“Under my umbrella was all the most controversial stuff,” Small says. “All the nuclear radiation: VANDU, needle exchange, and a safe-injection site.”
“We decided at that meeting that we were going to do it,” he continues. “That we were really going to do it.”
Small and Townsend went for a long walk around the city one day, scouting an appropriate location. In the end, they settled on the exact spot where they had begun their search: the 100 block of East Hastings Street. This was the heart of Vancouver’s drug scene. Bud Osborn had named an entire collection of his poetry for this strip of pavement: Hundred Block Rock, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 1999.
“Hundred block rock,” begins the poem from which the collection takes its name.
shoot up shock
police chief
cold grief
war on drugs
pull the plug
clean it up
nowhere to go
ground zero
overload jail
rock and wail
where a dopefiend stood
comin soon
to your neighbourhood
blue teardrop tattoos
what’s the plan
tear it down
let ’em drown
too much reality
fixin the alley
blood streamin
naked girl tweakin
hundred block reelin
vancouver’s first
western world’s worst
hiv
public health emergency
fuck ’em around
till their lives burst53
At the 100 block’s east end is the Carnegie Community Centre and the open drug market of Main and East Hastings. One block in the other direction is the old Portland Hotel and Pigeon Park, another hub for dealers. On the 100 block itself is the Portland’s Washington Hotel and the adjoining Washington Needle Depot, as well as two more PHS buildings: the Sunrise and the Roosevelt. There’s also the Balmoral Hotel, the Regent, and Brandiz—three notorious private SROs long known as a few of the city’s very worst hotels. Hundreds of intravenous drug users were concentrated on the 100 block, so it wasn’t like opening an official injection site there would attract many more. They were all already there, so why not give them a place where they could use inside instead of leaving them in the alleys?
“Mark and I looked around the city for the right area where this would make sense,” Small says. “Our vision was to put it in the eye of the hurricane, where the people are.”
There were a few storefronts tucked in between the 100 block’s rundown hotels that might have worked. But only one building was really large enough for what they had in mind. It was 139 East Hastings, a nondescript three-storey building positioned almost exactly in the centre of the block’s north side. It was so ordinary looking that Townsend felt like he’d never even seen it before that day.
“I’d never even really noticed this fucking place, and it’s right between the Washington and the Sunrise, which we were operating,” he says. “This building was like God had just plunked it down in the middle of the block.” There was a man hosing down the sidewalk. Townsend thought he was the building’s janitor and started to chat with him. “Who owns this building and what’s the story?” Townsend asked. “He explains that he owns the building. He’s lived there for twenty years, he’s brought his daughters up here, they’ve all gone on to UBC, and now he lives on one floor and uses the SRO rooms on the other floor for people he tries to help out.” That was Kwan Lee, or “the Korean General,” as Townsend later came to affectionately call him.
Technically, the building has two addresses, but they’re connected on the inside. On the ground floor, Lee sold sandwiches out of one of them and at the other, pizza by the slice. He lived with his wife and two children on the second floor. The third floor was an SRO, where Lee rented small rooms to the same sort of down-and-out tenants that occupied the rest of the block.
When Townsend and Small struck up that first conversation with Lee, they hadn’t yet agreed on how they were going to convince him to offer his building to a bunch of drug addicts. At one point, they thought it might be smart to hide their intent to open an injection site and draft the lease with vague language about a health-care facility. “But we kind of wanted to have a partner on this,” Townsend says.
On the street, they continued to chat with Lee. It turned out that while they had never noticed him, he had been keeping an eye on the Portland Hotel Society. “I’ve watched you for a long time down here, and you’re the only people who do anything,” Lee said.
Townsend and Small caught each other’s eyes. “What are we going to do?” Townsend remembers Small’s glance communicating. “Are we going to rent the store without saying what we’re going to use it for, or are we going to just go for it and lay it all out on the line? And so we laid it all out on the line for the guy.”
Lee didn’t know what a supervised-injection site was. He was familiar with the drug issue, given where he lived. But he’d never heard of giving people addicted to drugs a safe space to inject them.
The previous year, Kerstin Stuerzbecher had travelled to Frankfurt, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland, and Small had visited Sydney, Australia, to see the injection sites already operating in those cities. He shared photographs with Lee, explained how the facilities worked, and described how those health-care programs operated in contrast to the scenes of squalor and misery that Lee witnessed outside his storefront every day.
“We went into his office and looked at all that,” Small says. “We had a glass of orange juice together—he made homemade orange juice—and we talked about this.”
At this stage, the Portland’s injection site was not going to be the Portland’s. PHS was responsible for housing hundreds of people, the vast majority of whom struggled with a mental illness, a serious addiction issue, or both. If PHS opened an illegal injection site and the government came down hard on them for it, all of that would be at risk. By 2002, it looked like all three levels of government were just about ready to see someone open a sanctioned injection site. But that was far from certain. At the same time, Evans, Townsend, Stuerzbecher, and Small had agreed they were done waiting. This injection site was going to open even if government support never actually materialized. And so to protect PHS and its tenants, Small established a separate nonprofit organization called Health Quest.
