Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (40 page)

Owen stared on, pale, his face drawn, as if he couldn’t understand how this was happening. Who
are
these people?

Bud won the City of Vancouver Book Award for a collection of his poetry. Normally, the award is presented by the mayor, but Owen refused to do it. Bud was beginning to despair. He had fought so hard—but the mayor seemed to be an insurmountable barrier.

But then something nobody could have predicted happened. Embarrassed by this endless protest, Mayor Owen decided he had better find out who these addicts were, and how they could be shut up. They were from a different world: he had been a businessman for thirty years, and came from a privileged political dynasty in which his grandfather was the chief constable, and his father the lieutenant governor. He hadn’t ever known any addicts, so he decided to walk around the Downtown Eastside incognito, and sit with the addicts, and hear what they had to say.

And this man who had argued that they should all be rounded up and locked away on army bases—this local Anslinger—was amazed.

When he described his memory of it in 2012, he still seemed startled by what he had witnessed. “The stories you hear,” he said to me, “blow you away.” These people, he found, had had such hard lives. He remembered a fifteen-year-old girl on the streets, and shook his head. They’re not malicious, he came to see. They’re not bad. They’re just broken. So he arranged “an afternoon tea party” for “the most hard-core addicts” and sat and listened to them talk about their lives for hours. “The stories were just unbelievable,” Owen repeated, shaking his head again.

Now that addicts were no longer phantasmagorical bogeymen but actual people with real stories, Owen realized he would have to learn more. He met with Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war. Friedman had grown up under alcohol prohibition in Chicago, where he concluded that prohibition causes more problems than the drug itself. The drug war, he believed, was the ultimate big government program—a criminal waste of money. Owen, who had always been a fiscal conservative, started to look at the cost of the drug war, and said to his fellow conservatives: “You want to balance the budget and get our fiscal health in shape? Let’s get realistic.”

Mayor Owen knew that politicians were supposed to ignore the facts he had learned and keep pledging endless warfare. But he said: “I just get so sick and tired of bullshit.”

He decided he was going to change the way he conducted his public meetings and press conferences about drugs. From now on, sitting on the platform with him, he had the chief of police to answer questions about crime, the medical officers to answer questions about health, and an addict from VANDU to answer questions about drug use and addiction. The mayor admitted he knew nothing about it: Why not have an addict there to provide a firsthand answer? With addicts by his side, he pledged to open the first safe injecting room in North America, to keep his new friends in VANDU alive, as the start of a wave of policies to protect addicts.

“Just think about it,” he implored his fellow politicians. “Think about the country. Leave politics at the door.”

The more the mayor looked and learned, the more he came to believe the prohibitionist policies were rotten right through. “Let’s start by legalizing marijuana, taxing it and putting it under the control of the federal government. It’s not rocket science. It’s a fairly simple proposal, and it works,” he said to me. “Let’s start with marijuana. We’re not talking about cocaine and heroin, [although] I hope we get there eventually. You got to crawl before you walk . . . Then we’ll come to the others and gradually go through the process . . . The evidence is in. The facts are in.”

Other politicians told him he was mad—not because of the substance of his policies, but because of the politics. “People said—you’re going to get defeated, mucking around with a bunch of no-goods,” Owen tells me. In fact, he was reelected at the next two mayoral elections in landslide victories.

When he and I met in a café on the Downtown Eastside, people interrupted us spontaneously to thank him for what he had done.

But for his conservative party, it was all too much. They eventually deselected him for the next mayoral race in favor of a more prohibitionist candidate, who lost. His successor as mayor, Larry Campbell, was a strong supporter of the injection site, now named InSite. I walk there, past Oppenheimer Park where the crosses once spiked through the grass, and I find that on the inside, it looks rather like a hairdresser’s. As you enter, you are taken through the lobby, shown to your booth, and given clean needles. You inject yourself, while a friendly trained nurse waits unobtrusively in the background. The booths are small and neat and lit from above. Once you have injected yourself, you can walk through to get medical treatment or counseling or just to talk about your problems. Any time you are ready to stop, there is a detox center right upstairs, with a warm bed waiting for you.

Because of the uprising by VANDU, and a conservative mayor who listened to the facts, opened his heart, and changed his mind, Vancouver now has the most progressive drug policies on the North American continent.

But many people had understandable fears about this experiment. Wouldn’t it open the floodgates to even more drug use—and therefore end up with more death, not less? It seemed like common sense. The local business owner Price Vassage
²⁸
reflected the opinion of many people when he warned at the time: “People say drug injection sites are going to save lives because there’s all these deaths from drug injections. Bullshit. People die of drug overdoses because they do drugs. If you encourage them to continue to use drugs, there’s a greater chance they will have a drug overdose.”

