VANDU presention to Vancouver City Council meeting presided over
by then-Mayor Philip Owen

As slogans go, Ann Livingston is quick to admit the one her group's members use only half in jest has, well, issues: "We're not afraid of those people, we are those people," is sometimes bandied about as the unofficial motto of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU).

For 10 years now, VANDU members --who are all current or former users of illicit drugs-- have provided user-based peer support and education, advocated for change and increased the capacity of members to live healthy productive lives. While VANDU can point to many accomplishments in the past decade,
such as advocating strongly for a
supervised injection site (and then pushing the government to make it permanent), establishing a methadone-users association and participating in national and international conferences, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is it's very survival. In 10 years, about half of its members have died.

What we've been dealing with is death rates. It's not they they don't feel good: they're dead," Livingston said.

The executive director admits that life around the VANDU office, located a short walk east of the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings, is generally chaotic. This day, two days after welfare Wednesday (when things are generally calmer, because people have some money), is no exception.

Ann Livingston

Livingston, who is slowly prying herself away from VANDU, has come back to serve as executive director after her replacement did not work out. Today, she's also filling in for a staff person who called in sick. She's trying to get into the locked safe, but she doesn't have the right key or the combination and so far, calls to the people who could help her have gone unanswered. A few people mill about in the hallway, waiting for the safe to open so they can collect their $10 or $24 stipend for VANDU work./p>

Meanwhile, a woman storms into Livingston's office screaming that she wants to work a shift on VANDU's front counter. While the two argue their way to a compromise, people continue gathering in the hallway, awaiting their stipends. Eventually, a staff person arrives with a cash box and people quietly collect their stipends.

Livingston recalls that the early days of VANDU were during a terrible time in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). The previous year, the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board had declared a public health emergency as hepatitis and HIV rates soared. In 1998, 191 people in Vancouver died of illicit drug overdoses, the highest rate ever. "There was a tremendous amount of agreement we should be doing something."

Around that time, two men approached Livingston and said they wanted to start a drug-user's group. They created a funding proposal but sought her help to do the DTES organizing work. "We started holding meetings before we got the funding," Livingston said.

Then, a young law-school graduate tracked down Livingston. “I remember walking into the VANDU office and saying, I want to be a lawyer and start an organization to help drug users,” John Richardson, co-founder and Executive Director of Pivot Legal Society said. Richardson was just starting work at the Sierra Legal Defence Fund but worked closely with Livingston and VANDU.

VANDU’s first meeting was held in Oppenheimer Park and during the first year, both in and outdoors, VANDU held weekly meetings every Saturday at 2 pm. Livingston explained that in establishing the organization, it was easiest to just be consistent and let everybody know there would always be a meeting on Saturday at 2. Different people showed up, she said, but there were always enough for a meeting. Eventually they received funding from the health board and Livingston was hired as executive director.

In its 10 years, VANDU has managed to generate an enormous amount of publicity on a shoestring budget, working in and out of various offices, with few or no computers and with a membership of about 2,000 people suffering from addiction and sickness. Livingston attributes VANDU’s successes to a core belief that members have powerful stories and voices that must be heard. “The public expression of pain is subversive,” she said. That’s why VANDU ensures that members speak at public events and conferences, telling their stories. “You constantly bring forward the voices,” Livingston said. “Bring one of the people that’s dying and there will not be a dry eye in the house.”

VANDU’s work has also resulted in a collection of iconic images that have impacted public policy: VANDU members delivering a coffin to Mayor Philip Owen and Vancouver City Council during a council meeting; a man sitting with his head resting on his arms in a park filled with 2,000 crosses representing overdose deaths; and VANDU President Dean Wilson standing, shirtless and covered in tattoos, next to former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen dressed in a shirt, tie, blue blazer and grey slacks in a DTES alley.

What’s surprising, considering the number
of protests VANDU has organized or participated in, is that Livingston maintains members are generally reluctant to publicly protest. “Most of them are terrified; they’ve never carried a placard.” She said the work with VANDU offers members the opportunity to exercise their citizenship, often for the first time ever in their lives. “It’s like consciousness raising,” she said. And in the process, she believes, they’ve shifted the public image of drug users among members of the public.

In a decade, Livingston said she’s seen members’ situations deteriorate. Ten years ago, one in 10 members was homeless; now it’s approaching five in 10. She estimates half of the people who joined VANDU in its early years are now dead. While in the early years users typically took one drug, poly drug use is now common. In talking about the way drug users are treated, Livingston refers repeatedly to the Holocaust, saying drug users are dying and few outside of the DTES seem to care or even be paying much attention.

VANDU President Dean Wilson agrees. Wilson is perhaps the best known drug user in the country after allowing himself to be the focus of “Fix: The Story of an Addicted City” (a documentary that featured Wilson), and after standing as a plaintiff in the recent BC Supreme Court case where the judge determined that Vancouver’s supervised injection site provides a healthcare service and should remain open. Wilson said VANDU “supports thousands of the most marginalized people in the country.”

"They (VANDU) are just really tapped into the (drug-using) community. They create a context where other people can step up with solutions.” John Richardson, Pivot Legal Society

He talks about how, on a nightly needle exchange shift about seven years ago, he handed some clean needles to a woman sleeping in some bushes, in the rain. As he handed her the needles he said, “You be safe tonight,” and the woman burst into tears saying, “no one has ever been concerned about me in my life.”

“That’s a huge difference because nobody has been concerned for us,” Wilson says.

Asked about VANDU’s achievements Wilson leaps to his feel and rushes across the room to pull the most recent Vancouver Drug Use Epidemiology: Site Report for the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use off the shelf. He flips to the pages outlining the decreases in overdose death rates and lowered HIV rates: “These are direct results,” he says, adding VANDU advocated for the NAOMI prescription heroin trials and supervised injection site.

Wilson believes his organization’s next big struggle will be to establish opiate prescription for those addicted to opiates. “Why is the government not working on this?” he fumes.

Pivot’s John Richardson agrees that the organization has been a critical voice in the DTES and in the broader community. He notes the establishment of the supervised injection site and the Health Contact Centre, the growth in needle exchanges, and the recent NAOMI trials as just some of the things that have been established or occurred because of VANDU’s work. He said VANDU’s acceptance of drug users as they are has strengthened harm reduction measures and empowered drug users. “They are just really tapped into the (drug-using) community,” he said. “They create a context where other people can step up with solutions.”

Richardson noted that while VANDU has received legal advice from him and from Pivot, “VANDU was certainly fundamental to the formation of Pivot,” he said, adding that the relationship between the two organizations is ongoing and mutually beneficial.

Please visit our podcasting page to hear Ann Livingston’s November 27, 2008 podcast where she talks about VANDU’s anniversary and the organization’s accomplishments.