She laughingly recounts how her youngest son would get annoyed with her for the habit. “He used to freak out at me because sometimes people smelled bad,” she says. “He could get really militant.”
Livingston’s mother, Dorothy, played a significant role in shaping her daughter’s activism. Today, Livingston acknowledges that influence but remains amused by its unlikeliness. “My mother was so straight,” she says. “I’d never even heard her swear.”
Among the lessons Dorothy instilled in Livingston when she was still just a child was a reminder that people can break the rules and should do so when a rule is unjust. In 1967, when Livingston was thirteen years old, she first understood the extent to which her mother was willing to ignore or challenge authority in instances when she believed it was wrong.
In the 1960s, abortion was still illegal in Canada and the United States. A Canadian coroner’s report from those years notes that did not mean that abortions weren’t happening; it meant that the law made it impossible for women to receive an abortion legally—and often safely. The daughters of wealthy families paid professional physicians to perform the procedure. But women of lesser means were generally forced to deal with the situation themselves or, if they could afford it, to pay for a “nurse” to help them. A “nurse” meant a woman who was usually not an actual trained nurse, but someone who knew how to perform an abortion outside the medical system with as little risk to the mother as possible. The coroner’s report states that the procedure often involved pumping Lysol into a woman’s womb. The mortality rate is described as “high,” the risk of infection greater than fifty percent.21
This was one of the situations for which Dorothy felt breaking the rules was required. She was working as a psychiatric social worker for a regional care provider on Vancouver Island called Saanich Mental Health. She crossed paths with young women who were struggling with unwanted pregnancies, and the meetings she attended placed her in a position to help them. She began “counselling” them, which meant connecting them with safer means of receiving an abortion, helping them obtain birth control, and assisting in other ways related to women’s health.
Livingston was barely a teenager at the time but vividly remembers answering the phone calls of young women asking for help from her mother. “She knew that women were doing illegal abortions, getting infections, and dying,” Livingston says. “So she had given out her home number so people would call our home and say, ‘I’m pregnant. Can you help me?’ They would call, and then my mother would meet them somewhere.”
This led the Victoria police to tap their phone, Livingston swears, recalling a clicking noise she heard a few seconds into every call. “When they used to bug your phone, you could hear noise on the line,” she explains.
Livingston knew that her mother was not a criminal by any moral definition of the word. “She was a professional with a degree who was mild-mannered, a lay chaplain in the Unitarian church, and respected in the neighbourhood,” Livingston explains. “That she would be defying the law to the extent that the police were tapping our telephone, that was really startling.”
It prompted the entire family, including thirteen-year-old Livingston, to grow acutely aware of state power and understand that not every exercise of authority is an application of justice.
“My mother’s approach was, ‘If there is a problem, let’s solve the problem. And if the law is in the way, we’ll deal with that,’” Livingston says. “If the law is in the way, you can ignore the law and do what needs to be done.”
21Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate Allegations Relating to Coroners’ Inquests (Government of Ontario, 1968).
Chapter 7
Back Alley
In 1994, Melissa Eror lived in what she describes as “the suburbs.” In fact, it was barely a stone’s throw from Vancouver’s downtown core—a nice neighbourhood consisting of family homes with a good school nearby, but it wasn’t the suburbs. Her idyllic description might have something to do with where she came from. In 1994, Eror was a wife and mother who spent much of her free time volunteering at her daughter’s elementary school. Yet she still considered herself a member of the Downtown Eastside’s down-and-out.
“I was a typical child of the hippie years,” she says today with the comforting voice of a grandmother. “I certainly enjoyed my time with different hallucinogens and pot and that kind of thing. At the time, we started hearing about things like opium and heroin. And I tried it. And, jeez, I liked it.”
That was the early 1970s. Eror was a teenager, and one thing led to another. Before long, she was addicted to heroin and doing what she had to do to support her habit. She recalls spending more than a decade that way, becoming a well-known resident of what was then called the Hastings Strip.
When she had her first child, a baby girl, in 1981, it was time for that chapter of her life to end. “I realized that wasn’t going to work,” Eror says. Beating the odds on which so many fail, she successfully transitioned from heroin to methadone, married the father of her child, and escaped the pitfalls of the Downtown Eastside.
But she kept in touch with friends there and maintained ties to the community. When more and more people began to die of overdoses in the early 1990s and the AIDS epidemic grew worse, she felt called back. In June of 1994, she attended a meeting at the Carnegie Community Centre.
Community meetings about the growing number of drug-overdose deaths were happening more frequently. This one featured the province’s chief coroner of the day, Vince Cain, who was there to hear from drug addicts for a major report he was researching about addiction in BC. The man who would soon succeed Cain, Larry Campbell, was also in attendance. He had taken a keen interest in the area’s drug problem. And so on a hot summer day, the Carnegie Community Centre was packed with drug users—people who normally were not even allowed to set foot in the building.
