Fighting for Space

  Insite became an unlikely source of pride for the Downtown Eastside.

  Photo: Travis Lupick

  One of the staff’s primary responsibilities was to ensure that Insite clients injected drugs in as safe a manner as possible. For some women, that had the unexpected power of freeing them from abusive relationships.

  “We saw women who had been IV users for years and never self-injected,” Fisher says. He explains that a pimp or boyfriend injected them and used that monopoly over their supply of opioids to exercise control. The men in these relationships could choose to alleviate the women’s symptoms of withdrawal or ignore them and let a woman suffer. They could remove the emotional pain of childhood trauma or leave a woman to relive her worst memories.

  By teaching women who were addicted to heroin how to safely inject themselves, Insite empowered them and freed them from those abusive dynamics, Fisher says.

  “That’s a difficult thing to convey because it sounds weird: ‘Oh, you’re teaching people how to inject,’” he concedes. “But what we’re really teaching them is to take control of their own health care.”

  56Frances Bula, “Drug Users File in as Injection Site Opens,” Vancouver Sun, September 22, 2003.

  Chapter 24

  Consequences

  One Friday evening in late 2003, Philip Owen was driving home with his wife, Brita, travelling from downtown Vancouver to their family home in Shaughnessy. It was shortly after the opening of Insite, the greatest victory of Owen’s twenty-five-year career in politics.

  For most of the drive, it’s a straight shot south on Granville Street, an arterial road in Vancouver that takes the Owens past the home of one of their oldest family friends. For decades, the two households had shared birthdays, anniversaries, children’s graduations, and other milestones. They were as close as family.

  As Owen and Brita drove past their friends’ home, they saw the driveway filled with vehicles parked bumper to bumper. More cars were out on the street, on both sides and in either direction, as far as they could see.

  Was there a death in the family? How could they not have heard of something like that? By this point, Owen had slowed the car to a near stop. He pulled it over to the side of the road and the couple looked to one another for an explanation.

  To this day, they’re both reluctant to recount the experience. Dean Wilson remembers Brita sharing the story with him.

  “There were cars everywhere, all over the street and up and down the driveway,” Brita told him. “And they didn’t know what was going on. They found out later that it was their friends’ fortieth wedding anniversary,” he says. “They hadn’t been invited. They knew right then and there that this had cost them a lot,” Wilson continues. “Brita told me that Philip was literally stunned. He could not believe it.”

  Brita says they lost more than one pair of family friends over Insite. “A few of those things did happen,” she adds. Philip remembers there were a lot fewer social functions to attend after Insite opened. “It was pretty rough,” he says. “Some of our friends were very upset.”

  “So we were cut off,” Owen continues. “But I was convinced that we were right.”

  Owen’s embrace of harm reduction was primarily embodied in two policy achievements: his successful push to see the City of Vancouver adopt Donald MacPherson’s “Four Pillars” drug strategy, and then the establishment of the continent’s first supervised-injection facility, Insite. In the early 2000s, it was groundbreaking stuff. While law enforcement led the response to drugs in every other jurisdiction in North America, Vancouver began to treat addiction as a health-care issue.

  It had cost Owen more than just dinner invitations. His political career was finished.

  The City of Vancouver holds elections for mayor and councillors every three years. In November 2002, Owen intended to run for a fourth term. He remained popular among the general public and stood a very good chance of winning the vote, but his party, the NPA, was done with him.

  Since its founding in 1937, the NPA was a business-focused faction for conservatives. It was funded by old money, by people who embodied the status quo and wished to maintain it. Before the 2002 election, the NPA’s powerbrokers told Owen that if he wanted to run for re-election, he would have to campaign for the party’s nomination. It was a requirement that under normal circumstances would have been unthinkable for a popular, three-term incumbent mayor.

  “It became clear to me that it was time to step aside,” Owen says politely.

  Brita recalls one evening around this time when George Puil, an NPA councillor and old family friend, called Owen at home to ask for a favour. She was sitting nearby and heard Owen begin to say something about how he would be happy to help. Brita got up, walked across the room, and snatched the phone from her husband’s hand.

  “George, my husband’s got a knife in his back,” Brita said to Puil. “And the blood is all over your hands.” Then she slammed the phone down.

  The filmmaker Nettie Wild was spending a lot of time with the Owens that year, often on the road with him, Livingston, and Wilson, promoting Fix. She describes how his party’s withdrawal of support was much more than a political defeat.

  “Philip was crushed,” Wild says. “He’d lost his friends. And he loved being mayor. He loved it. That was a part of his identity, and it was gone.”

  For as long as Owen can remember, the NPA spent election night in the ballroom of the Hotel Georgia, one of the city’s most prestigious venues located in the heart of the downtown core. In 1993, 1996, and 1999, the Owens had a room there, where they would watch the results come in before proceeding to the ballroom for Owen’s three consecutive victories.

  On election night in November 2002, he was in a hotel room again, but one so inconsequential that today no one even remembers what city it was in.

  “I was with Philip the night of the election because he asked me to be there,” Wild remembers. “There was me, Philip, Brita, and Donald MacPherson. Because there was nobody else he had to watch the election with.”

