Barnetson laughs when he’s reminded of that incident. “The phone company was … nice enough to cancel the bill for us,” he says.
When that door closed, another opened when Livingston spotted an opportunity to secure real funding. A grant of $50,000 was available for a group that said it could prevent hospitalizations of marginalized people. No one was going to give $50,000 to a group of drug users, Livingston realized, and so she applied for the money through a Downtown Eastside nonprofit organization called Lookout, which at the time ran a shelter and drop-in centre for people with mental-health challenges. Against all expectations, Livingston’s application was approved. Then, later the same year, that grant was topped up with an additional $47,000. Now VANDU had real funding, which it used to rent a room at Lookout’s drop-in, called the LivingRoom.
At one of VANDU’s first meetings, in late 1997, attendees made a list of names of friends and family they had lost and attached it to the wall behind them.
Photo: Duncan Murdoch
“We had an office with a broken computer, a phone, and a leaky roof,” Livingston says. “And Lookout could not grasp what we were doing. Not a clue.”
Just as VANDU was gaining an air of legitimacy, Mackenzie and Quayle were offered another opportunity. The drug-user group in Australia that they had essentially copied to help found VANDU wanted them to relocate to Sydney. The offer was too good to pass up, and they took the job. Had they not, VANDU might have turned out very differently, perhaps with a far wider membership than the group of mostly injection-drug addicts that it’s composed of today.
Quayle and Mackenzie left but their name stayed. On August 15, 1998, the group debated—endlessly, Livingston recalls—the drafting of a constitution. At the end of it, a new nonprofit was formed. “The name of the society is: Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users,” the constitution reads. That document consists of just one page and outlines a simple mandate to “improve the quality of life for people who use illicit drugs.” Those objectives would be achieved through organizing, educating the public, and by developing “local networks and coalitions of informed and empowered people who will work to ensure public policies and practices are favourable to people who use illicit drugs.”
The next step was to elect a leader. Livingston and Osborn kept their names out of the race, instead encouraging the group to vote in an active drug user. Another raucous debate ensued. At the end of it, Melissa Eror, the unsung hero who had kept Back Alley together, was elected the first president of VANDU.
She recalls that the experience was not a positive one. “I got really frustrated quite quickly with the whole thing,” Eror says. She enjoyed the hands-on work she had done keeping Back Alley open as long as she had. In contrast, VANDU’s less tangible activism left Eror feeling disenchanted. She worried their efforts would never get them anywhere. “I didn’t think there was a future in it,” Eror explains. “Those things don’t really impress me. They get your name in the paper and everybody gets to beat their breast but that’s about as far as it goes.”
Eror was also trying to keep herself clean for the sake of her two daughters. Hanging out with a group for which a membership requirement was active or recent drug use didn’t help her do that.
“The more things got bad with the group, the more drugs I started to use,” Eror says. “And at the end of it, it just wasn’t a good thing.”
She did stick around long enough to make one notable contribution. There’s a document dated September 1998 that was drafted for the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board that bears Eror’s name at the top of its list of authors. The title of the report is “Proposal for the Development of a Pilot Project to Implement and Evaluate the Use of Safe (Injection) Sites: a Strategy for Reducing Drug Overdoses in the Downtown Eastside.”
The previous January, Osborn had pushed the health board to adopt a motion in support of harm reduction. It’s quite possibly the first time that a government body had ever incorporated those words into a policy document anywhere in North America.
“The first priority of harm reduction is to decrease the negative consequences of drug use for the individual,” the motion reads. “As a strategy, harm reduction establishes a hierarchy of goals that ranges from reducing the immediate harm associated with use or consumption to abstinence.” In accordance, the board established a committee to “explore the possibility of establishing safe-injection sites within the Downtown Eastside.”
Osborn had ensured that a number of VANDU members were appointed to the group. His name was included as were Eror’s and Livingston’s.
The board was represented by Heather Hay, who at the time was responsible for community health services in a large area of Vancouver that included the Downtown Eastside. She had gotten to know Osborn and, through him, Livingston, in an effort get a better grip on the needs of the community.
On top of all that, the number of illicit-drug overdose deaths in BC—which at this time were mostly occurring in the Downtown Eastside—had continued to climb. There were 217 in 1995, 301 in 1996, 300 in 1997, and then 400 in 1998.
So twice a week for a period of several months, Hay met Osborn at the Ovaltine Café, an old-fashioned diner near the corner of Main and East Hastings that’s still there today. “He would educate me,” Hay says. “And then I met Ann through VANDU. We used to rely on her to organize the IV-drug users. And they soon became the eyes and ears and support for us to get the work done.”
By September 1998, the working group had its draft report ready, a plan to bring four sanctioned injection sites to the Downtown Eastside. Their idea was to create a space for IV-drug users that was a combination of a more casual, “coffee shop” sort of atmosphere, but also fairly medical in nature, with separated cubicles for injecting drugs and professional health-care staff on-site, including counsellors. Equipment for injecting drugs—clean syringes, for example—should be supplied, the report said. It also recommended that these supervised-injection sites be staffed by “peers,” the government’s term for past and present drug users. “It is proposed that IVDUs [intravenous drug users] take on responsibility for reception, security, cleaning, and counselling; creating job opportunities for those within the user community,” the document reads.
