Necessary Evil?

Paul Delany asks hard questions about the Downtown Eastside

Media referred to in this article:
Da Vinci’s Inquest. Directed by Chris Haddock, with Nicholas Campbell.

Fix: The Story of an Addicted City. Directed by Nettie Wild.

On the Corner. Directed by Nathaniel Geary, with Alex Rice, Simon Baker, -Katharine Isabelle, and Gordon Tootoosis.

There are more than two million people in the Lower Mainland, and almost all of them try to stay away from the Downtown Eastside because of what they have read in newspapers or seen on television. People don’t know the Downtown Eastside directly, but through its representations, which directors like Chris Haddock, Nettie Wild and Nathaniel Geary provide. The recently wrapped TV series Da Vinci’s Inquest is an engaging morality play set on the dark side of Vancouver politics. Fix: The Story of an Addicted City is a documentary that asks the entire city of Vancouver to take responsibility for what is happening in the worst part of it. And the movie On the Corner tells the human story of why two young Natives are drawn to the Downtown Eastside, and how they try to escape from it.

These representations of the Downtown Eastside are also recommendations: They show us what is there, but also tell us what we should be doing about it. The solutions they offer lie at the liberal or leftist end of the political spectrum: let’s call them “caring services,” “harm reduction” and “cultural reconstruction.” Whether any of these policies will succeed remains to be seen, but they certainly rule out the kind of solution that might be called “moralistic enforcement,” best known through the clean-up-the-streets regime of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. This is not to say that these dramas present a soft view of drug use. They show the addicted life in a harsh light, and can fairly be described as hard-hitting. What they don’t show, though, are hard solutions.

As I write, it is announced that Vancouver has been chosen for the first clinical trial in North America to dispense heroin to addicts. They will also receive counselling and help finding jobs. This is the last stop on the harm-reduction line, and European studies argue that legalizing drugs does reduce crime and helps addicts to live normal lives. Fix and Da Vinci’s Inquest both point to this conclusion: first the open drug market around Hastings and Main; then the needle exchange; then the safe injection site; finally, the state provides free heroin. Yet the harm-reduction approach never seems to consider the other side of the ledger: the people who are drawn into the drug culture by the existence of a place that enables it. The Downtown Eastside isn’t just a place where addicts live; it’s also a place that creates addicts and is a focus for HIV transmission. Addicts don’t only do harm to themselves, but also to many people around them. Are we creating the harm that we then say we’re going to reduce?

The Downtown Eastside is also a place of poverty, disability and mental illness, but it exists mainly because possession of heroin, amphetamines and cocaine is a crime. People who are addicted to alcohol or nicotine don’t have to go to any particular part of town to get them. Prohibition of hard drugs concentrates their sale in a single marketplace; this makes drug use in Vancouver both more visible, and easier to manage. One has to say manage rather than control, because someone with a strong arm could literally throw a stone from the centre of drug dealing and hit either police headquarters or the provincial court. The Vancouver drug market is there in plain sight, something that is both prohibited and allowed.

In theory, the police could quickly clean up the Downtown Eastside by making it too uncomfortable for drug buyers and sellers to do business there, and they made a short-lived gesture in that direction in April 2003. Why has nothing really changed? Civil libertarians, and perhaps a majority of the general public, believe that police crackdowns violate the human rights of drug users. Politicians believe that if the drug market were shut down in one place it would re-emerge somewhere else—say on South Fraser Street—and we know how happy the local residents would be about that. Regular citizens complain about the Downtown Eastside, but they would be in open revolt if the action moved to their neighborhood. Can we say “safety valve”? “Necessary evil”?

Over in Surrey, Mayor Doug McCallum is trying to root out the evil of his local drug scene-that is, send it down the Skytrain line to Vancouver. In a way, this has already happened to many individual drug users. Either there was no reliable supplier where they lived, or hostile neighbours or police harassed them. The Downtown Eastside was the place where their special needs could be satisfied. Big cities always have this function—providing a haven for small-town gays, for example—but being a drug capital has its drawbacks. For one thing, that makes it a crime capital too, and Vancouver may reach the point where drug crime threatens the very fabric of everyday life. It already has something close to the highest rate of property crime in North America. Someone like McCallum may then be elected mayor of Vancouver, and the drug game will be played down at the other end of the field. But recently we have had mayors Philip Owen followed by Larry Campbell, politicians who take their cue from George Bush the elder’s famous attempt to define himself: “Message: I care.”

In Da Vinci’s Inquest, how you feel about the Downtown Eastside reveals whether you are a decent character or not. Westsiders are mostly callous and hypocritical because they support the ambitious right-winger Joyce Simkins; already on the council, she now wants to be the next mayor. Those who run city hall and the police are power-hungry weasels, all with some guilty secret. Finally there are the frontline workers in police and social services, who are closer morally to the addicts and prostitutes of the Downtown Eastside than to the people who run things. Da Vinci’s alcoholism makes him into that mythic figure, the wounded healer. He can be “a hell of an advocate for the Downtown Eastside” because he is one of them in spirit, a suffering rebel.