  Owen knew that enough of the public was onside with harm reduction to ensure that his successor would bring a supervised-injection site to the Downtown Eastside. The election was a landslide. Larry Campbell won with just less than 81,000 votes; the NPA’s Jennifer Clarke got 42,000.

  Thanks to Owen’s groundwork, the city’s next government was going to bring a supervised-injection facility to Vancouver.

  Mark Townsend remembers the high he felt when Insite opened shortly after, in September 2003, and then the sense of dread that followed with the federal election that came just nine months later.

  “We miscalculated,” he says. “In that moment of excitement, we forgot that governments change. This one certainly did. And then we were in a very difficult position.”

  Chapter 25

  Seattle, Washington

  In 1996, Shilo Murphy was sleeping in an abandoned building in Seattle’s University District. He’d passed out the night before after shooting up with a friend. When he woke up the next morning, his friend didn’t.

  “I went to sleep and when I woke up, he had passed away,” Murphy says. “And it broke my heart.”

  Murphy was just twenty years old at the time. He frantically tried to wake his friend, but it’s likely he had already been dead for hours. “I was hysterical,” Murphy recalls. “And then I was very heartbroken.” He carried his friend’s body outside and set him down on a patch of grass. “I didn’t want him to die in shit,” Murphy explains. “I laid him outside, where he didn’t have to be around garbage.”

  Murphy was angry. He remembers thinking that the reason they were in that abandoned building—the reason they were sleeping somewhere out of sight—was because there was a war on drugs and because police hunted people who used drugs. “There was constant harassment and we were a constant target,” Murphy says. “I wasn’t going to take that anymore. I wanted to start organizing.”

  In the late 1980s, a man named Bob Qui
nn started an illegal needle-exchange program in Seattle, one of the very first anywhere in the United States. In 1996, he took Murphy under his wing and let him volunteer at the nonprofit organization that the unsanctioned exchange had grown into: Street Outreach Service.

  Murphy had grown up with an activist streak in him and Quinn channelled it toward harm reduction. “He taught me to always get to a meeting early, because if you come late, they’ll think of you as just another drug user who they can discount,” Murphy recalls. “Always give unconditional love to our participants and patients. And be a good listener, then be a good talker.”

  Quinn also taught Murphy about the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labour organization that was founded in Chicago in 1905. The Wobblies, as they’re often called, focused on strength in numbers and the power of unions. Murphy wondered if he could take what he’d learned about the labour movement and apply it to drug users. He’d heard of a group just north of Seattle, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, who had done something like that, and thought he could do the same in Seattle. (Quinn committed suicide in December 2016 at the age of fifty-four. Several obituaries ran with a photograph of him with his arm around Murphy. “He’s one of the closest things I’ve ever had to a father,” Murphy says today.)

  There were a couple of failed attempts to organize drug users. “I remember talking to people and just getting them there was a struggle,” Murphy says. “For a little while, people thought that we were a front for the police. We had to do a lot of convincing.”

  By 2007, enough of the University District’s drug users were convinced that Murphy was for real. They banded with him to form the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, an advocacy group dedicated to ending the war on drugs. Then, in 2009, Murphy cofounded the Urban Survivors Union, a needle-exchange program run entirely by active drug users.

  “We did a lot of protests, we did a lot of lobby efforts, and we did things like bringing drug users to meet their congressmen,” Murphy says. Each week, the group met in the basement of a church on Northeast 43rd Street, just across from the University of Washington School of Law.

  “One of our first campaigns was lobbying drug dealers for better quality drugs,” he recalls. “We said, ‘Hey, we have all these drug users who buy drugs. If you gave us better quality and better quantity and if you give us better pricing, we can guarantee you more customers.’” The idea, which Murphy borrowed from a drug-users union in London, England, experienced some success but quickly fizzled.

  In 2012, the Urban Survivors Union began to discuss how to bring a supervised-injection site to Seattle. For three years, they went back and forth on different roads they could take to make it happen. Some drug users, Murphy among them, wanted to open an illegal site to test how authorities would respond. But the majority thought it would be smarter to work with local government. In November 2015, they settled on a combination of cooperation and confrontation.

  “We were invited to a meeting at city hall and we said publicly, for the first time, ‘We are going to open up a safe-injection room in Seattle.’”

  A local newspaper’s account of that meeting is slightly more colourful. “The time is now,” Murphy said, quoted there. “Get on the bandwagon, or get the fuck out of our way.”57

  “Safer is better,” reads an advertisement that ran on the sides of buses driving around Seattle through the summer of 2017. “Supervised consumption spaces / Reduce discarded syringes in parks and alleys.”

  The campaign was funded by Voices of Community Activists and Leaders Washington (VOCAL-WA), a project organized by the nonprofit Public Defender Association to educate Washington State residents about harm-reduction services.

  VOCAL also used light projectors to display messages on buildings in downtown Seattle. “Overdose deaths in King County in 2015: 320,” one read. “Overdose deaths in an SCS [supervised-consumption space]: 0.”

