We recognized the need for a full time meeting space so—Yes, we’re back in the alley—in name only, thank goodness. One of the main reasons for having rented a space was to ensure that there would be at least one spot on this earth where we would be welcome, other than the streets and back alleys of the downtown eastside and as you know we are not exactly accepted in the alleys and streets, only tolerated. We’ve had our ups and downs and will probably experience more but as these sorts of things go we’ve been quite lucky. If you haven’t been to a meeting, they are still held every Tuesday at 6 pm, with a light supper following. We’re at 356 E. Powell St.
Word went out that cocaine and heroin users could inject drugs there without having to fear they would die of an overdose alone on the street.
Back Alley was a big step up from a literal back alley but it still wasn’t much to look at.
“A bunch of fucking anarchists had been in there before,” Livingston says. “The place was just a pile of rubble. People would come in later and say it was really squalid. And I’d think, ‘Wow, we should have taken some before pictures.’”
It was a fairly large space. At the front, near windows looking out onto the street, there was a desk and a table people could sit around. A bit further back, there were two rows of couches that faced one another. The very back of the storefront had been sectioned off by a previous tenant and divided into a series of dark rooms for photographic development. Before long, IV Feed members covered the walls with murals, poetry, and whatever else came to mind.
Twice a week, Livingston led evening meetings there. Always wearing one of her trademark flower dresses paired with combat boots, she stood at the front of the group and scrambled to write on big sheets of paper as much as she could of what was said. It was semi-official, with Livingston keeping regular meeting minutes. There was free coffee, powdered creamer, and a pouch of tobacco, all purchased at the corner store next door in a bid Livingston made to keep the neighbours happy.
Aside from Livingston, Kay, and Eror (sometimes clean but often not), the group’s membership was entirely drug users. It wasn’t long before casual use at Back Alley became the site’s primary function.
The police were aware of that transition almost as soon as it happened, Kay recounts. “A month or so into it, a police officer in a starched white shirt comes in with two supporting escort officers. And he wants to talk to William.” One of them told Kay, “We’re not condoning what you’re doing. But as long as there is no trafficking going on in here, and as long as we’re not getting called here a lot, we’re not going to do anything about it.”
As the conversation continued, one of Back Alley’s regulars wandered over from one of the couches near the back and took an interest in Kay’s conversation with the police officer. The man leaned into them and casually put a butane flame to a crack pipe with a sizable rock stuffed in its end. He was quickly arrested.
“You said we could do this in here!” the man yelled at Kay, who replied, “Well, don’t do it right in front of them!”
Ground rules were established. No dealing and keep the worst of it out of the cops’ sight. “Basically, that was the attitude of the police,” Kay says. “They were going to tolerate it.”
Members of the Vancouver Police Department weren’t the only people in positions of power who took note of IV Feed and Back Alley. In an effort to keep the organization political, Livingston invited members of the local and provincial governments to speak at 356 Powell. One of her first guests was Larry Campbell, the coroner whom Livingston and Eror noticed at that meeting at the Carnegie Centre where they had all met one year earlier.
“It was scary,” Campbell recalls. “One night, I went down and the place was packed. People were shooting up. I think the thing that stuck for me was, if somebody overdosed, they would call [an ambulance], but put them in the alley because they were afraid of the police. It was a real moment of change for me. I realized the really dire straits that drug users were in.”
Campbell gave a bit of a speech that evening, mostly made up on the spot. “You’ve got to do something,” he told them. “You’ve got to be heard. You’ve got to raise a little hell.”
Larry Campbell was ahead of most members of the establishment when it came to views on harm reduction. It wasn’t that he was especially enlightened or even very liberal. He had travelled a long road to get there.
In 1973, Campbell was a young officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), assigned to a drug squad called the “Street Crew” that patrolled the Downtown Eastside. In A Thousand Dreams, a book about the Downtown Eastside that Campbell co-authored in 2009, he describes the neighbourhood as a place less dangerous than it later became.
