from Chapter 3

Lethal Heroin, Killer Coke, and Expo 86

With Larry Campbell’s change in career in the early 1980s came a philosophical shift in his thinking: he no longer viewed the victims of fatal overdoses in the morgue as lawbreakers but as people whose deaths could have been prevented. “The biggest change was the mindset that you were going from enforcing laws to keeping people alive,” Campbell says today. “That is where my changes in attitude towards drug addiction took place. I was anxious to know, how do I keep these people alive? How do I prevent death?” Of mounting concern to the rookie coroner was the increasing potency of first heroin, then cocaine. He also found the overdose deaths upsetting because they were claiming victims from all walks of life: young and old, rich and poor, sick and healthy, occasional users and entrenched ones. By 1991, at an inquest into the death of a heroin addict, Campbell was telling the coroner’s jury: “There is no doubt that this addiction is an illness as surely as cancer, heart disease or a tumour. The difficulty is in the treatment, and while certain successes have been registered, the problem appears to continue unabated.” His conclusion was progressive at a time when many officials were still approaching addiction as a criminal problem.

The case Campbell was commenting on was that of Ken Hodgins, a man whose severe dependence on heroin had caused his life to fall apart. “Medically, no one has been able to explain how a ‘good husband, father, worker’ turns into a violent, driven heroin addict,” Campbell told the jury. Hodgins, thirty-seven, was living in a Downtown Eastside hotel and was wanted for ten armed robberies when he was shot and killed by police on January 2, 1991, in east Vancouver after refusing the officers’ repeated requests to drop his loaded gun. Hodgins had committed the robberies to support a habit that was costing him five to seven hundred dollars daily, and he had taken eight caps of heroin an hour before his encounter with police. In a report submitted to the jury, Hodgins’s parole officer said, “Although the subject died of gunshot wounds, it would seem that in reality he died of heroin addiction.”

Hodgins had a stable family life and a good-paying job as a tree faller on Vancouver Island when a series of tragedies led to him using a syringe to manage his grief. His habit had become extreme by 1986, a year in which he was charged with sixteen robberies and convicted of committing nine. A 1989 National Parole Board report concluded Hodgins was “not fundamentally anti-social or criminally oriented,” and a Corrections Canada report added: “Kenneth Hodgins no doubt has a great deal of potential. He has employment skills that are marketable. He has a sincere desire to be a positive role model for his son. What he is lacking however appears to be the intestinal fortitude that it will require for him to leave heroin use behind him.” Hodgins was dead less than four months after being released from prison. The head of the police bank robbery squad, Sergeant Ted McClellan, told the Vancouver Sun in 1990 that Hodgins exemplified the reason the city’s bank robbery rate was the highest in the country.

“It’s not done for personal gain,” McClellan was quoted as saying. “It’s done to support a habit.”

In his address to the jury, Larry Campbell spelled out the dire consequences of not doing more to help those with debilitating drug habits: “Heroin addiction is such that life itself is controlled by the schedule set by the drug . . . If the demand is not listened to, the results are predictable: painful and debilitating withdrawal.

The cycle continues with Ken requiring more and more money to support the habit. Soon, the proceeds from the armed robberies do not cover the cost of the drugs and the violence escalates due to the withdrawal and a frustration that this is never going to end. As the coroner for the city of Vancouver for the past ten years, I have dealt with literally hundreds of deaths involving heroin addiction. Fortunately most of them do not involve the police and shooting, but violence has almost always touched the lives of the addict at one time or another. You are just as surely dead from an overdose as from a bullet or knife.”

The complexities of Hodgins’s case were tragic but unfortunately not rare. The evolution of drugs through the 1980s had created chaos. Between 1984 and 1987 there were fewer than twenty heroin overdose deaths annually in the province of British Columbia, but in 1988 the number of overdose deaths jumped to thirty-nine and then began a meteoric rise. According to provincial toxicology reports, the purity of heroin seized on the street between 1984 and 1993 surged from an average of six per cent potency to more than sixty per cent. Unlike in eastern Canada, where high-strength drugs had always been a market option, users in B.C. had no idea about the purity of the drug they were injecting, and most of the carnage was taking place on the streets of the Downtown Eastside.

Michael Brandt, an MA student at Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology, examined the toxicology reports of all overdose deaths in B.C. during the 1980s and early 1990s. He found that about twenty per cent of heroin overdose deaths during the 1980s involved the consumption of alcohol to the point of impairment (an average blood alcohol reading of 0.10).

