“Bud lost his shit,” Livingston says. “He jumps up, the fucking chair falls over, and he starts screaming. ‘Are you fucking serious?!’”
Interviewed twenty years later, Dr John Blatherwick, who held the position of board chair during that meeting, acknowledges that the deaths hitting a saturation point is very likely what occurred. “There wasn’t something that we did that helped,” he says. “It was simply a numbers game. When so many people got infected, there were fewer people left to get infected. And so the number of cases went up and up and up, and then dropped fairly precipitously. I’d love to say that things like the needle-exchange program changed the course, or that the Street Nurses changed the course. But, in fact, the epidemic burned itself out. It’s very sad.”
In 1997, Osborn saw this explosion of HIV/AIDS in his community as an emergency. He couldn’t understand why others didn’t feel the same, and so he went to the public library to look up the definition of the word. What was happening in the Downtown Eastside was definitely an emergency, Osborn confirmed.
On Davies’ next visit to Vancouver, Osborn met her at a diner, presented her with the definition of the word “emergency” he had copied down, and asked for her advice on a next move. They decided he should propose a motion at the health board that would give the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the Downtown Eastside official status as a public-health emergency. “He didn’t know how a motion was formulated,” Davies says. “So I helped him craft the right sort of language.”
At the health board meeting on September 25, 1997, Osborn arrived with his motion, ready to present it and call for a vote. But one of his colleagues had another idea. “I got to the meeting and was greeted by one of the executives of the health board who had an alternative motion for me that they wanted me to introduce instead of the public-health emergency,” Osborn said. “I refused.”
That exchange left Osborn discouraged, but he followed through as planned and tabled his motion. And it passed. It was a great victory but also a point of unbearable frustration.
“Declaring a public-health emergency really rang an alarm, and it caught a lot of media,” Osborn said. “And I felt that the health board would have to then explain to people what a public-health emergency is or define it. Well, that isn’t what they did at all … They didn’t do anything.”
Davies recalls Osborn’s intense anger at the situation. “He expected everything to change with this emergency resolution, and, of course, it didn’t,” she says. “Getting it through was one thing; giving it meaning and having action taken is a totally different thing.”
Eventually, after another year of people dying, the declaration did begin to bring tangible results. Slowly, more funding for health-care programs found its way to the Downtown Eastside. In addition, Osborn and Evans and Townsend and everyone fighting for the Downtown Eastside in those years were able to hold the declaration up and say to government, “A public emergency has been declared. We need you to respond.” Davies describes it as “pivotal.”
“It was a tipping point in how the public-health system responded,” she says. “And it would never have happened if it hadn’t been Bud on that board, presenting it, arguing for it, lobbying for it, and getting it through.”
25Bud Osborn, “a thousand crosses in oppenheimer park,” Raise Shit: Social Action Saving Lives (Vancouver, BC: Fernwood Publishing, 2009), p. 20.
26Bud Osborn, “a thousand crosses in oppenheimer park.”
27Statistics throughout the book for HIV/AIDS deaths in British Columbia are sourced to the BC Vital Statistics Agency. http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/lifeevents/statistics-reports/annual-reports
28Parry, Penny. Something to Eat, a Place to Sleep and Someone Who Gives a Damn: HIV/AIDS and Injection Drug Use in the DTES (Victoria, BC: Ministry of Health and Ministry Responsible for Seniors, 1997).
Chapter 10
A Drug-Users Union
In the summer of 1997, Livingston remembers feeling a strange disconnect between the beautiful weather and the tension and fear that had emerged in response to so many deaths in their small Downtown Eastside community.
“It was just fucking ghastly,” she recalls. “If you added up the suicides and alcohol poisonings, it was huge. We were losing over a hundred people a year to alcohol poisoning in this neighbourhood. And then about 200 to overdoses. It was just fucking horrible. But I remember how sunny it was that summer. Every day, Bud and I would wake up, and it was just glorious weather. And I would think, ‘How can the weather be this good when all these terrible things are happening?’”
On one of those sunny afternoons in September of that year, Livingston decided it was time to take another stab at organizing drug users. She drafted a simple flier and went around the Downtown Eastside fixing it to telephone poles. “Meeting in the park,” it read. “Discussion items: police conduct, violence and safety, ‘Is this your home?,’ washroom facilities, neighbourhood relations … Let’s talk about a community approach.”
Through Livingston’s work at Back Alley two years prior, she was well-known among the neighbourhood’s community of drug users. A lot of them had felt empowered by participating in the meetings she had led there. Osborn enjoyed a modicum of fame in Vancouver for his poetry and anti-gentrification activism. And so on September 9, 1997, several dozen people were there to meet the pair of them at the east end of Oppenheimer Park.
A few years earlier, Osborn had made a serious attempt to get clean, spending more than a month at one and then two treatment centres for drug addiction. “I needed to get away,” he recalled. “I was just wretched. And I had started getting arrested for shoplifting and stuff like that. And I thought, ‘I gotta do something.’” Osborn didn’t kick all of his bad habits, but he did gain enough clarity to find a new meaning in life. “When I came back from those treatment places, I decided, ‘Okay, what am I going to do now?’” Osborn said.
