Vancouver
2.0:
Politicians
Unveil
New
Agreement
to
Deal
With
Hard
Drug
Scene,
but
Tensions
Continue
to
Rise
10/7/00
Two weeks ago, DRCNet reported on increasing tensions in the Downtown Eastside pitting thousands of hard drug users and their advocates against a coalition of community and merchant organizations (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/152.html#twocultures). Amid rising clamor from the politically powerful and deep pocketed Community Alliance, the coalition of 13 different groups from the Gastown, Strathcona, and Chinatown neighborhoods abutting the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen in August ordered a moratorium on new services for drug users. The mayor, who had previously supported such services, wanted a "time-out" to cool rising passions as the level of hostility between addict-oriented activists and merchants and residents grew palpable. On September 30th, Mayor Owen, along with representatives of the provincial and federal governments, announced a new version of the Vancouver Agreement designed to deal with the Downtown Eastside. The original agreement, initialed last spring, was stopped in its tracks by the moratorium. The new agreement provides for $10 million US for new services for the drug using population, including a health contact center, a mini-emergency room, and expanded detoxification services for the area, along with an already planned drug users' resource center. But it does not include safe-injection sites demanded by some harm reduction advocates. Worse, said Anne Livingstone of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), half the funds will go to support increased law enforcement activities in the Downtown Eastside. "This plan is vacuous," Livingstone told DRCNet. "It was a time for political courage, but they are moving backward. They are headed in the direction of drug courts," she said. Livingstone is also skeptical about the resource center. "It was already approved before the moratorium, and the mayor's office claimed it would open, but it didn't," she said. "We worry that it wasn't supposed to happen and it won't happen." "VANDU is looking at direct action in that event," she added. It wouldn't be the first time. The Vancouver harm reduction community has held demonstrations, carried coffins into city government offices, and disrupted meetings of anti-drug community organizations. Livingstone is unapologetic. "Listen," she said, "VANDU allows people who think they don't matter, who think they don't have civil rights to come to the realization that they do matter. There are lives on the line here." If harm reduction advocates are displeased, so is the Community Alliance. Alliance leader Bryce Rositch told the Vancouver Sun the announcement was "20% good news, 80% more of the same." "You still have four neighborhoods that are still very angry and frustrated, said Rositch. Last Saturday, one day after the new plan's announcement, Rositch and hundreds of supporters staged a march to protest open drug use in the area and to turn in petitions with 32,000 signatures asking the government to refuse to "assist, facilitate, or maintain the dealing and use of illegal drugs." The marchers, replete with their own private security force, were met by dozens of harm reduction counter-demonstrators and, according to press and eyewitness accounts, the scene turned very ugly. One harm reduction activist representing a Downtown Eastside agency who attended the march told DRCNet, "Those people were very angry, but we tried to present a nonviolent dissent. We handed out carnations with labels saying 'Drug Users Are Brothers and Sisters, Mothers and Fathers,' we had the Raging Grannies come out and sing songs saying we need compassionate solutions." "But they had these security guards with black sunglasses and leather jackets and gloves -- I thought I was in Suharto's Indonesia! -- and they were shoving and pushing us away." Police arrested 13 counter-demonstrators, although press and eyewitness accounts suggested it was Alliance members who should have been detained. "The marchers were angry," one participant told DRCNet. "They approached us with their security guards to harass the demonstrators, they screamed at the Raging Grannies, they took our flowers and threw them to the ground, they smashed our placards. They stood in a circle around one of members screaming 'die, die, die.'" "And we were the ones arrested?" After the arrests, the march ended at Canada Place, the municipal government offices in downtown Vancouver. Alliance members chanted, "This is our Canada, this is our community, no more drugs," handed in their petitions, and then sang the national anthem. "It was very menacing, like a Nazi rally with the security guards behind them," said one participant. Now, with anti-drug forces mobilized and angry, the question becomes whether Vancouver and British Columbia authorities can maintain the political will to actually implement the Vancouver Agreement.
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