Fighting for Space

  One month into the moratorium, Wilson had an idea. He asked Dan Small if VANDU could borrow a few of the Portland’s 2,000 crosses. If city hall was going to kill ninety drug users, VANDU was going to make sure that the politicians and the people working there knew it.

  On September 12, 2000, Livingston rented a big white van and Wilson and a few other VANDU members piled in. On the way to city hall, Livingston discussed strategy.

  “Go easy on the mayor,” she said to Wilson. “He’s in a tough place, but he is an ally. Don’t yell, don’t do anything that could be attributed as violent,” Livingston continued. “Because you are an organization of drug users and drug users are written off all the time as being unreasonable. And so you’re going to go in as a voice of reason and compassion. And protect the mayor. Listen to the mayor. Understand that he may not be saying anything that you want him to say today, but that he is an ally who is in a really difficult position.”

  Meanwhile, Bryan Alleyne was on a bus with another fifty drug users. They joined up outside city hall just before two p.m. On the grass that surrounds Vancouver’s city hall, they hammered ninety crosses into the ground. At the same time, a larger group marched straight up to the building’s wide front doors. It was a siege, but one Wilson led with strategy and tact.

  “I walked up to the cops and I said, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’” he recounts. “I gave them my card—I had a VANDU card—and I said, ‘If there’s a problem, phone me, and I’ll deal with it. We’re here to state our case and that’s all there is to it.’”

  As Wilson spoke with two police officers, about forty people stood behind him, arm-in-arm. If the cops had flat-out refused to let them enter the building, things could have quickly turned ugly. They did make a half-hearted attempt, but pragmatism prevailed. The police allowed Wilson to lead his parade of drug addicts past them and into city hall.

  That was the cue for a third group of VANDU members to spring into action. A friend of Livingston’s named Robert Cort had built a black coffin. A final group of six people had hidden around the corner with it and now, with Wilson’s parade keeping the doors open, they joined the end of the line. The crowd proceeded noisily up the stairs to council chambers, which they knew was in session, with the mayor present. A second pair of police officers was there waiting for them, but there wasn’t much they could do to slow the group’s momentum. VANDU entered the council meeting and the room went quiet.

  The group with the coffin on their shoulders made its way to the front and set the black box down directly in front of Mayor Philip Owen and the councillors who were sitting in an elevated ring around him. The message was clear: people were dying, and if politicians weren’t acting to stop it, they might as well be filling the graves themselves. Reflecting on that day for a documentary that was released a year later, Owen recounts the pressure he felt. “They were all looking to me,” he said. “I’m chairing the meeting, sitting in the mayor’s chair. And it was all eyes on Phillip Owen. What’s he going to do?” The mayor decided he was going to let Wilson speak.

  “They were yelling and screaming and up on the balcony dropping banners over. I asked for silence for a minute,” Owen recounts today. “I said, ‘Dean, we’re going to take a five-minute silence period here and all of council is going to listen to you. I’m going to give you that microphone for five minutes. And after five minutes, I’d like you to just quietly leave.’”

  The mayor’s colleagues with the Non-Partisan Association did not support Owen’s attempt at pragmatism. “Council objected,” Owen remembers. “They wanted to call in the police. But I said, ‘I’m chair of the meeting, I’m the mayor, and I control this agenda. And I’m telling you, council, that we’re all going to sit quietly.’”

  Wilson took his five minutes.

  “It’s time for action,” he began. “You’ve got to do something … If you have ninety days of inaction, it almost seems like you’re sentencing us to death, because every day somebody is dying. I think it is incumbent on you, as representatives of our city—you know, we did vote you in—that you have to come down to our neck of the woods and give us a solution. One a day is dying. And if one of you were dying every day—every morning, you woke up and there was one less person working at city hall—I’ll tell you, that problem would be solved in two minutes. End the moratorium is all we ask.” The room erupted in loud applause.

  “And then do something!” Wilson shouted.

  After he finished speaking, VANDU left. “I told everybody, ‘Let’s go, we’ve done it,’” Wilson says. “And the mayor was impressed by that. He said, ‘I can work with that guy.’”

  Livingston says this was the day she saw that the mayor was really coming around on the drug issue. “If you watched closely, you could see that Philip Owen was on our side,” she explains. “He could have just said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ But because he was chair and he recognized us, we could speak.’”

  One week later, council lifted its moratorium on new services for drug users, just five weeks into the ninety days for which it was originally issued.

  “VANDU was a bunch of street-entrenched addicts rounded up by this naïve, young, socialist-type woman who thought something could be done with them,” Wilson says. “She amalgamated them into this little force.”

  A bit of a problem had slowly developed at VANDU headquarters at Hastings and Cambie.

  Dean Wilson was spending a lot of time at the office there, which Ann Livingston welcomed. Before the Downtown Eastside, Wilson had spent years in the corporate world and so he knew what he was doing in that environment. His potential was somewhat diminished by his considerable coke habit, but Livingston says he still quickly proved himself a huge asset to VANDU. It was around the same time that Wilson began working around the clock at the office, however, that it became known as a place to hang out in the evenings.

