[Editor's note: Over the last century, a saga of drug use, policing and treatment has unfolded in Vancouver. And while it remains a contentious issue, the city has gradually emerged as a forerunner in progressive harm reduction tactics. This article, the first of three in a series by Megaphone Magazine, looks at the history of Vancouver's battle with drugs. In the next two days, further stories will examine harm reduction's status on the national scene, and how its principles are faring in treatment programs for alcoholics. This series is republished with the permission of executive director Sean Condon. Learn more about Megaphone in this story's sidebar.]

When William Lyon Mackenzie King came to Vancouver in the spring of 1908, he didn't come to start Canada's war on drugs. Called back from diplomatic business in London, the 33-year-old Deputy Minister of Labour had been dispatched to British Columbia to investigate a race riot.

The previous September, members and sympathizers of the newly formed Asiatic Exclusion League had descended upon Chinatown by the thousands. Smashing plate glass windows and ripping signs from storefront overhangs, the rioters were finally repelled at Powell Street by club-wielding residents of Japantown. And so the future prime minister found himself in Vancouver, assessing the damage claims of aggrieved business owners.

What King found in Chinatown was a thriving opium industry. Even more troubling to the deputy minister, the drug was regularly being consumed by English-speaking whites. Just a month later, a long title bill now known simply as the Opium Act passed through both chambers of Parliament with minimal debate. This was Canada's first anti-drug law -- the opening salvo in a war on drugs that continues to this day.

More than a century later, Canadian drug policy is still being hashed out on the streets of Vancouver. Last September, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously to allow Insite, North America's first legal supervised injection facility, to keep its doors open on East Hastings. Two months later, Mayor Gregor Robertson joined four of his predecessors in an open call for the legalization of marijuana. In December, Vancouver Coastal Health began offering free crack pipes to stem the oral transmission of disease among users, whose crack use-related lip and mouth injuries can make them vulnerable to HIV and Hepatitis B and C.

These recent developments, which led Peter Ferentzy, author and recovering addict, to dub Vancouver "the most enlightened city in North America," are underscored by a long and complicated history. It's a history that has been written chiefly in the Downtown Eastside, where the impact of addiction overlaps so messily with the depredations of poverty, illness and social fragmentation. It's a history written by cops and community organizers, by healthcare workers and academics, by politicians, addicts and survivors. It's a history of overdose, epidemic and societal neglect, but also political leadership, community activism and improbable, tentative hope.

The birth of harm reduction

In 1952, something had to give. Since Mackenzie King had warned of conniving Chinatown opium peddlers in 1908, federal anti-drug legislation had been moving solely in one direction. In 1911, stricter punishments were introduced for opium users. In 1917, Vancouver's Chief Constable Malcolm MacLennan was gunned down in an apartment shootout on East Georgia. His killer was Bob Tait, described in the next day's papers as a "drug-crazed Negro."

The incident helped to rile up local support for the flurry of sometimes-draconian anti-drug legislation in the 1920s.

"Up until the 1950s, if you were a regular drug user, you'd typically spend about a third of each year in prison," says Vancouver historian Lani Russwurm. "You had a revolving door between prison and the street. It was expensive, and it wasn't stopping the spread of the drug trade."

And so in 1952 the Community Chest and Council, a precursor to the United Way, formed a committee and published a report on drug addiction. "Narcotic addiction," the report read, "is a medical problem." The committee went on to call upon the federal government to begin dispensing drugs to addicts. A heroin user with a steady supply of heroin, the report argued, could live a stable, crime-free life and, once in the program, could be ushered towards rehabilitation.

Today, says Russwurm, we would call such an approach "harm reduction" -- the novel idea that the first priority of drug policy should be to keep people alive, safe and healthy. But in 1952, "it was just a sincere and pragmatic attempt to deal with the issue."

Celebrated in editorials in both The Province and The Vancouver Sun, the recommendations of the report were finally quashed by federal opposition. It would take another 40 years before this kind of thinking was again given so much official credence in Vancouver.

The making of 'Skid Road'

Now we call it the Downtown Eastside. In the years after the Second World War, it was called "Skid Road." It might be difficult now to imagine the neighbourhood as it was -- a seemingly incongruous overlap of vibrancy and squalor. But the area still comprised the downtown core. There was the streetcar, the ferry terminal, the Interurban rail station. There was Woodward's department store, the Pantages theatre and the library.

"At the same time," says Russwurm, "it all coexisted with a seedy drug scene. It was much more discreet. It wasn't in your face like it is now. But it was there."

The decline of the neighbourhood came quickly. In the last few years of the decade, the economic and cultural heart relocated to the area around Burrard and Robson. Describing the Downtown Eastside in a 1965 report, city planner W. E. Graham called it "a backwash in the westward drift of downtown."

Though a 1958 Macleans magazine article described Columbia and Hastings as "Canada's most notorious underground rendezvous," throughout the next two decades, alcohol was the undisputed drug of choice in the neighbourhood. Specifically, it was beer and liquor for those who could afford it, and noxious substitutes like shoe polish and Lysol for those who couldn't.

Throughout the 1970s, one of the ongoing campaigns of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA) was to dry out the neighbourhood. In practice this meant lobbying for more effective treatment centres, shutting the neighbourhood's B.C. Liquor store, and in 1980, converting the dilapidated Carnegie Library at the corner of Main and Hastings into the Carnegie Community Centre -- one of the few communal spaces in the area where drinking wasn't allowed.

The ubiquitous and unconcealed drug market that many now associate with the Downtown Eastside began to thrive only in the mid-1980s. It started with the pre-Expo development of Granville Street and continued with the displacement of sex-trade workers by West End community groups and the gentrification of Yaletown and Coal Harbour.

The drugs were different, too. Suddenly cocaine was everywhere -- uncharacteristically cheap and dangerously pure. In the mid-1980s, South American production began to rise dramatically. With the increased flow of people and money into the city for the Expo, some of that supply made its way to Hastings Street.

Donald MacPherson, who would later go on to become the first drug policy coordinator of Vancouver, was a program director at the Carnegie Community Centre in the late 1980s. He says that abundance of cocaine changed the street scene of the neighbourhood.