Chapter 14
Raleigh, North Carolina
The first time Minister Michelle Mathis saw Robert Childs was in 2012, in a parking lot outside the Cooperative Christian Ministry in Hickory, North Carolina.
“There was a guy, this scruffy, bearded little fellow with a weird accent, who was handing out packets of stuff from the back of his car,” Mathis recounts in a southern accent of her own. “I didn’t know who he was, but I knew he wasn’t from around here.”
Mathis was right about Childs. He’s a bit of a nomad. Originally from the United Kingdom, he immigrated to Chicago and then lived in Portland, New Hampshire, and New York. Since 2009, he’s lived in Chapel Hill, a town of about 57,000 people just west of Raleigh. While not from North Carolina, Childs knows the place well. For years, he operated as a one-man needle-exchange program, roaming the state with a backpack full of clean syringes.
Each morning, Childs filled a backpack with packaged needles and naloxone, called for his dog, and set off in his little Honda Fit.
In 2012, distributing needles was illegal in North Carolina. But, of course, there were still intravenous drug users. And so an underground network developed. “We started going to methadone and buprenorphine clinics all over the state, distributing naloxone, doing know-your-rights training and harm-reduction training,” Childs says. “Something else we used to do to engage people is have barbeques in people’s yards. And in North Carolina, people can’t say no to barbeque.”
In Fayetteville, Childs connected with a pastor named James Sizemore who was running an illegal needle-exchange program out of the basement of his church.
In High Point, he found Steve Daniels, central North Carolina’s so-called “godfather of needle exchange.” Daniels was an older man whose body was weathered by decades of drug addiction, HIV, and hepatitis C, but he was always on call. Twenty-four hours a day, drug users knew they could call Daniels and soon enough he’d pull up with a supply of clean needles and alcohol swabs. He saved countless lives from HIV before the disease took his life in January 2017.
In Hickory, Childs met Michelle Mathis and Karen Lowe. The couple run their own congregation, called the Olive Branch Ministry, which does homeless outreach and advocacy work for the LGBTQ community. They were distributing naloxone in the area around Hickory and hanging out in parking lots outside methadone clinics, offering people free tests for HIV and hepatitis C.
“We began to get requests for clean rigs,” Mathis recalls. “We didn’t have any. But Robert had explained to us that while there were no protections, if we decided to do underground syringe exchange on our own—if we were willing to take the risk—that he could get us rigs. We said, ‘Absolutely, we’re in.’”
Just a few weeks before that meeting, a pastor in Charlotte, NC, was arrested for running a needle exchange out of his church. There were real risks involved. But there was also a real need. By the time Mathis met Childs in 2012, the prevalence of HIV in North Carolina had risen steadily for more than a decade. There were 127 infections per 100,000 people in 2000; in 2012, that number was 280.34
“So we began to kind of covertly get the word out,” Mathis says. “Hey, if you know anybody who needs a clean rig, you can put them in touch with us.”
To keep their exchange program off authorities’ radar, Mathis and Lowe asked people to donate an item not usually associated with harm-reduction programs: they asked for boxes of corn chips.
Using the syringes that Childs provided in bulk, the couple prepared little Ziploc bags of harm-reduction supplies. Then, in each bag of donated corn chips, Mathis and Lowe cut a small hole near the bottom at the back and stuffed one of the Ziploc harm-reduction kits inside, hiding them among the corn chips. Then they used a clear piece of tape to reseal each bag to make it look like it had just come off a store shelf.
“And then we would deliver chips to people,” Mathis says. “We would meet people in a fried chicken restaurant or in the parking lot of a big box store or, as people became more comfortable with us, we’d actually go to their house.”
It’s a travel-intensive business to offer needle exchange in a mostly rural area like central North Carolina. “Ninety percent of what we do is mobile,” Mathis says. “We put five-to-six hundred miles a week on our personal vehicles just making syringe drops in the evenings … There are some people who we deliver to who don’t even have running water or electricity.”
