Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (39 page)

At the first meeting, eight or ten people shuffled in, addicts from the street, like him. “They’d be there to see—Are we there, like everyone else, to hustle them somehow? To shoot an angle on them?” Bud recalls. “To make a group out of them and then us keep the money?”

Bud’s first moves were very practical. He suggested the addicts patrol the alleyways to spot people who were overdosing and immediately call medical help for anyone who needed it. He invited the local fire department to come and explain to addicts how to perform CPR on an overdose victim so they could keep their friend alive until the ambulance got there.

This was tangible. Everyone could see what it meant, right away. The addicts organized themselves into brigades and started watching one another. In the weeks and months that followed, people who would have been found dead in the morning were spotted in time, and survived. So at the next few meetings, other addicts started to come up with suggestions themselves for how they could save each other. How do we get a safe injecting room? How do we protect the addicted sex workers? Soon the meetings had a hundred people at them, and they had to find a bigger room.

The group decided to turn up at community centers and City Hall meetings where they were having discussions about the need to crack down on The Junkies. They would listen to people talking about how they had to be wiped out or driven away, and then politely stand up and explain—That’s us. We are the people you are talking about. How can we answer your fears? How can we be good citizens? There was a look of amazed disgust on people’s faces. They had never had a conversation with the people they were raging against. They turned to the addicts and poured their fear and scorn over them—you are filling our children’s playgrounds with used syringes in an attempt to hurt them, they’d say. Bud explained they were happy to solve this problem: he arranged a regular patrol of addicts to go and clear away the needles.

People were nonplussed. Are they trying to mess with our heads? Is this a trick?

The addicts started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movements of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: “Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing. They began, haltingly, to find a new language to talk about themselves as addicts. We have certain inalienable rights: to stay alive, to stay healthy, to be treated as people. You are taking those rights away from us. We will claim them back.

The mayor of Vancouver was a right-winger named Philip Owen—a rich businessman with sharp suits and sharper solutions. He knew how to deal with this problem: round up all the addicts, he said, and lock them away
¹⁰
at the army base at Chilliwack. He dismissed calls for the supervised injection rooms, and the evidence that they had hugely reduced the overdose and AIDS transmission rates in Frankfurt, declaring: “I’m totally and violently opposed.”
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His solution was “twenty-five years, mandatory life sentence” for anyone selling drugs. “Bango, just like that. Just like that. Throw away the key.”

This attitude ran right through Vancouver. A senior member of the Vancouver Police Department dismissed addicts as “vampires” and “werewolves.”
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When a serial killer started to murder the mainly addicted sex workers of the Downtown Eastside, the police did virtually nothing for years, effectively allowing him to continue. One policewoman explained to the subsequent inquiry that the attitude among her fellow officers toward these addicts was that “they wouldn’t piss on them
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if they were on fire.” Bud went on radio shows and callers told him: “The only good junkie is a dead junkie.” One asked: “Why don’t they just
¹⁴
string barbed wire around the Downtown Eastside and let them inject each other to death?”

In the middle of all this, a killer whale
¹⁵
named Finna died in the Vancouver Aquarium, and there was an outburst of Princess Diana–style grief in the city. The deaths of more than a thousand addicts, by contrast, were stirring no response.

Bud believed that it would take a dramatic gesture
¹⁶
to jolt the city into seeing his neighborhood differently. So the group he and his friends had formed—now christened the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)—headed to Oppenheimer Park, one of the great green spaces of the city, and VANDU volunteers along with the staff of the Portland Hotel Society filled it with a thousand plain wooden crosses. Each cross represented
¹⁷
a drug user who had died on the Downtown Eastside in the past four years. Their names were written
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on the crosses in black marker. As the crosses stretched across the neat lawns of Oppenheimer Park, it looked like the graves of the First World War—a great swath of lost love. Bud and his friends sealed off the surrounding streets with wire, and hung a vast banner that declared that these blocks were “killing fields.”
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They handed out leaflets
²⁰
explaining that overdose was the single biggest cause of death at that time in British Columbia for people between the ages of thirty and forty-nine.

The traffic stopped and the streets were still, as if these deaths mattered, as if the loss of a thousand addicts deserved a pause. Gandhi said one of the crucial roles for anyone who wants to change anything is to make the oppression visible—to give it a physical shape.

Bud wrote a poem titled “a thousand crosses in oppenheimer park.”
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It says:

a question each one of these thousand crosses puts to each of us

why are we still alive?

These activists believed that if people knew—if they could see the addicts as human—they would care. Ann Livingstone, Bud’s girlfriend at the time of the protests, tells me they were working on the belief that “Canadians are decent people and they don’t know what’s happening to us and they need to know.”

Addicts had been persecuted by prohibition since 1914 and none of them had fought back before. It hadn’t seemed possible. Bud wasn’t only creating a rebellion; he was creating a language with which addicts could rebel. It happened in Vancouver and nowhere else for a reason: in most cities in the world, if addicts came out in public and declared who they were and began to fight for their rights, they would risk being fired from their jobs, stripped of their welfare, and expelled from their homes. But the Portland Hotel Society—where Gabor and Liz Evans worked—had a policy of housing Vancouver’s addicts and refusing to throw them out. These addicts, alone in the world, had safe ground on which to stand.

