'The Dope Craze That's Terrorizing Vancouver'

By Lani Russwarm, The Tyee. Posted August 26, 2008.

I recently heard a senior city planner say that economic decline in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside preceded the drug problem now associated with the area. The point he was making was valid -- that the drug trade didn't cause the decline -- but his history was nevertheless skewed.

Similarly, Vancouver mayoral hopeful Peter Ladner recently contrasted today's 100 block of East Hastings with the one depicted in Fred Herzog photos from the '50s and '60s, lamenting that this used to be a "normal neighbourhood." The open drug scene, according to Ladner, "shouldn't happen here. We shouldn't be putting up with it."

The Odd Squad, a cop-run video production company, also promotes this misleading history by blaming harm reduction policies for today's drug problems in the Downtown Eastside.

Not only are these distortions of history, but coming from such influential folks, they also have significant implications for revitalization policy for the Downtown Eastside. If the drug scene is standing in the way of economic renewal, it follows that the junkies will have to go in order to attract new business and make it a "normal neighbourhood" once again.

Hard drug central

The Downtown Eastside has always been the centre of Vancouver's hard drug trade. In fact, Canada's first drug prohibition law originated here, introduced a century ago after Mackenzie King investigated compensation claims stemming from the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Chinatown and Japantown. Some of the claims happened to come from opium manufacturers and King became especially alarmed when he learned the opium scourge was spreading to white women and girls.

The drug scene never left this area and by the 1920s, drug use across the country was concentrated in poor urban neighbourhoods, something police did not discourage because it made tracking and arresting addicts easier. Beginning in 1939, Vancouver police were making regular inspections of skid road rooming houses looking for drugs and related paraphernalia.

The Downtown Eastside was also the largest drug scene in Canada. According to Catherine Carstairs in Jailed for Possession (University of Toronto Press, 2005), half of all drug convictions between 1946 and 1961 occurred in Vancouver. Chief Constable Mulligan estimated in 1955 that 70 per cent of all crime in the city was connected to the drug trade. By that time, there were 20 RCMP and 14 VPD officers dedicated to policing fewer than 1,500 addicts, a third of whom were incarcerated at any given time.

A 1955 Maclean's magazine article entitled "The Dope Craze that's Terrorizing Vancouver" estimated there were more like 2000 addicts in the city. The writer calculated that this amounted to "one addict for every two hundred and fifty citizens. This not only gives Vancouver the highest rate of drug addiction in the Western Hemisphere," he continued, "but means that if the city's rate of addiction continues to increase as at present, the crop of addicts now being born will constitute one in every sixteen Vancouverites."

The main strip for the drug trade in the 1950s was the 100 block East Hastings, just as it is now. A young lawyer named Harry Rankin described the view from his Main and Hastings office in 1958 as "a scene from Gorky's Lower Depths." This intersection is infamous today as the epicentre of the drug trade, but in the 1950s that distinction belonged to Hastings and Columbia, one block to the west.

'It never gets far from here'

According to Maclean's, Hastings and Columbia was known by the "drug racket" as far away as Montreal simply as "the Corner." The Broadway Hotel (now the Sunrise) did more than its share in cultivating the corner's ill-fame. "It is just as easy to buy drugs at this hotel," bemoaned police magistrate Oscar Orr, "as it is for a child to buy candy at a store."

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Lani Russwurm lives, works, and is raising a daughter in the Downtown Eastside. He has an MA in history from Simon Fraser University and runs Past Tense, a local history blog, where a version of this article first appeared.

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