While Childs was working with Mathis and Lowe’s Olive Branch Ministry and similar groups spread out across the state, a larger nonprofit he’d joined called the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition was advocating for policy reform in the capital, Raleigh. In 2010, Childs hired a young woman named Tessie Castillo and she quickly proved herself adept with the legislative process.
The underground exchanges were doing a lot, not only without the government’s support but with authorities actively working against them. But there was only so much of the state that a few church groups could cover.
“The situation before there was needle exchange was really dire,” Castillo recalls. “I would talk to users who had found needles by scrounging through trash cans for them, picking up used needles off the ground. We knew about diabetics who were selling their used needles … People would use the same needle fifty times before it would finally break and they would have to try to figure out a way to get another one.”
In the spring of 2011, Castillo found a state legislator willing to introduce a bill that would decriminalize syringe distribution. That was the beginning of a long and complicated process.
Along the way, they picked up a number of unexpected allies. Castillo says that perhaps the most influential in convincing politicians was law enforcement.
Before too long (but only as a result of an education and advocacy campaign that she and Childs led for the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition), police departments that had previously spoken out against needle exchange were quoted by North Carolina media as in favour of harm reduction. “I support syringe-exchange programs, a common sense tactic to address the issue of drug use in our communities,” Fayetteville police chief Harold Medlock said. “It’s clear to me that these programs do not encourage drug use and that they can work in conjunction with the continuing enforcement of drug laws.”35
On July 11, 2016, five years after Castillo found her first sympathetic legislator, an amendment attached to a bill about police body cameras made it legal to distribute clean needles in North Carolina.
Childs says that by 2016, North Carolina’s underground-exchange networks were pretty well established. So when the law changed, it didn’t bring on a massive expansion of services. Rather, it brought above-ground the exchange programs that were already running.
“We had gotten to know a lot of people. We’ve set up syringe exchanges at methadone and buprenorphine clinics,” Childs says. These distribution points are usually as simple as a table and a couple of chairs set up in a clinic parking lot. “If people are coming to dose [methadone], they can also get supplies for their mates or bring their mates with them who can then get supplies from us,” Childs says. “When we talk to them, we talk about risk reduction. And then if they are ready to go on methadone or buprenorphine, we say, ‘Great, go across the parking lot.’”
Mathis says that even though needle exchange has been legal in North Carolina for more than a year now, a lot of drug users remain cautiously suspicious. “We still have people who don’t trust the system,” she says. “Even though what we are doing is legal, there is a stigma attached to it.”
But Mathis adds that attitudes are changing. “Thank God we don’t have to deliver in corn-chip bags anymore,” she says.
342013 North Carolina HIV/STD Epidemiologic Profile (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, 2015).
35North Carolina Law Enforcement and Syringe Exchange Programs (North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, 2016).
Chapter 15
A Drug Dealer Finds Activ
ism
Dean Wilson is one of those people who has lived a lot of lives. He was a delinquent teenager and did time in prison. Later, he grew into a family man and, for many years, he was a highly successful computer salesman for IBM. He was also a single father. Later still, he was a drug dealer, and then an activist and something of a movie star. Finally, he became “Canada’s most famous junkie.”36
Wilson was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1956. His family moved to Chicago and then settled in Toronto when he was still just a baby. As a teenager with middle-class parents, Wilson was a handful. He got into drugs early and they often got him into trouble. The first of a number of times he was arrested was in 1972, when he was just sixteen years old. Wilson was picked up for marijuana possession and got away with a warning. When the same thing happened a few months later, a judge threw the book at him, and he was sentenced to six years in prison. Interviewed forty-five years later, Wilson grows visibly angry when asked about those years.
“That judge looked at me and said, ‘Fuck you,’” he says. “Ruined my fucking life.”