In 2012, the results of a decade of changed policies came in.

The average life expectancy
²⁹
on the Downtown Eastside, according to the city’s medical health officials, had risen by ten years. One newspaper headline
³⁰
said simply:
LIFE
-EXPECTANCY JUMP ASTOUNDS
. The
Province
newspaper explained: “Medical health officer Dr. John Carsley said it is rare to see such a shift in a population’s life expectancy.” Some of this improvement is due to the fact that the neighborhood is no longer seen as a disaster zone, so some wealthier, healthier people have started to move in; but the
Globe and Mail
newspaper reported,
³¹
using figures from the British Columbia coroners’ office, that drug-related fatalities were down by 80 percent in this period. To find a rise in life expectancy this drastic, you’d have to look to the end of wars—which is what this is.

Philip Owen smiled at me in his expensive suit and said he was proud to have sacrificed his political career in this cause.

In 2012, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that drug addicts have a right to life, and that safe injecting rooms are an inherent part of that right and can never be legally shut down. There is no need to fill Oppenheimer Park with crosses today. The killing fields have emptied. And the addicts did it for themselves.

Throughout 2013, Bud kept getting sick. He had a lot of pain in his back—the legacy of his time on the streets, he believed—and finally, in May 2014, he was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. They released him early. The next day, he was found dead in his apartment.
³²
He was sixty-six years old.

For his memorial service,
³³
the streets of the Downtown Eastside were shut down and sealed off—just as they had been on the day they laid a thousand crosses in Oppenheimer Park. Everyone from homeless street addicts to a member of Parliament read his poems aloud, and VANDU marched through the streets in a parade. There were many people in that crowd who knew they were alive because of the uprising Bud had begun all those years before.

Bud lived long enough to see something he feared he would never witness. Back when he was at the lowest ebb of his addiction, it was the poetry of Rimbaud that kept him alive. He vowed then, he told me, to “write one poem like that for another human being . . . to really connect deeply in their pain and their suffering, in the same way these poets did with me.”

A few years before he died, Bud went on a reading tour of high schools in British Columbia, and way up north in a town called Smithers, he read out a poem titled “When I Was Fifteen” about the time he had tried to kill himself. He didn’t impose any retrospective wisdom. He tried only to describe truthfully what it had been like for him on that day. He didn’t know it yet, but there was a girl in the audience who, a few days before, had taken an overdose, and her parents had responded by telling her she couldn’t be unhappy because they gave her everything. Her teacher suggested she come to the poetry reading to take her mind off things.

At the end of the reading, the girl approached Bud. She insisted that the teacher unlock the office and run off a photocopy of the poem; she wasn’t leaving without it, she said.

She clutched it as she left, glowing now.

And Bud thought to himself—I stayed alive long enough to keep my promise. I wrote my poem.

Chapter 15

Snowfall and Strengthening

After a year and a half of meeting victims of this war and feeling more and more angry and depressed, Vancouver had given me an itchy sense of hope. I had learned from Bud that things could get dramatically better if people organized and demanded it—and I wanted to see more experiments and innovations like his, to discover whether this was a freak result, or a harbinger of how things could be. But as I asked around, it slowly became clear to me that there were almost no positive experiments taking place in the Americas. A few prisons in the United States have slightly more generous addiction treatment programs. A few state governments have tiny programs giving out weaker substitute drugs to the most extreme addicts. That, it seemed, was it.

But I knew that the two European countries I am a citizen of—Britain and Switzerland—had experimented with much more substantial alternatives. It was time, I realized,
¹
to come home.

I had a vague memory—learned, I think, from reading Mike Gray’s book
Drug Crazy
years ago—that in the early 1990s, in the north of England, there had been an experiment in prescribing heroin, but I knew very little about it. I tracked down the man who had led this experiment, and it turned out he was in exile in New Zealand. I interviewed him by phone and then traveled to Liverpool to find everyone I could
²
who had witnessed what happened there. The story they told me had—I quickly realized—startling echoes of where the story of the drug war had begun, long ago.

Forty-four years and five thousand miles from the shuttering of the last heroin clinics in California, a man named John Marks walked into a gray little doctor’s office in a stretch of the Wirral, in the drizzly north of England, where they used to build ships, and now they built nothing. It was his first day as a psychiatrist there. John was a big, bearded Welshman from the valleys, swathed in smoke from the pipe he puffed on, and with the murk of the River Mersey washing past, he was not optimistic. Like Henry Smith Williams, he was the intellectual son of a doctor, and like him, he thought he frankly had better things to do than waste his energies on addicts in a place like this.

John had come here to crack the mystery of schizophrenia and how it really works, but because he was the new boy, he was given a chore. His colleagues said to him: “You can have all the addicts, John—all the alcoholics and drug addicts.”