  “They weren’t parties,” Wilson says. “It was just a place where people could go shoot dope and not have to worry about dying in an alley. That’s essentially what our whole thing was about. Just a place for people to go.”

  Livingston wasn’t thrilled about it. She worried about what would happen if somebody overdosed. The VANDU office was on the building’s third floor. The door on the ground floor was locked each evening at five, and there wasn’t even a buzzer for people to signal when they were outside.

  “Even if you called 9-1-1, how did you even let them in the fucking building?” Livingston asks. “I could see the headline: ‘Ann Livingston Lets People Die in Her Office.’”

  The social scene that developed at the VANDU office became more of a problem when a young academic named Gordon Roe received a grant to explore “the questions of whether an IDU [intravenous drug user] group could develop and implement effective, peer to peer services, and whether the group could sustain these services after the research was concluded.”

  Roe’s project brought a small influx of cash to the organization, which was used to create the VANDU Health Network (VHN). The health network operated as an outreach program and low-barrier service provider. Led by Roe but with significant input from VANDU members, it established alley-patrol teams that walked the streets of the Downtown Eastside, checking on drug users and offering clean needles. It also opened an emergency shelter, launched a program that saw VANDU members pay regular visits to drug users who were stuck in hospital, and created teams inside the Downtown Eastside’s private hotels that could respond to an overdose and other emergencies. A paper Roe later published on the project describes how its development was shaped by drug users.

  At the beginning, the boundaries of what that project would do were kept deliberately loose—so loose that one of the ideas under discussion was a member-based safe-injection site, and another was a heroin-buying co-op as a means to reduce deaths from ‘bunk,’ or bad dope. There was some interesting discussion about how these could work, but they were ultimately rejected as impractical.

  Projects such as a he
roin-buying co-op or safe-injection site were things that certainly would have met the needs, and contributed to the health and safety, of users in the area, but they would not have met the goal of producing something that would work in the long term, because they were political actions that would likely have been shut down by the police. The final goal was for an outreach program of some kind that would promote harm reduction.

  With VANDU operating as a service provider, the office at Hastings and Cambie was increasingly crowded with business late into the evenings. That slowly gave rise to tensions between the members who were working in the evenings and those who were using the space as a clubhouse. “It was a place where an awful lot of people were hanging out,” Roe says. “There were some drug issues late at night. That was partially the influence of—I’ve got to say—Dean. Dean was kind of a wild card.”

  It became too much activity for one location.

  “Once we started doing outreach out of Cambie and Hastings, things started getting really tense in the office,” Roe says. “Supplies were going missing. Boxes of syringes were disappearing and things like that. We were in and out at all hours, there were accusations of favoritism—it was just getting disruptive.”

  In addition, Roe and Livingston had a clash of ideologies. Livingston had founded VANDU as a grassroots group of activists. She worried that by morphing into a service provider, VANDU risked losing the radical voice that was just starting to hold power in Vancouver. “I thought that this [needle distribution] was an avenue to independence for VANDU,” Roe says. “If through these programs they could prove that drug users were reliable stewards of money and could reliably deliver services, that would be a good thing for them. But Ann was very upset that an activist organization was falling into the service-provision trap.”

  The growing divide threatened to break VANDU in two. “Then it happened that I had rented this other little storefront, just using my own money, on Dunlevy,” Livingston recalls. Earlier in the year, she had applied for a small portion of federal money that was promised for health-care programs in the Downtown Eastside. When VANDU missed out on that round of funding, Livingston lost her temper and impulsively paid the first and last month’s rent on a storefront she intended to open as another supervised-injection site. “The money never arrived, and that’s when I started taking the fucking gloves off,” she says.

  Then, when Roe and his VANDU faction of peer-service providers grew to the point where they needed a space of their own, Livingston offered them the storefront she was renting in order to give everybody a little more elbow room.

  Livingston and Wilson remained on the third floor of the building at Hastings and Cambie, and Roe and his crew moved into the new space at 213 Dunlevy. “That solved a lot of problems between us [the health network] and VANDU,” he says.

  Located across the street from Oppenheimer Park, 213 Dunlevy is described in Roe’s research paper as a haven in a very rough part of town. “The home and heart of the project,” it reads. “It was ideal—close to the action, with big front windows.”

  The drug users who hung out in Oppenheimer took notice, as did the sex workers who at the time congregated nearby along Cordova Street—the “Low Track,” it was called then. “The office volunteers were visible to people on the street, and they would knock on the door to ask what was going on,” reads Roe’s report. “When they heard it was VANDU and that they were operating a needle exchange, they wanted to exchange the needles they had. The office volunteers had the supplies and nothing much else to do, so they started keeping the door open to exchange needles across the desk while they were waiting for the patrols. As the number of patrols increased, so did the time the office was open for needle exchange, and soon the volunteers were letting people hang out there as a drop-in.”

  Today Roe remembers it with little romance. “It smelled like unwashed bodies and recycled tobacco,” he says.

  There was one table at the front and off to the side where volunteers took shifts with a clipboard, checking people in and out. A second, larger table used for meetings was farther toward the back. And at the very back was a cubicle washroom, where people injected drugs.