“It was another avatar or firewall to protect the Portland,” Small explains. “Because we didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Health Quest didn’t have any money or support from government—no one at city hall even knew it existed. That made it a risky partner for Kwan Lee.
“If the shit hits the fan, I will decloak, and I give you my word, I will take responsibility,” Small reassured him. “It will be me in the press, not you.”
Over the course of a week or so, they met repeatedly over orange juice.
“I believe that we will get this done,” Small told Lee. “I believe it will be legal eventually. We may have to set it up illegally, temporarily. It’s my view that we will get the grant for it, eventually, to pay for a lease. But if we don’t, I need your word that you will rip the lease up.”
If the whole venture collapsed, Lee would have moved his family and shut down his pizza and sandwich businesses for nothing. Or worse, he would be sent to jail. The risk for Lee and his family was considerable, but today he remains exceedingly modest about the whole thing.
“I’d been there a long time, long enough to know the neighbourhood,” he says. “And they were nice people, working hard … Bottom line is, I leased them the space, just as I would have leased it to anybody.”
They signed the deal in his office on the second floor of the building where Insite still stands today.
“Kwan took a leap of faith that this was the right thing,” Small says.
“Now, obviously, you were not just allowed to build a supervis
ed-injection site,” Townsend begins. You are allowed to build a hair salon. So that’s what they called it: the Hair Salon, operated by Health Quest. Townsend called in the maintenance team.
In February 2003, Liz Evans, former Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users president Bryan Alleyne (centre), and Don Baker posed for a news photographer inside the “Hair Salon,” the Portland Hotel Society’s unsanctioned supervised-injection site.
Photo: Peter Battistoni / Vancouver Sun
Christoph Runne recalls the task as absolutely daunting. “For some reason, we only had ten days to turn it into a safe-injection site,” he says, “or a hair salon, I mean … So we were working through the night.”
The project’s tight schedule is similarly the first thing Phong Lam remembers about it. That, and then its secrecy. “We worked day and night,” Lam says. “Quietly, we worked inside the building, day and night. If you were tired, you went home, got some rest, and came back and continued working on it.”
Small notes that they actually only renovated half the ground floor during this initial phase of construction. The sandwich shop remained as Lee had left it when he’d closed the place up a few weeks earlier. The Hair Salon was built where the pizza place had stood. They ripped out the oven and sneaked debris out at night, through the exit to the back alley. Out on the 100 block of East Hastings, there wasn’t a hint of anything going on.
“Loose lips sink ships,” Small says with a smirk. “The inner circle of people at the Portland didn’t tell anyone. There was zero leakage.”
Lam remembers it was as if an injection site appeared out of nowhere. “Nobody knew about it,” he says. “Then Mark and everyone got together at four or five a.m. He got a disposal truck to come and take down the awning and wrap up. And then we were done. Like a surprise.”
Small remembers the Hair Salon really as not that different from how Insite looks today. There was a lobby at the front, larger than one might expect in an effort to dissuade crowds from forming outside on the street. Then, past the lobby, was the injection room. On the left side was a space for staff, and against the wall on the right was a row of sectioned booths. Each one had a mirror, a small sink, steel table, and a chair underneath. For a demonstration that PHS organized, each booth also had a bouquet of pink tulips.
“It was exactly like Insite is today except cheap and cheerful,” Small says.
Today, Lam reflects back on the crosses he nailed together and then helped plant in Oppenheimer Park, the coffins they built for a march on city hall, the hypodermic needle they assembled that was so long it could block six lanes of traffic, and a dozen other crazy tasks that Townsend and Small had assigned to the maintenance team over the years. The Hair Salon—building an injection site from start to finish in ten days—was by far the most challenging, he says.
“That is the best memory I have,” Lam adds. “Making it happen.”
Nobody ever used drugs at the Hair Salon. A few weeks later, everything they’d constructed as the Health Quest injection site was ripped out and destroyed.
45Mike Howell, “Downtown Eastside Merchants, Residents Confronted on March,” Vancouver Sun, October 2, 2000.
46Clare Ogilvie, “Cops Arrest Anti-March Protesters,” Province, October 1, 2000.
47Shane McCune, “Fed-up Merchants Tell City to Arrest Junkies,” Province, August 10, 2000.
48Ogilvie, “Cops Arrest Anti-March Protesters”
49Howell, “Downtown Eastside Merchants …”
50Ogilvie, “Cops Arrest Anti-March Protesters”
51Petti Fong, Frances Bula, “Crackdown Targets Drug Dealers,” Vancouver Sun, April 8, 2003.
52Petti Fong, “Drug Operation Results in 162 Arrest Warrants,” Vancouver Sun, April 8, 2003.
53Bud Osborn, “hundred block rock,” Hundred Block Rock (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), p. 101.
Chapter 22
Establishing Insite
During his 2002 campaign for mayor, Larry Campbell had pledged to open a supervised-injection site by January 1, 2003.