Wilson declines to talk about the time he spent in prison. But a passage in Dr Gabor Maté’s 2009 book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, offers clues to what happened inside. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Maté recounts asking him. “Dean winces as he tells me about an incident in jail that still revolts him for its cruelty and physical sordidness—nothing would be served by repeating it here.”
In other interviews over the years, Wilson has mostly dodged requests for details and responded with vague statements about doing what he needed to survive. He gave a little more in a 2002 interview with the documentary filmmaker Nettie Wild. Wilson described the prison they sent him to as a “hate factory.”
“I wasn’t racist before that, but you have to be racist in there, otherwise you die,” he explained.
“First thing, I walk up to one of the biggest white men I’ve ever seen in my life, just built unreal, just covered in swastikas. He said, ‘You’re in the Aryan Nation.’”
“You’re bloody right I am,” Wilson replied to him.
“There were only eighty white guys in that facility that had almost 5,000 people,” Wilson told Wild. “But we ruled the joint. So you had to do what you had to do, ’cause if you go it alone, you would have died.”
Today Wilson describes his youth warmly. “I had a wonderful upbringing,” he says. But he later reveals he was affected by his parents’ divorce. “When my parents split up, my mom had to go to work. And I was ten. My dad left on my tenth birthday; he handed me the chess set that I wanted, and said, ‘I’m gone.’ And it just blew my fucking mind. I didn’t talk about that for years.”
Wilson first injected heroin at the age of twelve. He’s insistently vague when asked about the experience. It was at his family’s home in Toronto and Wilson and his older brother, Bobby, had been left the place to themselves for the weekend. The only other detail Wilson mentions is the feeling the drug gave him.
“Bobby was there, and I turned to him and said, ‘I feel normal for the first time,’” Wilson recounts. “I thought that was kind of an odd thing for a twelve-year-old to say.”
Drugs were the priority for the next few years, and then Wilson met that judge who sent him to prison when he was just sixteen. After he was released, Wilson followed his estranged father west, to Vancouver.
In 1983, his own first child was born and then, in 1984, his second. Wilson settled down for a while. Things didn’t work out with their mother, so he found himself living in South Vancouver as a single father. A good one, it turned out.
“I sold computers. I wore a suit and tie and fucking everything like that,” Wilson says. He never went completely straight. While Wilson proved an expert at selling computers, he was also very good at trafficking large amounts of marijuana.
“I would [make] $100 on every pound and sell a thousand pounds a month.”
That paid for the house in South Vancouver. “Then my kids grew up,” Wilson continues. “They didn’t need the twenty-one meals a week anymore. They didn’t rely on me as much. And I found I began migrating back into the drugs again that I had put away when the kids were born.”
Wilson gives a slightly different account of his on-again-off-again relationship with drugs in the interview with Wild.
“During those years, it was more of a managed drug thing,” he told her. “I’d use my shot in the morning so I wasn’t sick and then I’d have one shot at night and that was it. There was never any really getting high. It was just a management thing, because you had to keep the monkey off your back.
“And occasionally, if the [kids] went over to their mom’s on the weekend or were away or something, I would take that weekend to shut the blinds, shut the door, and let’s rock,” he continues. “But, no, they were definitely the apple of my eye and there was no bullshit with them.”
The drug scene in South Vancouver was somewhere between boring and nonexistent, and before too long, Wilson had blown through the small fortune he’d made selling computers and marijuana and could no longer afford to live in the suburbs.
“People go where the dope is, and the dope was down here,” Wilson says about the Downtown Eastside, where he still lives today. “And then I got to shooting cocaine, and that was the real beginning of ten years of hell. I sold a lot and I did a lot.”
In 1996, Wilson moved from the four-bedroom house where he’d raised his children to the Ivanhoe, a seedy hotel located above an even seedier bar next to Vancouver’s main bus station. He was kicked out a few months later and ended up in a similar place just down the street, called the Pacific Hotel. His small room was a convenient three blocks from the open-air drug market at Main Street and East Hastings.