The real-life Da Vinci, Larry Campbell, has said that drug users should not be treated as criminals, but as “human beings with an illness… the side effects of this medical condition is that it forces you to do things that you would never do, be it work as a sex-trade worker, be a break and enter artist or a purse snatcher” (Globe and Mail, 31 Jan 05, A4). Addiction, in his view, is a disease you catch from somewhere outside yourself—a sick society, perhaps—and which makes you a different person. Individual blame or responsibility are irrelevant. Then there’s the anthropological argument, that the drug scene is just one culture among others: The CBC website for Da Vinci’s Inquest calls the Downtown Eastside a “fascinating marginal community where poverty, prostitution, drug abuse and desperation are all too frequent ways of life.” Da Vinci campaigns on the idea that prostitutes and addicts are “marginalized” people. The passive voice assumes that society chose to put them where they are—they were never free to choose it for themselves. Every centre, after all, is guilty of creating a margin.

Fix: The Story of an Addicted City is largely a commercial for harm-reduction strategies, especially the establishment of a safe injection site. If drug users are random victims of a disease, or members of a particular urban tribe, then harm reduction becomes the only sensible and moral policy. One implication, though, is that the Downtown Eastside should remain pretty much where it is, and how it is. Modernist urban renewal never took hold in Vancouver; now we are expected to respect neighbourhood cultures and not perform surgery on communities that have their own kinds of strength. In New York, Giuliani’s war on street crime encouraged the gentrification of Manhattan. Police commissioner Howard Safir believed that 80 percent of all crime was drug-related; he said that he did not really care if he drove the drug traffickers to New Jersey or to Westchester, as long as he drove them out of New York City. When the drug dealers were moved out, the yuppies moved in. But Vancouver city planners are hostile to gentrification. Clean up the cheap hotels but don’t shut them down; bring in some art students and bohemians, but only as a minority in subsidized housing. The Downtown Eastside will be preserved, not gentrified or bulldozed.

Harm reduction means living with imperfection while emphasizing the dignity and solidarity of the drug culture. In the romantic version of this stance, the people of this “fascinating marginal community” are morally better than the Westsiders who condemn them, just as the woman taken in adultery was better than the judgmental Pharisees. That tends to be the premise of Da Vinci’s Inquest, where only the downtrodden (and those who stand up for them) are decent. But with all these positive images of harm reduction, we are still left with the nagging question: Is it going to work? The social approach to alcohol abuse is strikingly different. There, both the police and citizen groups like MADD have promoted a zero tolerance/strict enforcement approach to drunk driving. Harm reduction has been achieved—fewer people are being killed—through moral disapproval and heavy penalties. Alcoholics Anonymous, similarly, doesn’t say “reduce the harm from your drinking”; it says “never drink again.” We’re in the curious position where social attitudes towards a legal drug (alcohol) are more repressive than towards illegal ones (heroin and cocaine). The same could be said about nicotine, where disapproval and prohibition have caused a massive drop in the number of addicts.

One of the many merits of On the Corner is that it takes morality seriously, and shows that within the drug world, rules are both recognized and enforced. The movie is a low-budget, documentary-style look at life in a Downtown Eastside hotel, the kind of place where its director, Nathaniel Geary, once worked. Drugs, crime, prostitution and poverty are viewed through the fate of two young Natives, brother and sister, who have come to the Downtown Eastside from a reservation near Prince Rupert. As in classic movies like Mean Streets or You Can Count on Me, an older sibling tries to save a younger one from aimlessness and despair. Angel, the older sister, and her brother Randy are victimized by two evil white characters, a drug dealer and a pimp. A parallel plot concerns the presumed murder of a young white prostitute, Angel’s friend (a riveting performance by local actor Katharine Isabelle).

On the Corner is not a brief for the Downtown Eastside “way of life.” It shows the brutal treatment of the weak by the strong, the one-way street of addiction, and the vampire shadow of the abduction and murder of dozens of Hastings Street prostitutes. An older Native man, played by Gordon Tootoosis, tries to live a righteous life in the midst of moral chaos, but he cannot prevent Randy being pulled under by the street culture. There are no heroic, caring authority figures of the Da Vinci’s Inquest type, because they aren’t relevant to the struggle in which Randy, Angel and their friends are engaged. There are real choices to be made between good and evil; no one says that society is to blame for what happens on the street, or expects a “treatment” that will make everyone healthier or better.

Using mostly Native actors, Geary takes his viewers inside that culture in order to make a statement, not preach a sermon. Angel and Randy are in the Downtown Eastside because their father died there and their mother was an alcoholic who could not look after them. What they must do in order to be saved is reunite with their mother and go back to the Prince Rupert reservation. This return is not shown sentimentally, as a way of reclaiming their cultural roots; it is simply their best and only way to get off the streets of Vancouver. Unfortunately, Randy came to the Downtown Eastside because it was his best and only chance to get off the reservation. He floats around the city on his new rollerblades, thinking he has found freedom and money—until, inevitably, everything goes terribly wrong.

On the Corner is not a commercial for doing anything about the Downtown Eastside except staying away from it. The movie doesn’t hold out any optimism that easier access to drugs is a cure for what its protagonists suffer from; nor does it show liberal, caring outsiders having any impact on the harsh realities of life on the street. It shows in brutal fashion why vulnerable young people are almost certain to start injecting drugs soon after they arrive at Hastings and Main. We have in our midst one of the sickest communities in the developed world, with a fearsome level of HIV infection; and we may be facing one of the worst cases of mass murder ever recorded outside of war. It’s still possible that harm reduction will make the Downtown Eastside a less awful place, but it’s unfortunate that most of what we see or read in the media assumes that there is only one morally creditable approach to this problem from hell.

Copyright © Paul Delany, 2005