Campbell, today a senator who splits his time between Vancouver and Ottawa, recalls the energy in the room. “It was pretty sombre,” he begins. “It brought people back to their worst fears and to memories of people who had died. And they all knew people who had died. So it got pretty raw.”
Eror had heard the name Ann Livingston before, but the two women had never met. She spotted Livingston across the room at Carnegie with her two youngest boys, noticeable because they were the only children in the room. Livingston had them in a wagon that she wheeled back and forth during the entire meeting in an effort to keep them asleep or at least quiet while the sizable group of drug users took turns sharing stories of abuse and memories of friends they’d lost.
“I had been talking at the meeting, and she had been talking at the meeting,” Eror recounts. “The ones who had been talking sense—we all kind of noticed each other. It was all about the overdose deaths. And, finally, there was something that we could hang the issue on: human rights for drug addicts.”
The idea was revolutionary at the time, at least in North America. Eror remembers how it excited her. She gave Livingston her number with the feeling that something big was about to begin. “She said, ‘We ought to get together.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be really interesting.’ But I didn’t hear from her for about a year.”
In 1994, Livingston was living on welfare and her eldest boy had just been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Her economic condition led her to monthly meetings with a group called the Innovative Empowerment Society at a café called La Quena on Commercial Drive. Loosely led by a thirty-four-year-old man named William Kay, the group mostly talked about how to fight for better conditions for the unemployed and held workshops on how to navigate different government bureaucracies in which the poor so often find themselves lost. The meetings at La Quena were not about drugs, with the exception of a little beer and pot that sometimes accompanied Friday-night sessions.
In 1994, Ann Livingston (front row, far right) and Bud Osborn (sitting behind her) attended a meeting at the Carnegie Community Centre where drug users pleaded for government attention to
overdose deaths.
Photo: Duncan Murdoch
In a past life, Kay had practiced as a lawyer but was disbarred in 1989. (He shrugs off questions about those years. Livingston recalls rumours that it had something to do with a bank robbery.) His intellect was sharp, and he maintained an inexhaustible work ethic that proved a significant benefit wherever his attention turned.
“I was a revolutionary communist,” he says today from his home in Edmonton, Alberta. “Someone with a lot of anarchist sympathies. And the strategy that I was operating on was that you don’t just preach revolutionary politics to the oppressed. You’ve got to get involved in their actual day-to-day struggles.”
Kay was an agitator with several projects on the go. Addiction was not one of them, he recalls. “I was never someone who was, initially, passionately moved by the harm-reduction cause.”
But drugs and the overdose epidemic were primary interests of Livingston’s, and Livingston fast became a primary interest of Kay’s. He and Livingston met at those meetings on Commercial Drive and soon the Innovative Empowerment Society was headed in a new direction.
The same year, Livingston met Liz Evans. Livingston needed somewhere to store a shovel and other tools she was using in a somewhat futile effort to tidy up East Hastings Street. Livingston walked into the Portland Hotel one day to ask if they would mind if she stored the tools there. Whoever was behind the front desk that day said that would be fine, and so Livingston began to come and go from the Portland and soon enough bumped into Evans.
“Of course, the tools were stolen right away,” Livingston says. “I went back once and they were there, and then I went back a second time and nobody could find them.”
One night a few months after that meeting at Carnegie, Livingston and Evans were out together handing out clean needles. Their route along East Hastings Street took them into a few of the neighbourhood’s very worst hotels. “These were abandoned buildings that sat there for I don’t know how long,” Livingston recounts. “Your classic shooting galleries. There was actual shit and then humans and then garbage and people dragging mattresses through that and then sleeping on these mattresses. And at that point, they couldn’t get needles, either. You could just feel the HIV spreading. It clawed at your heart.”
The two women never became best friends. Evans found Livingston difficult to work with—an opinion shared by many—and Livingston never particularly liked Mark Townsend. But both Livingston and Evans recall an immediate sense of mutual respect and admiration for one another. They quickly found they could work together on a shared cause.
“She was very saint-like in those days,” Livingston says. “She had this hotel that was really, really difficult to manage and just falling down. It had an area with a TV where people would be laying on the couch in various states of disrepair. [Townsend and Evans] were really considered ground-breaking simply because they were nice to people.”
The desperation of the scene she found with Evans that night sent Livingston into action. In the weeks following, she spent hours every day writing letters, begging for funding for programs that might help drug users. Not by coincidence, Kay’s meetings at La Quena became less about rights for the poor and more about the Downtown Eastside’s drug problem. Before too long, a subgroup had formed within the Empowerment Society that followed its members’ interests from Commercial Drive to the Downtown Eastside.
Vancouver Native Health Society had a building on the 400 block of East Hastings Street that was left unused each evening. The group’s executive director allowed Livingston, Kay, and whoever else showed up to use a room on the building’s second floor. Their meetings were initially irregular, and they operated on a budget of just $100 a month, but a new group had taken shape. They called it IV Feed.