“I want to keep writing poetry,” he thought. “I’ll always do that. But I also want to give as much of myself as I can to help the Downtown Eastside. Because it had become, really, the only home that I had ever known.”
Osborn gave part of the credit for this transformation to a counsellor he met at Kinghaven Treatment Centre, a rehab facility that still operates today in the rural Vancouver suburb of Abbotsford. “I ran down the same weary story that I’d been running down all my life,” Osborn recounted. “My father hanged himself, my mother was mentally ill, there were all these beatings.
“I thought what [the counsellor] would say is what others had always said: ‘Oh, you poor guy, no wonder you use drugs. That’s terrible.’ But he didn’t. He leaned back in his seat and looked out the window, and then he looked at me and said, ‘It’s your lightning.’ Which completely stunned me, so much that I didn’t even ask him what he meant. And from then on, I began to puzzle over what that meant. I even looked it up: ‘What is lightning?’ It’s the most powerful physical force on Earth, really. A natural force.”
A good friend of Osborn’s in those days was Donald MacPherson, who held a manager’s position at the Carnegie Community Centre. He recalls how seriously Osborn took his position on the health board, assigning himself the role of a liaison for the Downtown Eastside. The flip side of that work on the health board would be the meetings he and Livingston held in Oppenheimer Park. “They were an attempt to do something like a needs assessment,” MacPherson says.
Livingston brought all her felt pens and the big chart paper on which she had recorded meeting minutes at Back Alley. While Osborn led the group, calling on drug users for their input, she scribbled frantically to record everything they said. “We would compile the [notes], and I would take them to all the [health] board members, so they could actually see what a real junkie says,” Osborn explained.
Two large pages of Livingston’s notes from their very first meeting in the park survived to today. A note added to the top describes the scene: “A community meeting was held to get input from people who use and care about th
e park,” it begins. “The meeting held at six p.m. outside on the checker board was attended by about sixty people. The weather was warm and although there was some heated debate the tone was positive. Agency people, seniors, neighbourhood activists, drug users, and people who sleep at the park participated and shared food.”
Thirty-three bullet points are recorded below. There are complaints about used needles and trash left around the neighbourhood and concerns about violence in the community. Abuses perpetrated by police are mentioned a couple of times. But the one concern raised more than any other was that drug users simply had nowhere to call their own. “When the Back Alley Drop-In was open, we had our own place to go,” one point reads. “You shut it down.”
In response to some attendees’ complaints about discarded needles that made the park unsafe for children, drug users argued that a designated site like Back Alley might address that problem. “If we provide users with a place to go shoot up, it will improve things in the park for all of us—users and non-users.”
Livingston recalls the meeting as bare bones but powerful. “It was just me and Bud, and we had a big piece of paper and I made notes,” she says. “It wasn’t that it was massively well-attended. But I wrote down everything people said, and they could see me writing down what they were saying.” That alone had a huge impact, Livingston recalls. Drug users were speaking and somebody was listening.
At the end of her record, another note is appended. “After the meeting, people visited with one another and the atmosphere was friendly. Many people are looking forward to some kind of regular get-together at the park to discuss serious community issues and to get to know each other.”
Livingston drafted a second poster and put it up around town, this time with a message that was more focused. “Where can users go?” it read. “How do users feel about having no place to go, nowhere to wash, inadequate detox, constant police harassment and no one who cares?”
Meanwhile, Osborn found them a place where there would be a roof over their heads. He was heavy into a religious “twelve-steps” approach at the time, and had come to know the pastor of the Foursquare Church, also known as the Street Church. It was a congregation of low-income people who met each Sunday on the second floor of a building on the 100 block of East Hastings Street, across the street from the Carnegie Community Centre. The church’s pastor, Randy Barnetson, in 2017 still holds twice-weekly meetings there. Today, he’s usually found minding a stove with a large pot of hot dogs boiling, just as he was in the mid-1990s. Back then, a twelve-pack cost a dollar. Today the price is more than double that, but Barnetson still serves them for free. It’s from this routine that the building gets its better-known nickname, the “Hot Dog Church.”
Barnetson recalls the day Osborn approached him to ask if they could use the space for a weekly meeting of drug addicts. “We got to talking about harm reduction,” Barnetson says. “I was saying, ‘Well, in our own way, by giving free food out to addicts, we were doing harm reduction.’ But Bud had a different attitude toward people who just give out food. He said, ‘We don’t need a sandwich, we need justice!’”
Barnetson says he never thought the idea of hosting a regular meeting of drug users was anything to balk at. The destitute were the church’s regular patrons anyway. “That’s what the Street Church is,” he adds. “We’re a church for the people on the block.”
In November, Osborn’s group of drug addicts convened there for their second meeting together. Livingston had stayed up late the night before, preparing sandwiches for everybody (an effective incentive for attendance, she had learned). Upon arrival, people signed in, took a seat on the floor, and then introduced themselves. Again, Osborn led the meeting while Livingston furiously recorded every attendee’s contributions to the discussion.