By the early 1990s, that percentage had risen to about sixty. Were drinkers turning to heroin? Yes, very likely; the drug had become cheaper and more accessible, and its unexpected potency was producing fatal results. Cocaine, present in fewer than ten per cent of fatal overdoses in the 1980s, was seen in close to thirty per cent of fatalities by the 1990s.

Although the death rate was increasing, the street scene was still relatively calm in the early 1980s, Larry Campbell recalls. There were no violent turf wars among dealers, since the drug trade in Vancouver was controlled by three or four groups. Crystal meth and crack had not yet arrived in the city; most addicts were injecting heroin, a drug that made its users relatively mellow.

The Downtown Eastside was still a functional, stable place for people to live. “The biggest eye-opener I had was how cohesive the community was,” Campbell says of his early years as a coroner. “It was a place you could go where, if you were different, you wouldn’t be judged. There was a sense that if you were down and out, someone would help you, would take you in for the night. For the retirees and widows, it was not a bad life. There wasn’t the drug-fuelled craziness we see now.”

Campbell remembers being called to a rooming house where a retired logger was slumped dead over his kitchen table, an open newspaper and a lottery ticket nearby. The man had just won the lottery, but whether the sudden windfall had caused his heart attack couldn’t be known for sure. The man’s relatives, who had long dismissed him as a drunk but would inherit his new-found money, wanted to cremate him in a cardboard box. The beat officers in the neighbourhood, outraged by this, devised a plan to ensure the man would be given a proper funeral, Campbell recalls. The officers told his relatives the man should be buried in an expensive casket at a proper wake with food and drinks; all of it could be paid for from the lottery winnings. Limousines were rented to take about thirty of the man’s Downtown Eastside friends to the funeral. “I remember these guys showing up in suits out of the forties, with ties so wide you could land a jet on them. They were all just family down there. They had this incredible funeral,” Campbell says today.

But he saw his share of disheartening events as well. In 1986, Campbell investigated the deaths of two men who had fallen three floors when a rusty fire escape collapsed at the Astoria Hotel, a rundown SRO in the Downtown Eastside. John Dyck, aged thirty-eight, and Matthew Wilson, twenty-nine, had plummeted into the alley below. An investigation found the external staircases were rusting off “hundreds of buildings” in the low-income area, recalls Campbell. He held an inquiry that ultimately called for tougher inspection methods. “It was unbelievable. I had been in and out of those buildings as a Mountie, but I had never looked at them for what they were: places with one bathroom for dozens of people. The majority of people in some rooming houses were retirees, loggers, fishermen, miners. The women were widows.

This was just sort of where they ended up. Other SROs were for people on welfare, and those places were more frequented by drug users and sex-trade workers.” The latter buildings, in the heart of the drug district, had the worst fire escapes.

Whether they were derelict or tolerable, the number of low-income hotels in the Downtown Eastside continued to decline in the 1980s. The person who fought hardest to reverse the closures was Jim Green, an outspoken football‑ and opera-loving guy with a master’s degree in anthropology who became a fierce protector of the community’s existing housing stock. Green took over the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association in 1980, when Bruce Eriksen was elected to city council and Libby Davies was elected to the city’s Parks Board. In a DERA report Green wrote in 1985, Housing Conditions and Population in the Downtown Eastside, he called on the city to start protecting low-income rooms, especially with the World’s Fair, Expo 86, coming to Vancouver the following year. “Over the past four years approximately 2,000 units of housing have been lost in the Downtown Eastside. With the approach of Expo the number of units lost will increase drastically,” Green wrote. The DERA report found residents were “fiercely loyal to their neighbourhood,” which made the Downtown Eastside one of the most stable communities in the city. But the amount of housing was shrinking, and some of the loss was due to the 1985 demolition of the sixty-room Georgia Rooms on Main Street, torn down to make way for a parking garage. The typical evictees were older, single, retired resource workers—including eighty-seven-year-old William Smith, who had lived in the Downtown Eastside hotel for forty-six years.

“They told me I had to pull out because they were tearing it down. I didn’t want to move, but what could I do?” Smith told Vancouver Sun reporter Bob Sarti at the time. DERA arranged for Smith to move into a hard-to-find unit in a social housing complex.