Around this time, Livingston got back in touch with Eror. “I had given her my phone number at that meeting, and now she was ready to do something,” Eror recalls. “She said, ‘You want to come together and talk and see if we can put together some plans?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ She got the meeting together, and I invited people from the street that I knew might want to attend. And some of them did.”
It was April 19, 1995. “The first meeting we ever held was on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing,” Livingston recalls. “Weirdest fucking thing.” Kay recalls that their objective was still vague. “Our goal was to get involved with local people’s issues, listen to what their issues were, and then help them fight for their issues. So we started organizing bi-monthly meetings of addicts themselves. We always tried, as much as possible, to let the addicts run it themselves. But it was like letting the mental patients run the asylum.”
Livingston similarly recalls how those first meetings were challenging. “We were completely overwhelmed with the people who came,” she says. But they stuck with the plan for self-empowerment. “We followed exactly the way you are supposed to do grassroots activism,” Livingston says. “You have your education thing, there is a discussion, decisions are made, decisions are recorded, and then word goes out that that’s what we’re doing this week. And then you go on to the next thing.”
Vancouver Native Health Society had been an early advocate for needle exchange. But its executive director, Lou Demerais, didn’t like the direction that Livingston and Kay were heading with the group to which he had given the keys to his second-floor boardroom. “If they were just using the space on a pretext and were going to start to allow people to shoot up and so on, that’s not why we [Native Health] were here,” he says. “They got that message and moved on.”
Even before IV Feed was off the ground, it was earning detractors. “There were a lot of people connected with different agencies that didn’t like [Ann Livingston], because she was very blunt and had a way about her,” Demerais says. “Maybe she interpreted that as, ‘Well, if nobody’s going to do it, then I’ll do it.’ And then off she went.”
Livingston describes the next step they took with IV Feed as almost inevitable. “There was a real sense that we were in the right,” she says. “You can’t be around that much death and think it’s okay to let it go on.”
At the time, John Turvey’s nonprofit, the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society (DEYAS), was distributing money to smaller groups focused on health initiatives. Livingston convinced him to share some grant money it had received from two more mainstream charitable organizations, Central City Foundation and the Vancouver Foundation.
IV Feed—or IV League, as in ivy league, as some drug users playfully called it—could now afford to move out of the Native Health Society’s boardroom, where they were no longer welcome anyway. Kay found them a storefront on Powell Street, near Oppenheimer Park in the Downtown Eastside. Livingston paid the first month’s rent of $650. And on November 15, 1995, IV Feed officially held its first meeting there. With a touch of black humour, they dubbed the place “Back Alley.”
At 356 Powell Street—their own space, a first for drug users, certainly in Vancouver and likely in North America—people could just hang out. Livingston called it a “clubhouse.” Nothing more.
Eror—who takes credit for the name IV Feed but notes she’s not positive it was she who came up with it—agrees that a supervised-injection facility was not the reason the group formed, nor was it why they moved into the space on Powell. “It started out as a basic, ‘What should we be doing?’ kind of thing,” she says. “And then that evolved, eventually, into Back Alley.”
They were activists, and activists paying rent. So IV Feed began to look for a more specific purpose. Why did they exist? It was a question that Livingston and Kay very consciously avoided answering themselves.
In those early days, there were two issues that drug users raised at every IV Feed meeting at Back Alley: police harassment and overdose deaths. A front-page story that ran in the Globe and Mail on May 4, 1996, describes how dire the situation had become. It notes that during the first four months of that year, sixty-four Vancouver residents had already died of illicit d
rug abuse. “That’s one death every two days,” the article reads, “and the city coroner thinks that there could be a record number of bodies by the end of 1996.” That prediction was correct. There were 151 overdose deaths in Vancouver that year, up from 116 in 1995. They accounted for a little more than half the number of fatal overdoses recorded across the entire province. The same article states that one in fourteen Downtown Eastside addicts was HIV positive, describing the neighbourhood as “an incubator for AIDS.”22
While it might have been news to the Globe and Mail’s national readers, the drug users who gathered at Back Alley already knew all of that, Livingston says. She recounts how their concerns turned to action.
“When you do this process, you say, ‘What are the issues? Why do we have those issues? And what are we going to do about it?’ We went through it step-by-step. They said that the main problem we have is that we need a place to inject drugs that’s safe. Why don’t we just do it here?”
Livingston recalls users who came to 356 Powell with injuries they’d incurred not from drug use but from police. People who had been caught in the act of injecting drugs were sprayed with mace. One user had the end of a needle break off inside their arm during a particularly rough encounter with a pair of officers. “We were trying to figure out how to deal with mace burns in ear holes,” Livingston says with exasperation. “So, yes, it was conscious, and, yes, we knew we were taking a big step. Now the place was an injection site.”
She gives a lot of credit to Kay as the individual who made Back Alley’s move. “William said the most important thing to do is that we should just rent a place,” she explains. “I would have gone slower. I wouldn’t have done that.”
A manifesto of sorts written by Kay announced the news to the community: “IV FEED no longer holds its meetings at the Native Health Clinic,” it begins.
Fighting for Space Page 8