A hardcore addict in rough shape by this point, Dan Small found Wilson and moved him over to Portland’s Sunrise Hotel. In his room on the second floor there, Wilson became a constant headache for the PHS staff and especially for Small.
“Dan used to call me in about my drug dealing,” Wilson explains. “He called it my ‘entrepreneurial adventure.’”
Small managed him as best he could. “Look, man, you went up and down the stairs eighty-nine times last night!” Wilson remembers Small telling him one morning. “Dan goes, ‘You can’t be going in and out and having people up to your room.’ I said, ‘I never have people up to my room. That’s why I’m going up and down the stairs.’ He says, ‘Well, we can’t protect you much longer.’”
This being the Portland, Wilson wasn’t evicted. He and Small actually became great friends. And while they didn’t like it, PHS staff did protect Wilson for a while longer.
“I had the best fucking security in the world,” Wilson says with a laugh. “To get to me you had to get by the Portland staff first.”
Every night at seven, Wilson left his second-floor room at the Sunrise to pick up two ounces of cocaine and a quarter-ounce of heroin. “The number that everybody phoned was then forwarded to my phone for the next twelve hours,” he recounts. “I would answer the phone, I would sell all that, and it typically came to $5,000 or $6,000. It was funny how it worked out. Every single night, $5,000 or $6,000.
“Except on Wely,” he adds, using a slang term for the last Wednesday of each month—Welfare Wednesday—when government money pours into the Downtown Eastside. “On Wely I would do up to $20,000. In a night.” (That’s about $27,000 CDN in 2017 dollars or $21,600 US). “And I worked every night.”
Those dozens of trips down and up the stairs of the Sunrise each night equated to a lot of cocaine and heroin. “I did well over a million dollars in twelve months,” he says. “For three years, I went out every night and never missed a shift. Three years solid.”
It was a remarkable work ethic, made more impressive by the fact that Wilson was injecting cocaine every day through all of that. “I remember one November when I only slept three nights,” he says. “The whole month, three nights … But I was really fucked up. That’s whe
n you have involuntary movement in your body and shit like that.”
Andy Bond, a frontline Portland staffer who joined the organization the same year that Wilson moved into the Sunrise (and another musician of some success), recalls the headaches Wilson’s drug dealing caused him.
“I was working at the front desk of the building and there were a lot of people coming by asking for him. ‘Is he here? Is he here?’” Bond says. “There would be twenty people coming by, going in and out. It was obvious what was going on. So then there would be a power struggle.
“Your whole shift would become focused around Dean’s guests, people trying to sneak in, or someone wanting to collect or assault him, or whatever it was,” he continues. “I remember one time getting really frustrated and calling Mark or Liz.” An hour or so later, Bond received a call back from Dan Small.
“Look, you’re losing the plot a bit,” Small told him.
“I thought, ‘How am I losing the plot?’” Bond says.
“He’s driving the other residents crazy. Why do we keep him?” he asked Small.
“Well, there’s nowhere else for him to go,” Small replied. “It’s bigger and more complicated than that. He’s not doing well. And if we don’t support him, no one else will.”
Bond says that made sense to him. “He couldn’t find another place. Back then, we were the last stop. Otherwise, he would have been homeless.”
Small remembers that this sort of dust-up with Wilson happened somewhat regularly. “Someone would tell me, ‘Dean is drawing a line that is unreasonable, that pushes the flexibility of even the Portland beyond what it can possibly sustain,’” he says. “Then I would meet with Dean and we would have coffee, and I would say, ‘Hey, you’re getting a lot of exercise on the stairs, huh?’ We would have a discussion and at the end of the day, he would know what I was saying, and that he would need to pull his horns in a little bit. And he would do that.”
To this day, Wilson refuses to even give a hint about who he was dealing for. “You’re never going to nail that down,” he says. “Just people. People who ran the Downtown Eastside at the time. They had six or seven hotels. And I just did their bidding at the Sunrise.”
Fighting for Space Page 18