“Bud would say, ‘Many people are dying. I’m an addict like you guys. I’m straight now, but blah blah blah,’” Livingston recounts. “So he says all this inspiring shit, and people are like, ‘Oh shit, I want to be on this guy’s fucking team.’ He was very charismatic. People wanted to be part of what he was doing.”
Livingston’s notes from that first gathering at the Foursquare Street Church reflected addicts’ wishes for a place where they could feel comfortable without fear of harassment by police. “It is important to have these meetings to hear from drug users,” one note reads. “Drug users aren’t illiterate. They need a voice in the matters affecting their lives.”
On January 10, 1998, the group’s tenth consecutive meeting, they invited a guest: the rookie MP who was so affected by the Killing Fields protest the year before: Libby Davies.
“The room was so jam-packed I could barely get in there,” Davies recounts. “Ann had all her flipchart paper all the way around the walls, like she always did, just scribbling everything that people said. She really understood that giving witness to what people were saying was very important.”
No federal politician had ever spoken to a group like this one, and Davies recalls the room was highly skeptical and more than a little suspicious of what she was doing there.
“Ann introduced me, and I was literally stepping over people to get to the front of the room,” Davies continues. She told them she was in Ottawa working for them, and that one day, they would create a safe space for injection-drug users, an idea that was just beginning to attract more discussion among residents of the Downtown Eastside.
“I remember a couple of them said, ‘It’s never going to happen, Libby. We’ll never get a safe-injection site,’” Davies says. “I said, ‘It’s going to happen. It will happen, I promise you. We are going to fight for this.’”
She attended a couple of subsequent meetings and likens the experience to an education on the issues facing street addicts. “I realized that one of the issues was that nobody listened to them,” Davies says. “That once you were labelled a drug addict or a criminal, nobody ever again saw you as an individual. You were part of this stereotype, a screwed-up criminal. And so just listening to people and knowing people as individuals was really important.”
With the church as a space they could call a home, Livingston recalls that things began to move more quickly. “I kept saying that we needed to organize and then we would get somewhere,” she recalls. “And it was true. Within I don’t know how many meetings, we had fifty people.”
Around this time, a young couple by the names of Kenn Quayle and Brian Mackenzie took notice of the collection of people Livingston and Osborn brought together each week. Quayle and Mackenzie were not living the street life on the Downtown Eastside, but they did use drugs.
“They were more rave guys,” Livingston recalls. “They contacted me and said, ‘We know you did this thing at the Back Alley.’” They suggested that Livingston’s group would have a greater influence if it expanded to include the more recreational sort of drug users that they hung with, which at the time were mostly interested in MDMA (then called ecstasy or “e” and today called molly), methamphetamine, and hallucinogens like acid, as well as Vancouver’s marijuana community. Livingston and Osborn thought that made sense.
“We were doing harm-reduction outreach in the rave scene,” Mackenzie says. Quayle was also involved in the city’s medicinal-marijuana movement. “And because we were all affected by the same anti-drug prohibition laws, we thought that it made sense for us to all pool our resources and our energy.”
Livingston started having Quayle and Mackenzie over to her apartment more frequently (Quayle fondly recalls that the children were a constant interruption), and they began to strategize their next move. Following the example of a group in Australia, the Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League, they decided they would make a play for government funding.
Well past midnight of the day their grant application was due, Quayle and Mackenzie were still up hastily trying to complete the paperwork when one question stumped them. What was their organization called? “I was working on the floor of our apartment on Commercial Drive in t
he middle of the night, putting together this funding proposal,” Quayle says, “and it needed to have a name.”
Mackenzie recalls that Quayle began playing around with the components they wanted to incorporate and what letters worked well as an acronym. Neither Livingston nor Osborn were there that night, but when Quayle was finished completing the grant application, the weekly meeting of users at the Street Church had a name: the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, or VANDU for short.
They did not get the grant. “The first proposal we wrote was for an outrageous amount,” Quayle says. Mackenzie remembers that it asked for half a million dollars. Quayle says it was for an even million. Either way, “The bigwigs there snorted and laughed us out of the room,” Quayle says.
Toward the end of January, Osborn was able to use his seat on the health board to secure a small line of funding for the group. It wasn’t much, a couple hundred dollars for each meeting that went to sandwiches plus an honorarium for attendees equal to bus fare. But it marked a significant milestone: a group of drug addicts was receiving financial support from the government. “Not much at all,” Osborn noted. “Money to get it started, to rent the place and to give some money for a bit of tobacco and bus fare and stuff like that.” But, he added, he considered those small sums one of his life’s greatest accomplishments.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the group was back out on the street, no longer welcome at the Street Church.
“Some asshole got into their office and started making 1-900 calls to a sex line,” Livingston explains. “That’s when they kicked us out. One day, we went there with our key to get in and the lock had been changed. I think it was the guys doing those 1-900 sex calls. The church didn’t like that.”
Fighting for Space Page 12