Photo provided by Arsenal Pulp Press
Interview by Deborah Heslop
Too often, the story of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is told solely through statistics of opioid overdose deaths, but award-winning journalist Travis Lupick delves into the community’s heart and grit in his book Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017).
Spanning over two decades and featuring an eclectic array of characters, it covers the true story of the herculean (and sometimes illicit) efforts that put Vancouver at the forefront of harm reduction in North America.
Lupick recently spoke with PRISM international to give some insight into how he approached this complex and encompassing topic.
What spurred you to write Fighting for Space?
In 2016, I was working for the Georgia Straight newspaper in Vancouver and by that time the overdose crisis—the fentanyl crisis—had become a full-time beat. At the same time, I noticed that there was a story of drug policy and harm reduction in the Downtown Eastside that was coming to a natural end. A well-known activist, Bud Osborn, had passed away in 2014. Around the same time, the founders of the Portland Hotel Society—the operator of North America’s first supervised injection facility, Insite—found themselves in a financial scandal and Liz Evans and Mark Townsend were forced to resign. Libby Davies, who had represented the neighborhood and community in Ottawa for more than 15 years, had announced she was retiring from politics. A number of other players, Ann Livingston and so on, were getting older and beginning to go different ways.
All of these different threads that tied together Vancouver’s first story about harm reduction were all coming to an end and I thought it was incredible that nobody had put that story down somewhere. As this new story around fentanyl in Vancouver’s second overdose crisis began to take off, I felt somebody had to put the story of that first overdose crisis on paper.
Speaking of all those threads, you cover multiple aspects of the struggle—historical, cultural, scientific, political—yet despite all that, it remains very rooted in story. How did you decide to structure it?
I wanted to write a book that explains harm reduction as an emerging field of health care to a general audience, while acknowledging that you can’t usually explain healthcare concepts in a way that’s going to hold anyone’s attention for very long. I saw in this an amazing, empowering story of the Downtown Eastside with so many opportunities to explain harm reduction through people’s stories. So, it was really those two objectives: wanting to tell the Downtown Eastside’s history with harm reduction and wanting to explain the concept of harm reduction that led me to decide on a chronological narrative.
One of the story lines that was particularly striking was that of Liz Evans and Mark Townsend’s journey with the Portland Hotel Society, from starting it to eventually being pushed out. It had a definitive arc, though stories rarely flow that naturally in the real world. How did you draw that out?
I knew they both showed up in the early 1990s and I knew they both left in 2014 and between those two dates they built this amazing non-profit organization, from ten rooms in a beat-up old hotel to the largest supportive housing provider in the province of British Columbia. And along the way they established North America’s first supervised injection facility and did all this amazing work for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. So, the Portland Hotel Society and the story of Liz and Mark were the skeleton of the book and the rest came around their story arc.
You included an impressive amount of detail, though you managed to avoid weighing things down. How did you balance scene and exposition?
My number one objective was to tell a story that a general audience would find interesting. Whatever else I was trying to accomplish with any chapter or section, I was consciously trying to keep the story moving and keep that objective front and centre.
Did you find you were having to leave things out?
Oh, there’s so much I had to leave out of that book that I still wake up thinking about every night. I’m still rewriting that whole book over and over again. There are so many people who made such important contributions to the Downtown Eastside’s history and development of harm reduction that I wasn’t able to give the credit they really deserve. I’m still thinking about all of that more than a year after the book came out.
For example, there was another injection site, the Dr. Peter Centre in Vancouver’s West End, that didn’t get a mention in the book. They’ve got their twenty-year anniversary coming up and maybe I’ll do a long article on them. I’ve tried to think of other outlets where I can get those stories I wasn’t able to include published. I do worry that some of them are going to simply be forgotten.
It can sometimes be difficult to make things like political backstory and courtroom proceedings interesting, but that’s not the case in Fighting for Space. How did you manage that?
