Fighting for Space

  Wilson was making a lot of money, but there’s no such thing as a street addict with a healthy bank account. One afternoon in January 2000, he was out with a friend named Sammy and they were three dollars short of the ten dollars they needed for a hit.

  They were at the intersection of East Cordova and Gore Avenue, where they found a long line of people leading down into the basement of the St. James Anglican Church. It was the annual general meeting of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. Wilson was told that if he made it through the meeting, he’d get three dollars.

  “People started talking about supervised-injection sites and heroin maintenance and all that,” Wilson says. “But to tell you honestly, I thought, ‘Yeah, that will fucking happen when pigs fly. Big fucking deal.’ I sold a lot of dope, and I wasn’t big on this harm-reduction shit. It just didn’t matter to me. I’d survived, I had money, so fuck off.”

  But if he and Sammy both made it through the VANDU meeting, they’d get six dollars between them. So into the church they went.

  A VANDU AGM is a special event to witness. There are elections for board positions that can involve a little money so everybody is competing for them hard. And because drug use is a VANDU requirement for membership, a lot of the people there are high.

  “We walked into this room and there are 200 fucking junkies just going wild,” Wilson recalls. He and Sammy took a seat at the back and waited for the whole thing to be over. Then Wilson spotted Ann Livingston across the room.

  “I leaned over to Sammy and I said, ‘I’m going to get that girl!’” Wilson says, laughing.

  Sitting directly behind them was Bud Osborn, Livingston’s steady boyfriend of several years.

  Dean Wilson (left) met Bud Osborn at a Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users meeting in January 2000.

  Photo: Ann Livingston

  Osborn leaned forward, stretching his neck in between Wilson and Sammy, and flashed a big grin. “That’s alright, but that’s my girl, man,” Wilson recalls Osborn telling him.

  “I didn’t know who Bud was and I didn’t know who Ann was,” Wilson says in his defence.

  “That was a Saturday afternoon,” he continues. “I walked into the office on Monday, and within four months, I was president of VANDU. I took over and I ran with it. It was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to have a voice,” Wilson explains. “Because I was sick and tired of shit. I had been doing drugs for so long, I had spent time in jail and all this shit because of drugs.” He pauses a moment, and then adds, “And I thought Ann was pretty good looking.”

  A few weeks after the AGM, Wilson was working at VANDU’s new office at West Hastings and Cambie Street, getting ready to close the doors and lock the place up for the weekend. A young Indigenous girl—no older than sixteen, Wilson remembers—wandered in off the street and over to the desk where he was sitting.

  She was pretty, Wilson remembers, petite, with straight brown hair, wearing jeans and a zip-up hoodie over a T-shirt. A subtle baby bump revealed her to be pregnant. “But a normal fucking kid,” Wilson says.

  “Oh, it’s my birthday,” the girl said to him.

  Wilson cheerfully replied, “Oh yeah? Happy birthday.”

  “I really don’t like birthdays very much,” the girl said. “It’s the day my dad passed me around to all my uncles. I just wish they hadn’t done it on my birthday.”

  Wilson remembers how flat and devoid of emotion her voice was. He looked her in the eyes and said the only thing he could think of. “It should have never happened, dear,” Wilson told her. “That stuff shouldn’t happen.”

  He grows furious recounting this memory today. “She was pregnant, she was HIV positive, she was sixteen, and she was living on the street. And I thought, ‘This is bullshit.’”

  Wilson was still an addict and a heavy one at that point, injecting cocaine forty or fifty times a day. He needed to support his habit, and for him dealing was the easiest way to do that. So for quite a few years he continued to sell enough to at least pay for drugs. But more often, he took a step back and instead of dealing himself, made a living cutting cocaine and heroin for other dealers. Wilson’s involvement in the drug trade finally ended for good in 2008, when police executed a large bust against the crew that was supplying him. “I was happy to get out of it by then anyway,” he says.

  Even if he didn’t transform into a model citizen overnight, Wilson credits that girl who he met on her birthday as the beginning of the end of his days as a drug dealer.

  “That was the moment I really said, ‘This has got to change,’” he says.

  “People in my position don’t realize how lucky we are, in many cases. I was articulate, I was educated, I was white. All these things come into play. Then you come down here and you really start to get to know some people down here and you go, ‘How the fuck did they survive? How could it happen? How could they have even gotten this far?’ I started thinking, ‘Somebody has got to fight on behalf of these people.’ Because, you know, I find it easy to be a lion. And I looked around, and I thought, ‘I could prey on these people and I could sell them dope or whatever, or I could protect them.’”

  Wilson’s energy could appear to be without limits. In the early 2000s, that was partly thanks to cocaine. But he still possessed a natural stamina that let him maintain that addiction while remaining remarkably functional. Now he turned that strength to activism.

  Livingston remembers that she spotted that energy right away but wasn’t sure if it would save Wilson or kill him. “If you have a weak constitution, you toy with drugs and pretty soon you face the fact that you are either going to die or you are going to have to stop,” she explains. “But if you have really good stamina, you can just stagger on for a decade or two, and then you might have to face it. Or not.”