William Smith was one of the more fortunate evictees, because he adapted to his new home. But there are ghosts, like that of Olaf Solheim, who continue to haunt the neighbourhood. Solheim, a retired logger, had lived in the Patricia Hotel on East Hastings for more than forty years, but he was evicted when the hotel went upscale to house tourists during Expo 86. At eighty-eight, he was relocated to the Columbia Hotel, but he wouldn’t unpack his meagre belongings, refused to eat, and often returned to the Patricia in a confused state. Six weeks after his eviction, Solheim was dead. Vancouver’s medical health officer said Solheim’s passing was caused, in part, by the shock of losing his home.

In his book Fighting for Community, Sandy Cameron wrote about the tensions caused by rooming houses slapping on a coat of paint and boosting rents for the five-month-long World’s Fair: “The Downtown Eastside is a tiny David compared to the Goliath of development, determined to build the corporate city, and the community is in crisis. Larry Campbell, the city coroner, has said that the stress people are under is far too much for many to bear. This is one of the reasons why there have been so many deaths in the past year.”

For Jim Green, the battle to maintain existing housing in his community was personal. He lived in or near the Patricia Hotel for five years during the 1980s, and he went to the Patricia’s beer parlour every night for a drink and a place to read the newspaper.

Green organized demonstrations to boycott the hotel after Solheim died. For a long time, Green told the Vancouver Sun’s Bob Sarti, he carried in his pocket Solheim’s key to his former room at the Patricia.

While the population of residents in the Downtown Eastside declined during the 1970s, this trend had begun to reverse itself by the early 1980s. The city hall report Downtown Lodging Houses and Tenant Profile, by project director John Jessup, found the Downtown Eastside population had risen from a low of 2,182 in 1976 to 2,507 residents by 1981. During the same time, the steady loss of SROs and lodging houses continued, with the number of units being reduced by 1,987 between 1978 and 1982. In 1980 and 1981, these units were ninety per cent full. The average rental rate in 1982 for an SRO was around $175, lower than the maximum welfare shelter rate of $200. (That extra $25, which doesn’t exist today, gave welfare recipients more money for food and other necessities.)

Vancouver’s Expo 86 was officially declared a success, with government claiming the World’s Fair had brought not only tourists but ongoing financial benefits to B.C. But not everyone in the Downtown Eastside agreed with that assessment. While Jim Green argued the biggest legacy from the fair was a loss of housing, Judy Graves would have said it was a shift in the community’s drug culture. “[The government] told us they were bringing us a world-class city, but what they brought us was world-class drugs,” laments Graves, who from 1979 to 1991 worked at Cordova House, a facility opened by the city in the 1970s to house the sixty-seven people police had identified as the most problematic in the neighbourhood. The violent people Graves worked with were mostly addicted, some of them with mental health problems as well. However, she remembers the community in the early 1980s as a safe place where she could walk to the corner store in the middle of the night to get snacks.

Many service providers were unprepared for the changes more potent cocaine would bring to the neighbourhood; they hadn’t even believed cocaine was addictive, because initially it was so weak. Stronger cocaine at the same low prices arrived with Expo, Graves says, and when people got hooked the prices were jacked up. After Expo, Graves saw dealers from other countries moving into some notorious Downtown Eastside hotels, and she recalls turf wars erupting over the lucrative drug business. It hit the newspapers in July 1986 that so-called killer coke had caused six fatal overdoses in the past year; cocaine had evolved from being a drug only the rich dabbled in to one accessible to poverty-stricken addicts. Coroner Larry Campbell told reporters that more and more thrill-seekers were playing Russian roulette with injections of the so-called champagne drug.

“People don’t think it could happen to them,” he said in 1986 of fatal overdoses. By the early 1990s, the availability of cocaine was combined with life-threatening purity levels of more than ninety per cent. In the past, cocaine sold at the street level had usually run between fifty and seventy-five per cent purity. Police were warning addicts to “step on” (street jargon for dilute) their scores to prevent more deaths. Young drug users were warned against a fashionable combination of heroin and cocaine called a “speedball,” also proving to be lethal.

Donald MacPherson, today Vancouver’s drug policy coordinator, had a front-row view of the neighbourhood’s troubles through the late 1980s and early 1990s. MacPherson, who had been working on a master’s degree in adult education, moved with his wife and children in 1986 from Ontario to B.C. He got a job at the Carnegie Community Centre, running its adult literacy program. His students were predominantly loggers and other middle-aged people wanting to finish their high school diplomas, along with some younger adults and those who spoke English as a second language.