I think the reason I was able to do that was because the characters who populate these stories are just such fascinating and incredible people. If your courtroom story is about Dean Wilson, it’s going to remain an interesting courtroom story. It was an absolute gift; it was such a privilege to be allowed by people like Dean Wilson and Liz Evans and Ann Livingston to share their stories. It was an absolute privilege that I’m still so grateful for today. And that’s how I was able to keep subjects that might be dry engaging and interesting throughout a 400-page book—because the people who were sharing their stories with me were such incredible people.
Beyond just the people, the locations often felt like characters too.
Sometimes I describe it as a book about two women, Liz Evans and Ann Livingston, and sometimes I describe it as being about the Downtown Eastside as if it was a character in itself because in many ways I think it is and that’s the one common thread that really unites every page and anecdote in the book.
It was just a gift to have the Downtown Eastside to work with and to share, because it’s usually described as a place of poverty and addiction but it’s actually such an empowered community that does an amazing job of fending for itself.
That was another thing that definitely came across, that people really take care of each other.
Really, they do. They’re there because nobody else would take care of them so that’s why so many people end up in the Downtown Eastside. Because they lack friends, they lack family support, they’ve been marginalized or pushed out of somewhere else. When they arrive at the Downtown Eastside, they realize they’re now among a group that needs to take care of each other.
There are a number of heavy stories involving trauma and abuse leading to addiction. Was there a line you used to determine how much was too much to divulge?
There were a couple moments like that. With access, it was just an extreme amount of trust that everybody placed in me. Liz Evans, especially, who I didn’t know as well before I began writing the book, placed an incredible amount of trust in me. Ann Livingston, I knew a bit better, we’d already established a relationship over a few years. For both of these women and just about everybody, no question was off limits. There were only one or two anecdotes that got scrapped for walking that line you’re talking about and in those situations, I took a hard look at it and said, there’s value in this story but the value does not exceed the pain it’s going to cause.
Was there any blowback afterwards from anyone who felt too much was revealed?
No, there wasn’t. We had a release party for the book in the Downtown Eastside and threw open the door to a big café there and invited every single person in the book to come out for the launch party. Somebody donated money to the publisher to buy dozens of books for everybody in the neighbourhood, so we really tried to make sure everybody in the book got to read it right away. And there wasn’t any blowback.
There’s already a great degree of accountability built into my reporting on the Downtown Eastside. I live in that neighbourhood and I bump into those people every day. Through my work for the Georgia Straight, I’ve known for years that if I misquote someone or write something that takes something they said out of context, I’m gonna hear about it from them real fast. So, I went into the book aware of that accountability mechanism and have always kept it in my mind, even before I was writing Fighting for Space.
What are you working on now? Any projects on the go?
I’m slowly wading into a second book. Fighting for Space ends off with the arrival of fentanyl and throughout the book, mini-chapters allude to harm reduction stories that are beginning in the United States. I’d like to put together a new project that picks up where Fighting for Space left off, with the arrival of fentanyl and so many cities across North America just beginning their story with harm reduction, like Vancouver began its story twenty-five years ago.
Travis Lupick is an award-winning journalist based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the author of Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press, June 2018). He works as a staff reporter for the Georgia Straight newspaper and has also written about drug addiction, harm reduction, and mental health for the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Star, and Globe and Mail, among other outlets. For his reporting on Canada’s opioid crisis, Lupick received the Canadian Association of Journalists’ prestigious Don McGillivray award for best overall investigative report of 2016 and two 2017 Jack Webster awards for excellence in B.C. journalism. For Fighting for Space, he received the 2018 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and nominations for the 2018 B.C. Book Awards and City of Vancouver Book Awards. He has also worked as a journalist in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Malawi, Nepal, Bhutan, Peru, and Honduras. Follow him on Twitter: @tlupick.
Deborah Heslop lives in Vancouver and writes screenplays, essays and fiction. Her work has been recognized in various international