  Wilson recalls how Livingston began to school him.

  “I started reading everything. I’d read an entire report, not just the executive summary or whatever,” he says. “So we knew how many people were dying and what they were dying of. We started to see the actual numbers; it was an appalling situation for everybody. Something had to change.

  “Ann turned us all into a bunch of epidemiologists,” he says. “That’s one of the things that Ann did that was really important.”

  36Mike Howell, “Downtown Eastside: Canada’s ‘Most Famous Junkie’ Comes Clean,” Vancouver Courier, February 27, 2014.

  Chapter 16

  Taking the Fight to City Hall

  Milestones are often counted in years. But by 2000, residents of the Downtown Eastside were measuring the overdose epidemic in bodies. Thousands of bodies.

  In 1997, Osborn and the Portland Hotel Society had hammered 1,000 crosses into the grass of Oppenheimer Park to symbolize that that many people in BC had died of an illicit-drug overdose during the preceding five years. (The actual number of people to die from 1992 to 1996 was 1,342, but it appears that in 1997, the activists believed the number was closer to 1,000.)

  In the three years that had passed since the Killing Fields, as the day became known, roughly another 1,000 people had died after taking drugs. (From 1997 to 1999, the exact number of fatal overdoses across the province was 972.)

  With the 1997 demonstration, activists had caught the media’s attention. Politicians were talking about drugs. A public-health emergency was declared. But it felt like a concrete response had never come.

  The garage at Liz Evans’s house had a thousand crosses stacked in a corner. Someone noticed them there and suggested they do the whole thing again to mark the passing of another 1,000 lives lost. Mark Townsend and a few Portland staffers dug the crosses out of storage and got to work building another thousand of them. “Nothing had happened,” he explains. “So let’s build a few more and slam them in the park.”

  The night before the demonstration, the Portland’s maintenance team—Phong Lam, Chris Runne, and Patrick O’Rourke—met Townsend at the house he shared with Evans. Many of the crosses from the 1997 demonstration were brok
en or had gone missing. Runne estimates they started with about 500 when they began working toward their goal of 2,000, and the protest was scheduled to begin in barely more than twelve hours.

  “We bought cheap wood and just kept going at it and called it another thousand at some point,” he says with a laugh. “We bought a nail gun. One of us was cutting the crosses, and the other one was shooting them together all through the night.”

  Shortly after sunrise on July 11, 2000, Tom Laviolette pulled up in a jeep. The maintenance team piled in, along with 2,000 crosses, “give or take,” and made the short drive to Oppenheimer Park. Now came the task of hammering them into the grass.

  “Police actually showed up pretty quick,” Runne says. “They told us not to do that. And we basically told them why we were doing it and ignored them … They didn’t know what to think about it. But they didn’t arrest us.”

  Bryan Alleyne was the president of VANDU at this time. In the days leading up to the demonstration, he and Livingston made posters and attached them to telephone poles around the Downtown Eastside. “‘Has anyone you loved died?” some read. For just about everybody who lived in the Downtown Eastside, the answer was yes.

  Early in the afternoon of July 11, they met at the intersection of Main and East Hastings to make the short walk to Oppenheimer Park together. By the time they got there, the maintenance team had transformed it into a cemetery.

  A newspaper report from that day quotes Osborn, speaking to the crowd: “We need a largely expanded methadone program, safe injection sites, heroin maintenance, and a variety of treatment models. We’re not talking about wild, experimental stuff here. We’re talking about practical solutions that have worked in Switzerland and Germany and other places in Europe.”37

  At Oppenheimer, a set of speakers played Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” on repeat. Meanwhile, Alleyne handed out small pieces of paper on which he had written many names of the dead. “I had to always go to the coroner and find out who died and what information they could give us,” he explains. “So then we had names and we put them on the crosses.

  “It looked like Arlington Cemetery in the States,” Alleyne continues. “There were thousands of crosses. And anyone who knew somebody who had died came and put a cross up and put their name on the crosses. It was a sad day.”

  Tanya Fader had worked closely with VANDU since starting with PHS two years earlier, taking a lead role in how the two organizations often worked together. “By that point, unfortunately, I’d known quite a few members who had died,” she says. “We obviously had a huge heroin overdose problem, but it was also combined with AIDS. People were dropping. It was hard to imagine.”

  She remembers how heavy it felt, hammering crosses into the ground. “We were on a different plane for a while that day,” she says. “I was writing someone’s name on a cross and then I looked out and saw all these people crouched over, writing other names. It made it real. It was really intense.”

  Among the people Fader saw crouching among the crosses was VANDU’s vocal rising star, Dean Wilson.

  “It was very solemn,” he says. “It was just people wandering through those crosses. And people were taking ownership of a cross. It really became a shrine … Everyone was reflecting on their lives, that they were alive, and that many of us weren’t.”

  Wilson walked with them, lost in his own world of grief.

  A friend of Livingston’s named Elaine Brière was at the park, taking photographs for VANDU. She walked among the rows of crosses for hours and eventually came across Wilson, who was sitting on the grass with his knees up, his arms folded across them, and his head buried low.