  “Safe Consumption Spaces Save Lives,” read another message that was so large when projected, it covered an entire side of a ten-storey hotel not far from Seattle’s Space Needle.

  Patricia Sully is a staff attorney with the Public Defender Association and coordinator for VOCAL-WA. She says the idea behind the advertisements is to take an education campaign about harm reduction beyond activists, to the general public. “We tried to come up with messaging that would resonate with anyone standing on the street,” Sully says. “Our bus ads are framed around the idea that safer is better … Basic information that is so reasonable that in order to disagree with it, you have to accept that you are just ideologically opposed.”

  Through 2015 and 2016, Sully sat alongside Shilo Murphy on the Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force, which was convened to assess the viability and potential benefits and drawbacks of supervised-injection services in Seattle and King County. While Murphy and the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance focused on service provision, VOCAL did advocacy to educate the public about the logic and evidence that supports harm-reduction services.

  Other jurisdictions in the United States that are considering supervised-injection services—California and New York, for example—are largely legislative efforts playing out in political arenas. In Washington State, local health authorities operate with significant autonomy. And a majority of key politicians already support the idea of an injection site, including Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and King County executive Dow Constantine. But there’s a push to bring the issue to a public vote. Joshua Freed, a former mayor and council member from Bothell City, King County, and Mark Miloscia, a Republican senator representing the thirtieth district, are working to put supervised injection on a ballot. And so in Washington, groups like VOCAL are using buses and buildings to educate the public about harm reduction.

  “We do a lot of events where we have a panel and a film screening, but those events draw people who are largely already supportive,” Sully says. “We’re not converting people at those events. So we’ve really tried to reach out and do events in places where we’re encountering the general public.”

  In July 2016, VOCAL brought a group called Safe Shape to Washington and over one week hosted supervised-injection demonstrations at six locations around Seattle and Olympia. At different parks and outside a record store, for example, Safe Shape’s Greg Scott pitched a “pop-up drug-consumption room.”

  It’s the shape of an imperfect cube, about ten feet (three metres) long on each side. Upon entering the tent, a drug user stops at a supply station where they pick up a clean needle, cooker, and tourniquet. Then they sit at a small desk and inject. Finally, there’s a sharps box for syringe disposal. Some Safe Shape demos also include an adjacent “chill room” where users who have just injected drugs can hang out for a bit to ensure they’re okay and also connect with social services, such as addictions counsellors or help with housing. The chill room is just another couple of chairs or large bean bags in which people can sit.

  Sully recalls one of her favourite memories since launching the education campaign. It was with Safe Shape at Victor Steinbrueck Park, along the water near Seattle’s popular Pike Place Market.

  “It’s a beautiful, sunny day, and these little kids come running into the Safe Shape,” Sully begins. “From a little kid’s perspective, I guess this looks like a really cool fort. And then in the chill-out room, there are those big, brightly coloured poof pillows to sit on. So the kids run in and are sitting in this thing.”

  She remembers looking to Scott a bit nervously. They didn’t want to just kick the kids out. The entire point was to normalize harm reduction and break down stigma. “But we’re also aware that we don’t know what kind of interaction we’re going to have with mom or dad when they show up,” Sully says. “So dad comes up and asks us, ‘What is this space?’”

  Dad turned out to be a state prosecutor. While his children played in the mock-injection site, Scott explained what it was and why Safe Shape thinks that bringing a functioning site to Seattle is a good idea.

&
nbsp; “Then his two kids come up and one of them says, ‘Daddy, what is this?’ And the way he explained it to them was, he asked them, ‘Do you ever feel like you just need to be in a place where it’s calm and you’re safe and you’re loved and accepted, where you can just be yourself?’ And the kid says, ‘Yes.’ And dad says, ‘Well, this is a space for people who need that sometimes.’

  “It was this beautiful moment of deeper recognition of what supervised-consumption spaces are,” Sully continues. “People can pretty easily grasp the practical element of this—that right now, we give people clean needles and then we send them out to a dirty alley to use that needle. But it takes a deeper understanding to really get the idea of safety beyond public health—to get safety on an emotional level, safety from arrest and harassment, and safety from judgment and from stigma.

  “We never would have encountered this prosecutor and his two kids at a panel,” she says. “We were only going to encounter him at the park when his kids thought this thing was a fort.”

  57Casey Jaywork, “Seattle Could Be the First City in the U.S. to Host Safe-Injection Sites for Heroin Users,” Seattle Weekly, November 17, 2015.

  Chapter 26

  Drug Users with a Lawyer

  I always say, there is a drug-user group, and then there is a drug-user group with a lawyer.”

  It’s an idiom that Ann Livingston came up with in late 1999, shortly after she met a young man by the name of John Richardson.

  Richardson was experiencing an existential crisis. He had just completed his final year of law school and was articling for a prominent environmental nonprofit based in downtown Vancouver. While it appeared everything was going according to his life’s plan, Richardson says he actually felt totally lost. Having just spent four years and a small fortune on law school, he was considering leaving the profession and starting over—doing what, he didn’t know.