For those positions that could not be filled by peers, “It is considered critical the professional staff is trusted by the users,” it adds in bolded text.
A short article published in the Vancouver Sun includes a description of the facility that was imagined by the report: “The proposal describes a uniquely West Coast amalgam of half coffee bar, half social service outlet,” it reads. “While the front coffee shop would offer coffee and snacks at a nominal price, a space behind the coffee shop would provide private cubicles equipped with apparatus for injecting, mirrors, lockers for clients’ belongings, and washrooms with sinks.”29
In 1998, however, this first official plan for a supervised-injection facility in Vancouver went nowhere. The same newspaper article recounts how the draft report got to the health board for a discussion but never made it to a vote.
Hay blames politicians in Ottawa. “The feds caught wind of this early on, and the whole thing went sideways,” she says. The federal health ministry had assigned a woman named Simin Tabrizi to the committee. She was fired for the report the group had put together. “It totally died, and I think it was pressure from the feds to make it die,” Hay says.
Tabrizi had put a considerable amount of time and effort into the project. She even travelled to Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, visiting supervised-injection sites in those countries to inform their proposa
l for Vancouver. Tabrizi took her dismissal in stride, acknowledging the controversial nature of their work, but still feels it was a missed opportunity. “Nobody wanted to touch this,” she says. “And I thought that was irresponsible. The model had proven to be effective. And it was not a huge departure from what we were already doing in terms of needle exchange. It was a natural extension, in my opinion … But they vetoed the idea.”
Eror took the entire experience especially hard. A few months later, in early 1999, she resigned from her position as VANDU’s first president and left activism for good. Eror took an entry-level job with the Portland Hotel Society, helping with HIV/AIDS outreach. She found she preferred hands-on work and settled in there.
“The Portland was a zoo,” Eror says with a laugh. “But it is what it is, and they managed to keep a lid on everything. I might have a lot of criticisms for Mark Townsend, but at this point, I’m going to give him nothing but praise for what he did. They were effective.”
Eror’s successor was Bryan Alleyne. He came from Nova Scotia where, in the early 1990s, he worked in a home for schizophrenics, watching himself go insane. Alleyne spent half of every shift down in the basement of the building, locked in a bathroom, smoking crack. Paranoia could set in, and he would get stuck in there for hours. It was time for a change.
“A buddy of mine just happened to call me from Vancouver,” Alleyne begins in his booming, raspy voice. “He said, ‘Do you want to come out here?’ I said, ‘Do they got any work out there?’ He said they got lots of work. I said, ‘They got any cocaine?’ He said, ‘Oh, man, you wanna come out here.’ And I came out, and that’s what I came looking for.”
For a while, Alleyne had a job removing asbestos. But the cocaine in Vancouver was great those years, and an addiction to the drug was soon a lot more powerful than his ability to maintain steady work. “Things started to get hard, and then someone told me, ‘Go down around Hastings and you’ll get a sandwich and a little help and stuff,’” Alleyne says. “Everything I wanted was right there. Or everything I thought I wanted.”
He settled into a life on the streets. On the edge of the Downtown Eastside, Alleyne found a store called the Chemistry Shop, where he could buy crack pipes in bulk for two dollars each. He would take them back to East Hastings or Oppenheimer Park and sell the pipes there for three dollars apiece. Alleyne stayed up for seventy-two hours at a time that way, fuelled on crack cocaine for days before an inevitable crash.
“I became a fucking burnout drug addict, there is no doubt,” he recalls. “A full-blown junkie. It was a tough time. I was standing out on the street selling pipes, waiting in the food lineups, fucking sleeping in alleys sitting up, not sleeping all night long. It was a hard time.”
One day in early 1998, Alleyne was feeling especially burned out. “I was really, really hungry,” he says. “I asked this girl if she wanted to buy a pipe. And she says, ‘If you’re hungry and want something to eat, go upstairs. This lady’s having a meeting. And after the meeting, you get three dollars and a hamburger.’ Boom. I heard that and I went upstairs.”
There were fifteen or twenty people inside the Street Church that day, Alleyne recalls. “This woman is standing up at the front of the room, and everybody else in the room is either a crackhead or a pin cushion or whatever,” he says. “We were all drug addicts. And she was trying to tell us, if we listen to her and if we followed her and if we lined up, that the government was going to listen to our voices.
“I went, ‘No, that’s bullshit. Government ain’t ever going to listen to us,’” Alleyne continues. “She said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you join this here group, I’ll prove to you that the government will listen.’ I had to take her up on that challenge. A year later, I was the president.”
Alleyne was Livingston’s right-hand man in those days. “VANDU gave me purpose,” he says. “I loved the fucking power. It gave me something. I wasn’t just a junkie on the street. I was a junkie who was doing something, making noise, and being heard.”
Livingston was still dating Osborn, but he had somewhat lost interest in VANDU. “Bud was a recluse at this point,” she says. “He stopped coming to the Saturday meetings. I guess he was home shooting dope. I don’t know. He pulled away.”