Campbell remembers “crawling onto ceiling tiles to spy into the washrooms in the rundown Brandiz Hotel, because it was still a challenge then to catch someone using drugs,” he wrote with the help of journalist Lori Culbert. “Police targeted users and dealers by setting up sting operations in other notorious hotels like the Sunrise, which was located at the centre of the action: the corner of Columbia and Hastings. Officers knew who the dealers were, but they were hard to arrest … The street crew members, who worked in plainclothes without protective equipment, would follow tips about the locations of dealers, busting down doors in sleazy hotel rooms to catch them with a stash.”
In 1981, Campbell left the police force to work as a coroner. He credits those complementary experiences with shaping his views on addiction and harm reduction. “Leaving the police and then becoming a coroner and moving from enforcement to just trying to keep people alive, that was when the light went on,” Campbell says. “Realizing that many of the people who are involved in drugs are, basically, self-medicating,” he continues. “Coming to the realization, perhaps belatedly, on my part, that this was a medical problem that we were dealing with as if it was a criminal problem.”
In the early 1990s, Campbell’s desk at the Vancouver coroner’s office began to grow crowded with files on people who had overdosed on heroin. He recalls how through the mid-1980s, there was seldom more than a handful of such cases across the province each year. Then, by 1993, there were 354. “We didn’t know what it was until we started analyzing the samples we were able to get,” he says. “That led to the conclusion that there was a glut of pure heroin out there—that it was coming in pure, and they were putting it right onto the street.”
That data supported anecdotal reports he received from the streets. “There was a sense of panic in the community, in the Downtown Eastside as a whole,” Campbell says, “that something was happening here. It was very palpable.”
A sad reality of the Portland Hotel was that a lot of its tenants died. They were people who were sick with AIDS, using intravenous drugs, and facing marginalization so extreme that even the health-care system avoided dealing with them whenever possible. Campbell sadly notes that this often meant their first encounter with the government was when he paid a visit to collect their bodies.
Around the same time, Campbell met Liz Evans and then Bud Osborn. It was only very shortly after Evans’s takeover of the Portland Hotel that Campbell got to know her fairly well. He recalls the evening they first met. “It was Halloween night,” Campbell begins. “I had a new coroner with me and we went in, and you couldn’t really tell who was dressed for Halloween and who wasn’t. And in the midst of this was this young woman, above the fray, boiling hot dogs on a big gas stove.” Evans offered Campbell and his partner each a hotdog and then calmly took them upstairs to the room where one of her tenants lay deceased.
“There was such a whirlwind of activity inside that hotel,” Campbell says. “She was a sense of calm in the middle of what appeared to be disorder, but she actually had a good handle on it.”
Campbell similarly recounts one afternoon he was walking along East Hastings when he bumped into Bud Osborn on the corner of Columbia Street, just outside the Sunrise Hotel. “He was talking about supervised-injection sites, and I said
, ‘Bud, I just can’t go there. I don’t think I can go there,’” Campbell recalled. “But he started explaining to me that this was not some weird, out-there idea. That this was, in fact, health care. And that I had to remember that addictions are a health problem.” The seed was planted.
“Bud Osborn had a huge, huge influence on me,” Campbell says. “I can’t think of anything that was more important to me than what he told me that day.”
Everyone at Back Alley was acutely aware of what the city’s coroner had finally noticed: addicts were dying like never before. By this time, an eclectic cast of characters had collected there and entered the very early stages of forming a movement. Livingston and Kay were still playing lead roles as organizers, but other people spent more time there than they did.
Ron Hudlin, better known by his street name Spanky, practically lived at Back Alley for much of the time it was open, literally for at least a few months. “I was a Downtown Eastside dope fiend,” he says now with a laugh. “I’m not normally a person who goes in for places like that. But I knew Livingston, so I showed up and hung around there sometimes.” (A vast understatement, according to everybody who remembers him from those years.)