At first MacPherson saw the core problems of the Downtown Eastside as alcohol or cheap substitutes like shoe polish and Lysol. He used as his unofficial measuring stick the roof of the Carnegie Centre. “It would be littered with Lysol cans from the Roosevelt Hotel next door,” he recalls. But users were soon shooting up drugs in plain view on the streets. According to MacPherson, when the city cleaned up nearby Granville Street for Expo 86, it pushed the cocaine market into the Downtown Eastside. There were suddenly two or three twenty-four-hour grocery stores on every block with bare shelves and a booming under-the-counter cocaine business. In some restaurants, users did lines of coke on the tables. MacPherson’s unofficial barometer was revealing different information by the early 1990s: “I’d go up to the top of the Carnegie Centre, and it was covered with syringes from the Roosevelt Hotel.”

Along with increased drug use came the crime to fund it. The neighbourhood went from being home to two or three legitimate pawn shops to having forty-four second-hand stores within a few years. It was wild on the streets at the corner of Main and Hastings, and MacPherson recalls Carnegie Centre employees regularly helping people in distress. “Our door staff were reviving people every day in the washrooms who were blue,” he says. There were so many memorial services for locals who had fatally overdosed that it seemed they were happening daily. Yet the drug-free Carnegie Centre maintained some normalcy during these turbulent times. “The Chinese ladies would come in for the ballroom dance classes from [the suburbs] on Sunday afternoons and weed through all the chaos out front,” MacPherson recalls. The Carnegie was still offering a learning centre, a library, a kitchen program, a seniors’ program, camping trips, coffee, and crafts, and it provided sports equipment at Oppenheimer Park. “Japanese women would come to play gate ball every Wednesday morning in their hats. Twenty metres the other way, you’d have your dealers with their drugs on picnic tables. It was a classic Downtown Eastside coexistence: no one bothered anyone,” MacPherson says. “The problem was the picnic tables were beside the children’s playground.”

By late 1988, injection drug use had so increased in prevalence that John Turvey, the founder of DEYAS (Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society), started single-handedly giving out three thousand clean syringes a month to try to reduce the spread of infectious diseases among addicts. Alongside him was Jerry Adams, who was hired by Turvey as a DEYAS outreach worker in 1986. He says Turvey, a former heroin addict who got clean in the 1970s, used donated money to buy clean needles because he was worried about the abscesses and scarring some users were developing. Turvey would walk the streets for hours, plucking clean rigs from his green army bag to give to surprised users. “I saw the first needles getting handed out,” recalls Adams. “It was quite an amazing thing. Like anything else, it was scary for people, who would say, ‘You’re not supposed to be giving us these.’” Turvey received the Order of British Columbia in 1984 for his social work on the street, and he was recognized by the Atlanta Center for Disease Control in 1988 for his needle distribution work. DEYAS eventually secured $100,000 in government funding and got permission in 1989 to open Canada’s first official needle exchange. Five hundred addicts were using it regularly by the end of its first month. DEYAS hired two extra staff, who drove around in a big green van, initially handing out about ten thousand new rigs a month and collecting old ones.

“John did this work out of his heart. He had a volatile temper, but John was all heart. He was very concerned for these people. The work he did came from a passion,” recalls Adams. DEYAS also handed out condoms to sex-trade workers and kept a “bad date” sheet about customers who had victimized the women. (Turvey would be mourned by many in the Downtown Eastside when he died in 2006 of mitochondrial myopathy, a fatal muscle and nerve disorder, at the age of sixty-one.)

Among those backing the needle exchange started by Turvey was Vancouver’s chief medical health officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, who argued it was crucial that users be allowed to trade used rigs for clean ones. It was a foreign concept to the city council of the day. “When John Blatherwick started talking about needle exchange, we didn’t know what he was talking about,” recalls Philip Owen, who was then a Vancouver city councilor and would later become mayor. “Blatherwick saw the need. He was the one who quarterbacked it.” Gordon Campbell, Vancouver’s right-of-centre mayor at the time who would later become B.C.’s premier, was an unexpected champion of an official needle exchange. Campbell provided city funding for the controversial project and secured more money from the province. “Gordon is the reason why we got it through. When he really wanted something like that, he pushed hard,” Owen recalls.