Chris Buchner, the health authority employee on whose desk that promise landed, remembers exactly where he was when he heard Campbell say that for the first time. He was in his office at the authority’s headquarters, just a twenty-minute walk south of the Downtown Eastside. Buchner stood up from his desk and walked over to the office of his boss, Heather Hay. “Well,” Buchner said, “it’s going to be him sitting with some rigs and spoons in a chair down on the corner, because nobody else is going to be able to be there with him by January 1.”
Little did they know, the Hair Salon was ready to go.
The night that Campbell was elected mayor, his victory party was held at the Vancouver Public Library. The event was open to the public, and Dan Small dropped by to offer him congratulations. “I walked up to Larry, and I whispered in his ear, ‘We already have the safe-injection site,’” Small says.
Campbell didn’t respond. His eyes just grew a little wider.
“It already exists,” Small told him, “and I’ve got the keys for it in my pocket. If you want to see it, come and see it.”
“He just looked at me kind of aghast,” Small remembers. He handed Campbell his business card and walked away. (Today, Campbell maintains that he wasn’t totally surprised. He claims that while he didn’t know exactly what the Portland was up to, he knew they were working on an injection site somewhere.)
A week or so later, news that the Portland had built an injection site finally leaked out. In 2017, Mark Townsend was still mystified as to how. The maintenance team did not talk. News about Portland black ops had never leaked before.
It turns out that shortly after the Hair Salon renovation, an acquaintance of Dean Wilson’s had broken into the place. He had noticed that Kwan Lee and his family had moved out and, late one night, jimmied open the back door, hoping to scavenge anything they had left behind. But instead of the remnants of a pizza shop, he found a brand-new—he didn’t know what he had found. But when he described it to Wilson the following day, Wilson recognized what it was. He told Ann Livingston, and the Downtown Eastside rumour mill spread the news from there.
“I told Ann, and then the world knew,” Wilson says with a laugh.
VANDU’s guerrilla injection sites were one thing. They were really nothing more than storefronts, and police knew to look the other way. But if PHS—a government partner receiving millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year—opened an illegal, purpose-built injection site, that would be a scandal. “This was like having a time bomb,” Townsend says. “It was a functional, actual site. It existed and we had a lease for it. So it was dangerous.”
As they inched closer to opening, Small remembers that the pressures building against them grew more intense. “Things start to heat up,” he says. “For example, I was invited to the US Consulate. They knew what was going on and that this was about to happen.”
Like children called to the principal’s office, Small and Evans complied with the invitation. There to meet them was David Murray, US President George W. Bush’s deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “He said—twenty times—‘Don’t get me wrong, sovereignty is important. But if you think, for one moment, that we’re going to allow this, you’ve got another thing coming.’”
Evans remembers the experience like something out of a movie. “It was like, ‘What the hell? He’s threatening sovereignty! How is that even possible?’” Evans says. “We had to sit there and listen to the guy lecture us for an hour and a half and threaten us. And then we left and were like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ And then we started to laugh and ignored it.”
Small similarly remembers they laughed about the US Consulate’s warnings, but adds that they did so somewhat nervously. “There were real risks,” he explains. “I had to tell my family, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ And I wasn’t being melodramatic. I didn’t know if I was going to be put in jail.”
Evans no
tes that the meeting at the US Consulate did remind them of the extent to which their plans to open an injection site challenged what was a core component of US law-enforcement’s very identity. “It was directly opposed to the philosophical and political positions that the United States had adopted, which was to fight against drugs. Drugs were the problem,” she says. “Anything that would be seen as condoning the use of drugs—harm reduction and Insite—was diametrically opposed to their philosophical beliefs.”
Would the authorities actually let them succeed with such a challenge?
Despite intense uncertainty, there were reasons for optimism. The Vancouver mayor had won an election promising an injection site, the province had come onboard shortly after, and now the regional health authority—the actual partner and financial backer that an injection site would require to operate—was finally taking a tangible interest, albeit hesitantly.
By this time in 2003, the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board had become Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH). Dr Patricia Daly, then its medical-health officer and director of communicable diseases, remembers the authority’s involvement as reluctant. “In the establishment of Insite, I would not say that Vancouver Coastal Health was the one that said, ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to take the lead,’” she says, somewhat diplomatically. “If you look at our leadership, they were always a little bit nervous about it.”
Daly was an early supporter of Insite but explains that, for her bosses at VCH, a supervised drug-injection facility was just one small piece of a very big puzzle for which they were responsible. VCH had a staff of more than 10,000 people as well as 2,000 physicians, operated thirteen hospitals, and was providing care to nearly fifty percent of BC’s population of more than four million. The Downtown Eastside was always on the front page of the newspapers, but never the only file on a VCH executive’s desk. “I don’t recall anyone saying that we don’t want to do it,” Daly says. “But I think the higher-up leadership were a little anxious about [Insite] … It was a little out of their comfort zone.”
Fighting for Space Page 26