Hudlin explains that the appeal of Back Alley for users was straightforward. Along with overdose deaths and the spread of HIV and other diseases, homelessness in Vancouver was also on the rise. “So it was a place to hang out,” he says. The added security was sort of a bonus, Hudlin continues. The separate darkrooms installed by Back Alley’s previous tenant made perfect booths for injecting drugs.
“There was one room there and another room there and you go in, and you get high. If you don’t come out in time, somebody comes to see if you’re okay. It was a fairly peaceful place,” Hudlin continues. “That was probably some of its allure. You knew if you got in there, there probably wasn’t going to be violence, and if violence started, there probably was going to be enough people to stop the violence.”
On the management side of things, Eror was often at Back Alley as a volunteer manning the front desk. Talking about her role in IV Feed, she’s extremely modest and reluctant to agree that Back Alley, as a supervised-injection site, actually was “supervised.” But there’s no doubt that Eror’s work saved at least a few people’s lives.
“If there was an overdose or problems, I dealt with it,” she says matter-of-factly. “Call the cops or throw someone out the door or whatever. That was what I did. And it got pretty wild sometimes. One night a guy died,” Eror says. “That was not nice. His heart just went. And people threatened me, for sure, on a number of occasions,” she continues. “But you gotta stand your ground. People threaten you outside, too. So it was safer there because if I had a problem, at least there was going to be someone to jump in from the back. There was a very informal thing where people were helping each other.”
Eror recounts two women getting into a fight inside the building and having to throw them both out. One of them walked away, but the other crashed down onto her knees on the pavement outside and began banging her head into the ground. “I said, ‘Not here. Take it down the block. At the fixing site, we don’t need the advertising,’” Eror recounts. “And she was really choked at me.”
But incidents of real violence were rare. An eventful night was more likely to consist of Eror calling 9-1-1 after someone had overdosed and performing mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions until an ambulance arrived. “Maybe it happened once a week,” she says. “That’s just what you do. That’s what you do on the street too.”
There were many other more mundane challenges that Livingston and Kay learned come with running an unsanctioned headquarters for drug users. “All kinds of problems,” Kay says. “They kept destroying the plumbing. They generated so much garbage, it defied the laws of physics. I’d have a friend of mine come with a pickup truck, and there were just bags and bags and bags of garbage. Those were things that we didn’t really anticipate. The bathroom was constantly in shambles,” he continues. “They would break the toilet off the wall. I don’t know why they had a thing about doing that. That was one of the major problems we had there.”
Toward the end, a bigger issue was the dealers and then full-on gangs who came to infiltrate the place despite efforts to keep them away.
“Here’s a war story,” Kay begins. “I actually ball-batted a guy in that facility in this high-noon sort of way.” One man started to deal drugs inside Back Alley—not seriously dealing, but selling to support his own habit. He was constantly ripping off other low-level drug dealers from around the Downtown Eastside, and that eventually angered gang members who were higher up the chain. And because the guy was spending so much time at Back Alley, that attracted blowback on Kay, who by now was known fairly widely as the site’s manager.
Kay was at Livingston’s apartment one afternoon, which was just a couple of blocks from Back Alley, and Eror came over to complain about the dealer. “In the interim, I’d purchased an aluminum baseball bat from Canadian Tire,” Kay recounts. “And when I heard that he was back, I put the bat in my baggy sweatpants, walked all the way down there, and just laid a beating on him.”
“No head shots,” he adds. “I didn’t want to have a dead body to deal with. But that was the only language these people understood … So I laid a hammering on him. And it worked. He never came back.”
Back Alley was open from ten in the morning to two in the morning and, at its peak, saw between 150 and 250 people use injection drugs there every day. Not all of them were long-time addicts.
Several former Back Alley volunteers politely refused to say anything about the place when approached for this book. That could have something to do with stories about activists who started work at 356 Powell with no interest in hard drugs and who left addicted to heroin. Kay confirms it. “A few people of the core group that were running it were not injection-drug users when we started that facility, but became injection-drug users,” he says.