There was a public outcry from those who argued the needle exchange enabled drug users to keep injecting. Coroner Larry Campbell flatly rejected that position, saying the needle exchange was necessary to keep addicts healthy until governments could be persuaded to properly fund detox and recovery facilities. “All they were trying to do was keep people alive until someone woke up and put real money into this. If it had been any other disease, we would have been on it like a rash,” Campbell says today. “There was certainly a recognition out there that addiction was an illness, but it was more often seen as a criminal event. And there was virtually no treatment. You needed a lot of money to get it and probably had to go outside Canada.”

Manny Cu, who would go on to manage the DEYAS needle exchange vans, was originally one of the needle users. Cu moved from Toronto to Vancouver in 1988, trying to leave behind a youth scarred by racism, petty crimes, and minor drug use. Instead, he was wooed by the easy supply of drugs in the Downtown Eastside. He started to hang around with bikers and eventually full-patch members of the Hells Angels, wowed by their lifestyle: rides in limousines, the best seats in restaurants, lots of attention from strippers. Before long, Cu was the middle man for a big-time cocaine operation, selling to dealers who hawked their coke near Oppenheimer Park. He had an unforgettable run-in with B.C.’s Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit, which targeted gangs: “I had the CLEU boys stick a gun in my head, because at one point I was running a shooting gallery.” But mostly Cu avoided the police by selling in Chinatown, where it was difficult for the mainly Caucasian CLEU members to blend in. Cu received his supply in kilos, cutting it with glucose for junior dealers to peddle on the street. He had no idea how much he was snorting, because he had an endless supply at his fingertips. Once he started basing—cooking the cocaine to further refine it—he wasn’t far from injecting. He and four friends would share one needle, using two dirty nickels to straighten the tip when it got bent. Cu drew water out of toilets and mud puddles to make his fix. “I didn’t care if I was going to die or get HIV,” he recalls.

In a short period of time, Cu ended up on the street, as the kind of entrenched addict he had “looked down on” when he first came to the neighbourhood. “It was a nightmare. I was sleeping on park benches. Stairwells in Chinatown. Abandoned houses. I couldn’t pull it together to get a place to live. All the money went to drugs,” Cu recalls. He developed the trademark scabs over skin where he frequently injected, making it almost impossible to find a vein. “You get so shaky from the cocaine that you can’t even shoot yourself. I made a sex-trade worker named Tracy cry because she didn’t want to shoot me anymore. Throughout all that is just misery. All your morals and values are gone. You get to the point that you’d use anything.” Soon Cu was also injecting heroin. Life was so bad he wanted to end it countless times.

“Christmas Eve in Oppenheimer Park, I remember sitting on the swings and wrapping the chain around my neck, but I didn’t have the nerve. So what did I do? I went on the streets and did more drugs.”

Cu tried detox several times, but he could never stay clean. A caring outreach worker urged him to go to a recovery home, and in May 1992, when his five-foot-ten frame carried just 115 pounds and he was severely dope sick, he agreed. Cu had been in the Downtown Eastside fewer than four years and had lost nearly everything. He says he went to hell and back in recovery, but he has remained clean. However, not everyone is that lucky.

By August 1992, the coroners service was lamenting that five young people a week—ranging from those homeless on the streets to healthy recreational users—were dying from drug overdoses. Campbell ordered a review of the tragedies, which were sweeping not just the Downtown Eastside but rural areas and urban centres across B.C. Existing social programs were making little difference. “The profile of the user had changed,” Campbell says today. “In the seventies it was a guy who had done prison time, had been an addict for years. And then we started seeing people with no record, a different dynamic altogether.

Then a shift started to take place towards younger people.” As the effects of the drugs became more severe, the level of violence escalated. Firearms replaced knives as the common weapon on the street.

By the end of his first decade as coroner, Campbell was delivering tragic news to more and more families. “Part of the job was talking to the next of kin. Some of that was very difficult. Almost always, although the parents said they didn’t know about the drugs, you knew instinctively that they had to know. Sometimes there would be an estrangement, where they hadn’t seen their child for months. Sometimes mental illness and abuse came into it. The victims were young people, Native and non-Native, and all the potential was there.” Campbell’s morgue was becoming increasingly crowded, and the coroner knew something major needed to change.