VANDU built a coffin and started to carry it to every City Hall meeting where drugs were discussed. On it, written in large letters, were the words:
WHO WILL
BE THE NEXT
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OVERDOSE VICTIM
?
They forced the mayor, Philip Owen, to see it, and to see the cost of his policies. They carried a sign, with words echoing right from the start of the drug war:
DRUG USERS
ARE PEOPLE TOO
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!

Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.

For months, Vancouver’s officialdom watched this movement puzzled and repelled. After a while, the local health board figured it might be able to muffle this force and prevent it from embarrassing them with its protests by getting Bud to sit on the board
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for Vancouver—a powerful body that monitors all the health spending in the city and has more resources at its disposal than City Hall. At one meeting after Bud joined, a top health official for the province explained calmly that the AIDS rate—the biggest cause of death among Bud’s friends and neighbors—would eventually reach a saturation point in the Downtown Eastside and fall of its own accord, because the addicts would simply die out.

Sitting there, carefully taking notes, Bud slowly realized what was being said. The authorities were nonchalantly declaring that he and his friends would all die, and then the problem would be over.

Bud managed—after a lot of arguing and lobbying—to get some small funding for VANDU from the health board, over the protests of Mayor Owen, and the group’s members voted for a detailed agenda. Their first demand was simple: establish a safe, monitored place where people could go to inject their drugs. That would mean they would live, and not die.

Across Vancouver, people were starting to look at the addicts in a different way. These people who had been lying and dying alone were now campaigning together, and often they seemed to have more dignity than the people screaming at them that they should just go away and kill themselves. Many people had believed what Bruce Alexander was taught by Batman and his dad—that addicts didn’t care about their lives, or about anything but their next fix. But here they were, organizing to defend themselves and each other.

And the addicts were starting to look at themselves differently. Bud said, “People would work sixty hours a week” at VANDU. “To see people’s faces and how they changed—they saw, I have worth, I have value. I’m able to help somebody else. I’m no longer just what they call me in the newspapers.” And Bud discovered, as a side effect, something else: “If we’re off demonstrating, we’re having board meetings deciding what to do, and thinking about what our next actions could be, how is so and so doing, how can we help so and so because he got busted again—all that’s taking you away from just being totally fixed on ‘I got to get a drug, I got to get a drug, drug drug drug.’ ”

Ever since he was five years old, Bud had wanted to die. But now, faced with a barrage of abuse saying people like him are better off dead, he was discovering something deep inside himself—the will to live. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he had a home, and a community, and people to fight for.

Bud’s story can be read as proof of Gabor’s theories that childhood trauma creates addiction, but he can also be seen as proof of Bruce’s theories. Back in Toledo, when he stopped taking heroin and drinking alcohol but was still in an empty cage alone, he was chronically suicidal. Now his life was becoming like Rat Park, where he had friends and everything that gives life meaning—and he was finding his desire to use drugs ebbed.

“That’s what I wanted—for my spirit to wake up. I didn’t just want to stop drugs and feel like shit, feel even worse,” Bud says. He wanted to be fully alive as a person making a difference in the world, and now it was happening.

Yet even as the most active members of VANDU were starting to feel better about themselves, people were still dying all around them. “We had twenty-five board members,” one of the cofounders, Dean Wilson, says, “because you never knew who was going to be alive at the next meeting.” When Bud came out of one health board assembly, he watched a man methodically going through the trash in an overflowing dumpster, and he saw empty syringe packages floating and a pink blouse in a heap.
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And there were still the sirens, all the time.

When you are confronted with historical forces that seem vastly bigger than you—like a war on your people that has lasted nearly a hundred years—you have two choices. You can accept it as your fate and try to adjust to being a pinball being whacked around a table by the powerful. Or you can band together with other people to become a historical force yourself—one that will eventually overwhelm the forces ranged against you.

Bud chose the second way. He appealed for more and more people to join VANDU. He studied in the library to find out what the official definition of a public health emergency is in Canada, and discovered that Vancouver had never declared one. He started maneuvering for the health board to formally do it—and under his pressure, they finally agreed. This was now, officially, the city’s first emergency. Suddenly, VANDU was an international news story, and Bud was interviewed by everyone from the BBC to the
New York Times
. He wrote a poem explaining that “the war on drugs
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/ is a war against hope and compassion and care.”

Now that they knew there were addicts at the meetings and that helping them to survive was now an official duty, the city bureaucrats started to talk differently. It’s hard to dismiss somebody’s death as irrelevant if they are looking you in the face. Bud was able to persuade the health board to provide funding for VANDU, and they established a permanent center in the city—a big old storefront in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. They voted to use their public money to fly in experts from Switzerland and the Netherlands to explain how those countries had massively reduced the death rate of addicts by abandoning the war on drugs. (I traveled to Switzerland later to see how this worked.)

But still the mayor, Philip Owen, was determined to block all progress. He actually declared a moratorium on all new projects to help addicts—in the middle of the emergency. VANDU cofounder Dean Wilson stood up at a city council meeting, looked him in the eye, and said “It almost seems like you are sentencing us to death . . .
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One [addict] a day is dying, and if one of you were dying every day—every day you woke up and there was one less person working in City Hall—I tell you, that problem would be solved in two minutes.”