There were also challenges keeping the facility supplied with enough clean needles to ensure everybody who was using there was doing so safely. The Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society was supporting IV Feed and Back Alley with a monthly allowance of about $2,000. But its executive director, John Turvey, did not approve of Back Alley and would not allow his organization’s needle-exchange program to supply 356 Powell with syringes.
IV Feed’s former landlord, Lou Demerais, had his needle-exchange program running out of the Native Health Society, but he felt the same way. Demerais says he thought it was dangerous to go ahead with supervised-injection without the involvement of health-care professionals.
“I didn’t like the idea because it was totally unsupervised,” he explains. “People did go there who were not [HIV] positive and became positive there and subsequently died a very short time later.”
Livingston concedes that maintaining a sufficient supply of clean needles was a challenge. “It was so bad that you could sell dirty needles,” she says. “That’s how scarce needles were. And that’s how much fucking dope there was. Until the Centre for Disease Control nurses saved us.”
The Street Nurses Program was a project the BC Centre for Disease Control launched in 1988. Pairs of health-care workers patrolled alleys in the Downtown Eastside and other poor areas of the city, handing out harm-reduction supplies such as condoms, sharing information on where people could get tested for HIV, and conducting basic checkups on people’s health.
In 1995, Liz James, Fiona Gold, and a half-dozen other young nurses were employed by that program to run a small clinic on Main Street just around the corner from East Hastings, on the second floor above a needle-exchange program. Gold remembers being young, intimidated, and unable to remain on the sidelines.
“Oh my god, people are dying,” she remembers thinking. “I went back and contacted the coroner’s office and asked, ‘What are the stats on overdoses?’ So they faxed me the stat sheets, and I was horrified. It was just nuts. So we had to do something. But what we
re we going to do?”
The Street Nurses began going to Back Alley with clean needles. Gold describes the BC Centre for Disease Control as a reluctant supplier. “They were not convinced about an injection site at all,” she says, “however, they were allowing us to do needle exchange. There was an exchange requirement, one for one, but as nurses, we were pretty liberal. You knew that if you didn’t get a clean one out there, somebody was using a dirty one.”
That was the most support Back Alley ever received from the medical establishment. By the fall of 1996, things were coming apart.
During the summer, Eror was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her work at Back Alley ended when she began chemotherapy. Other key volunteers were spending more time in the building’s back rooms shooting heroin than they were manning the front desk or helping maintain what little order existed there. Meanwhile, dealers had moved in, the cops were circling, and Kay was simply fed up with the whole ordeal.
“My main problem was, I could not keep drug traffickers out of the facility,” he says. “I was ending up in outright physical and violent confrontations with these people. And it was stressing me out. You’d get rid of one and another one would pop up,” he continues. “It was to the point where I was at risk of being stabbed every time I walked in there.”
A newspaper article mentions one sizable drug bust occurring at Back Alley shortly before it was forced to close its doors.23 “Vancouver police media liaison officer Constable Anne Drennan said the centre was raided last week and a forty-year-old man was arrested with eighty doses of heroin,” it reads. “At the time of the raid, Drennan said, there were 100 people on the premises, including juveniles and drug dealers.”
DEYAS withdrew its funding for the project. Meanwhile, Back Alley’s landlord, a legitimate businessman, had been watching the site gather more attention and, spotting an opportunity, had steadily raised their rent as the whole thing became more controversial. IV Feed was out of cash. There were also growing accusations of financial mismanagement and outright theft aimed at Kay. While it’s possible that happened, it’s unlikely, given how little money Back Alley had to begin with. To this day, Kay vehemently denies taking a penny. Regardless, IV Feed had lost what little community support it had. “They took my criminal record, printed copies of it, and distributed thousands of copies around the neighbourhood,” Kay says. “I couldn’t have been more of a pariah.”
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