Livingston recalls how Alleyne, heavily using cocaine and heroin, was still able to pour his energy into VANDU with the single-minded focus that she’s noticed is a common trait among functional addicts. “He would show up at my house every morning at 8:30 a.m.,” Livingston says. “I would be trying to get dressed and then we would talk about what we were going to do that day.”
VANDU only had access to the rooms they were offered at Street Church and then LivingRoom for a couple of hours each Saturday. And so, as the group grew more active, Livingston’s apartment became its de facto headquarters.
“We were always making sandwiches at my house and then sticking a hundred of these sandwiches in a Safeway cart and pushing them up the street to a meeting,” she says. “So the people in my co-op were freaking out because these drug people were coming to the door who were just bent out of shape and super marginalized. But we had nowhere else to make the sandwiches.”
Livingston describes those sandwich assembly lines that formed in her kitchen as a crucial component of the strategy for empowerment that she deployed within VANDU. Long-time addicts were marginalized to such extremes that years had passed since anyone had trusted them with any sort of responsibility, she explains. On the sandwich assembly lines, they were charged with seeing that someone else was fed that day. They also received a very small stipend for it, usually equal to bus fare. Alleyne notes that even back then, a couple bucks wasn’t much money to someone with a fifty-dollar-a-day heroin habit. It was the sense of belonging that gave the stipend its real value.
Alleyne likens hanging out with Livingston to a master class in activism. “Like a little dog, I’d go everywhere Ann went,” he says. “Just to see what was going on. I’d go to the health board meetings and Bud would be standing there and cursing and getting his point across doing whatever he had to do. And I just loved it. I thought, ‘I’m going to do this now.’ So when I went up to city hall, I talked how I wanted to talk, not how they wanted me to talk. And they listened. It was amazing how it came together. It was fucking amazing. They actually listened to us.”
Ann Livingston and Bud Osborn began dating in 1996.
Photo: Ann Livingston
Alleyne expresses puzzled bemusement with how little Livingston knew about him before she gave him her total trust. He was still homeless then, and she would let him sleep on her couch whenever he’d had a particularly rough couple of nights outside. Soon enough, Livingston’s children were calling him Uncle. The affectionate nickname could turn heads in public, he says, laughing. The boys were skinny white kids, and Alleyne was big and black.
“I used to babysit her kids,” Alleyne recounts. “And one day I’m walking down Hastings over by Powell Street and I’m pushing baby Joseph in a stroller. I was just walking there with the kid, and the police pull me over. They want to know who owns this baby and what I’m doing with it.”
“None of your fucking business,” Alleyne replied to the cop. “Are you just bothering me because I’m a black guy with a white baby?”
That didn’t end the altercation, so Alleyne got Livingston on the phone, and he recalls how she unleashed a string of expletives on the officer.
“Why wouldn’t I have cussed him out?” Livingston says now with a mix of amusement and outrage. “Why would a black guy go down the street with a white kid in a stroller? What did he think—he was selling him or something?”
Alleyne and baby Joseph were told they could continue on their way.
“She put so much trust in people,” Alleyne says.
About a year before Osborn passed away, Johann Hari asked him if, after nearly three decades of activism, he could name a high point.
“The highest moment was the organization of VANDU,” Osborn repli
ed after a moment’s hesitation. “I would never in my life, as a lone junkie on the street, have ever believed in a million years that a whole bunch of low-bottom drug addicts from the worst places could come together as an organization and accomplish something.”
29Cori Howard, “Safe Site for Addicts ‘Saved Lives,’” Vancouver Sun, September 25, 1998.
Chapter 11
Out of Harm’s Way
The Portland Hotel Society was founded in March 1991 under the umbrella of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA). Its leader, Jim Green, was supportive of everything the Portland was doing, primarily by taking a hands-off approach that left Liz Evans and her team to act on their own.
Green passed away in 2012. In Vancouver today, he deservingly holds the status of a hero of the Downtown Eastside. But in regards to the Portland, in the early 1990s, he didn’t understand what was going on at the hotel and didn’t much care to. Back then, his mission was to provide affordable housing for the working class. Evans and her hotel of drug-addicted lunatics—in the eyes of so many blue-collar workers—were viewed as dragging DERA through the mud.
At the same time, Evans and Townsend weren’t advertising their work. “There was a very deliberate decision on our part, that we made in the early ’90s, when we started, that we would not talk out loud about what we were doing, because we worried it would jeopardize our ability to house people,” Evans recalls. “Jim was great. But when the Portland started and we had all these active drug users, he really did not have any kind of clue what the fuck we were doing.”
The result was a bit of a disconnect between the Portland and its parent organization. Tensions slowly built over the years and as the Portland became more involved in activism.
One evening, the rift spilled into the streets, literally. “A DERA staff member was drinking in the bar on the ground floor [of the Portland Hotel] and came out drunk at eleven at night,” Evans recounts. “And they bumped into one of our residents and beat them up right outside the hotel. A staff member! There was just this sort of hatred of the people that lived at the Portland. They were viewed as the people that needed to be extricated from the community.”