,” Alexander says. “I thought it was probably true … But I thought of myself as a scientist, so why not test it?”
Alexander and his team got to work. They focused on the rats’ environment, the Skinner box, and strategized how to test whether or not different living conditions would affect an animal’s decision to press the button that injected them with drugs. At Simon Fraser University, the researchers constructed what they envisioned as the opposite of a Skinner box: a paradise for rats, or Rat Park.
Instead of a Skinner box’s steel floor equipped to deliver electric shocks, the animals at Rat Park enjoyed a thick layer of wood chips. They were given all the food and water they wanted as well as free access to rats of the opposite sex. There were little boxes the rodents could sleep in and running wheels they could use for exercise. One of Alexander’s students even painted a forest-themed mural that wrapped around the park’s entire perimeter.
Rat Park also included water tanks that were filled with liquid morphine. (The fr
eedom of movement the animals enjoyed at Rat Park meant they could not be implanted with catheters.) If the drug, an opiate that comprises the key ingredient in heroin, was the ultimate cause of addiction that previous researchers were sure it was, the animals at Rat Park would consume it with the same hopeless abandon they exhibited in the Skinner box experiments. Paradise would be overrun with desperate rat dope fiends. But it was not.
In 1978, Alexander and colleagues Robert Coambs and Patricia Hadaway co-authored the first paper based on his team’s experiments at Rat Park. It describes how a control group of rats kept in isolation in Skinner boxes was given the same level of access to morphine as the animals living together in Rat Park. To the researchers’ surprise, there were clearly observable differences in the two groups’ behaviours. “Isolated rats drank significantly more morphine solution than the social rats,” the paper states.18 “Housing conditions appear to play an important role in determining morphine self-administration,” it continues. “A possible explanation for the environmental effect is that for isolated rats, the reinforcement values of morphine ingestion was enhanced by relief of the discomfort [caused by] spatial confinement, social isolation, and stimulus deprivation.”
The paper was not greeted warmly, Alexander recalls. A few local reporters took notice, among them a young scientist and broadcaster named David Suzuki. “But in the larger academic world, it sank like a stone,” Alexander says. “No one wanted to hear it.”
However, the group felt it was on to something. They poked at the experiment from different angles. Sometimes the animals would enter Rat Park already addicted to morphine, sometimes the researchers would start the control group free of drugs. “It didn’t matter if they were tasting it for the first time or going through withdrawal symptoms,” Alexander says. “The more time you have in Rat Park, the less you like to drink morphine.”
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