  “I usually don’t take a lot of photographs if somebody is in an emotional state like that, grieving,” Brière says. “They feel you. Even if they don’t see you, they can kind of sense you taking this picture.”

  She snapped two quick shots of Wilson and then continued walking. “It was very moving,” Brière says.

  A photograph of Dean Wilson taken in Oppenheimer Park on July 11, 2000, became an iconic image of Vancouver’s struggle with addiction.

  Photo: Elaine Brière

  VANDU was still seeing its funding funnelled through the Portland Hotel Society but had grown into a political force of its own. Its office was up on the third floor of a building located at the intersection of West Hastings and Cambie streets, perhaps a bit too far west for some people’s liking. Livingston recalls how they were held responsible for any damage to the floor’s shared bathroom or graffiti out on the street anywhere within a block of the place. “They wanted to blame us for everything,” she says.

  Which is not to say that VANDU was totally innocent. The weekly meetings that began in Oppenheimer Park had since moved from the Street Church to the Lookout building, and the group had essentially been evicted from both locations. Now they were bigger than ever and still growing.

  “We had twenty-five-member boards, and for the first year or two, ten of them would show up,” Livingston says. “Which is fine. You can deal with that. But by the second and third year of VANDU, twenty-five board members were showing up at every fucking board meeting.”

  The weekly gathering usually numbered more than forty people by the time everyone was crowded around the long boardroom-style table they had there, and everybody had their own priorities and grievances.

  “All the crack cocaine people are saying, ‘If I have to listen to one more story about fucking methadone,’” Livingston says. “What a shit show.”

  Tanya Fader sometimes helped keep VANDU meetings moving as orderly as she could, and remembers distinct challenges. For example, a member on heroin might nod out in the middle of a debate and then, upon regaining consciousness, not realizing that the conversation had moved on, continue with their argument. “I remember having to actually get people to not fist fight around the table. That happened more than once for sure.”

  Amidst all of that, Dean Wilson was putting himself through school. “For the first little while that I was at VANDU, I didn’t do anything but listen and watch,” he says. “I’d sorta migrate to the people who were in charge. I started learning things and watching Ann facilitate. And then I realized that I could do this.” The first project over which Wilson really took ownership was a VANDU subgroup that focused on methadone. The rules in BC around methadone prescriptions and distribution were archaic and undignified. The opioid substitute was only available at select locations, and many of the pharmacists treated their patients like criminals. There were also rules around how an individual could obtain the drug that simply made no sense. For example, one’s urine had to test positive for opiates before a doctor was allowed to write that person a prescription for methadone.

  “I can’t tell you the number of times I paid someone to go score some fucking drugs to get enough in their pee to get on methadone,” Livingston says. “You had to do a two-week wait and you had to test positive for opiates. People were starting to go into withdrawal and they wanted to get on methadone, but then they didn’t have enough opiates in their piss.”

  Wilson formed a subgroup called the BC Association of People on Methadone and began to lobby authorities on these issues. He was quickly finding his footing as an activist. “Then that ninety-day moratorium hit,” he says.

  Since the Killing Fields protest of 1997, a lot of the city’s attention had turned to the Downtown Eastside, and money had begun to follow. A lot of people didn’t like that. “Fed-up Merchants Tell City to Arrest Junkies,” reads the headline of an August 2000 article in the Province.

  A small business owner named Grant Longhurst is quoted there: “It’s time to say this doesn’t work,” he told the newspaper. “The public needs to know that not everyone in the downtown neighbourhoods is advocating on behalf of drug users.”38

  Longhurst was a spokesperson of the Community Alliance, an umbrella organization of twelve neighbourhood groups that can loosely be described as business-friendly and anti-drug user. In another ar
ticle published the same day, he spoke on behalf of the communities that surrounded the Downtown Eastside—Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona—to argue for an end to harm reduction.

  “We are asking that all three levels of government cease to support or fund resources for anything that facilitates or maintains use and dealing of illegal drugs such as needle exchange, resource centres, safe-fixing sites and quality of life counselling,” Longhurst said. “These approaches are futile. It says we are giving up—that there’s no hope.”39

  While VANDU and the Portland were organizing, so were their opponents.

  Vancouver’s mayor of the day, Philip Owen, led a right-of-centre political party called the Non-Partisan Association (NPA). The plight of the Downtown Eastside and especially its drug users had caught his attention. But his constituency was on the west side of town among the upper-class, conservative voters who preferred the drug problem stay out of sight and out of mind.

  On August 10, 2000, Owen gave in to the pressure of downtown business owners and enacted a ninety-day moratorium on further spending and new services for drug users in the Downtown Eastside.

  VANDU’s Bryan Alleyne did the math on how many addicts Owen’s spending ban would kill. “In the Downtown Eastside, a three-month moratorium on harm reduction measures is equal to ninety drug overdose deaths,” Alleyne said. He and Wilson interpreted the mayor’s order as a literal death sentence for dozens of VANDU members and—as they were both injection-cocaine users during this time—quite possibly for themselves. They were angry.

  “We said fuck that,” Alleyne recalls. “We went up to city hall and we took over. That’s how we got our voices heard. And we did get our voices heard.”