  “As soon as that started happening, Ann wanted to declare it an injection site, but it wasn’t much of one,” Roe says. “We were using it as a base to run street patrols out of. That’s where we could safely keep syringes and all that kind of stuff.”

  Among those VANDU members who migrated six blocks east with Roe was Earl Crowe, VANDU’s vice-president at the time.

  Crowe is a tall Indigenous man with dark-brown hair that falls just past his shoulders. He’s intense and at first can come off as unfriendly, but he has a big heart. Crowe was born in the US. “I’m a visitor here,” he says, but other than that will share little about his past. Asked how he got to the Downtown Eastside, he replies: “She kicked me out.”

  Crowe maintains that 213 Dunlevy was entirely a community effort and that he was never the head of operations there. But everybody else says that he was. “Sometimes I’d stay three days there, just to make sure everything was okay,” he admits.

  In establishing the health network across the street from Oppenheimer Park, Crowe says the first thing that VANDU needed to do was make peace with the locals. “At the time, Oppenheimer Park was one of the most dangerous parks in Canada,” he explains. “A lot of fights, a lot of stabbings, a lot of gun shots happened in the park during that time. And so we had to be careful that it didn’t go from the park into our building.”

  Hoping to prevent the sort of dealers’ takeover that sank Back Alley, Crowe served as a liaison between 213 Dunlevy and the hustlers that operated in and around Oppenheimer. “There was a communication,” he says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Get the fuck out.’ It was like, ‘Let’s talk. This is what this space is about. We need you to respect it. We respect what you’re doing out there. Respect what goes on in here.’ And you know what happened? They made sure that other people did respect that.

  “There was no drug dealing in there,” Crowe continues. “People would bring their drugs in, but it never happened inside. That was the one thing that we really made sure of. Because that was the one thing that would have got us closed down.”

  Crowe also earned the Dunlevy injection site a lot of support from the community when he began letting many of the area’s sex workers spend the night there. “They were homeless and using drugs and they were working the street,” he says. “So they just needed a safe place for a couple of hours to get some sleep before they went back out there. They slept on the floor. They slept where they could—on my desk, under my desk, in the restroom.”

  A doctor who was volunteering with VANDU at this time, Alana Hirsh, says that for many people, 213 Dunlevy was more of a safe space for female sex workers than it was an injection site. “There was a really good relationship between the women and 213 Dunlevy. It had a really wonderful feel.”

  Hirsh was just twenty-four years old at the time and VANDU members fondly took to calling her “Dr Love,” for reasons no one can explain today. She recalls the day she informed her boss at St. Paul’s Hospital that she intended to volunteer her time with a group of intravenous drug users. “I’m going to be involved in something that is not legal yet, but I really believe that it is in their best health interests and that it is the right thing to do,” Hirsh told her boss. “And I wanted to let you know, if I get arrested, I will not associate myself with the St. Paul’s family medicine program.”

  In an example of how attitudes toward harm reduction in Vancouver were changing, her supervisors supported her. She became VANDU’s doctor for a time. “I have memories of going in there and it was just a big haze of smoke and it was like, ‘Dr Love is here!’” she recalls, laughing. “I knew I was amidst a bunch of really amazing people who were doing some amazing pro-active things. And I felt like I could play a small role.” Hirsh says it wasn’t always clear what that role was, or how much trouble she might get in for taking it on.
She was asked to supervise the back of the store and respond if anyone needed help with best-practices for injection drug use—something she did. She was also asked to borrow basic supplies such as latex gloves from the hospital where she worked—something she declines to comment on.

  “They always appreciated my questions, welcomed them, and would follow up with stuff. If I said, ‘Are you sure that this is safe and the right thing?’ They would get back to me the next week with a big print-out of a study from Frankfurt that answered my question.”

  Nearly a decade into an overdose epidemic, many Downtown Eastside drug users had essentially trained themselves as emergency responders. While Hirsh says that she never actually responded to an overdose at the Dunlevy site, Crowe remembers that he did, often.

  “Mouth to mouth,” he says. “That was before we even had masks to put over our mouths. But you had to keep them alive. We would make sure that we kept them breathing until the paramedics got there.”

  It wasn’t a glamorous space for using drugs. Crowe remembers more than once having to go into the bathroom with a bottle of bleach to clean blood off of the ceiling. But it was better than the alleys and it did save lives.

  “And if someone came in and wanted to detox, we were there to do that too,” he adds. “It wasn’t about one thing. It was about connections and many things. People came in and injected—so call it an injection site—but it was more than just that.”

  Crowe recounts one evening a few days before Christmas of 2000 when his brother visited from the US. The sex trade workers at Oppenheimer Park had put up a tree and hung other festive decorations at the 213 Dunlevy storefront.

  “My brother is really Republican,” Crowe begins. “So anti-harm reduction, it’s incredible. But he comes down to see where I’m at.”

  That night, Crowe’s brother showed up with his entire truck full of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “Fried chicken, potato salad, mashed potatoes, and gravy,” Crowe says. “The women set the table like Christmas dinner. And then everyone sat down and ate. It was really good. It showed what a community it was, how family-orientated it was. It was very powerful.”