TOM SANDBORN AUTHOR SUCCEEDS IN PUTTING A FACE ON OPIOID CRISIS
Journalist champions idea that users should have role in responding to problem
Travis Lupick’s Fighting for Space argues for harm reduction and celebrates the advocates and organizers who fought for it in Vancouver.
Vancouver is ground zero in Canada’s current opioid overdose epidemic, but it is not the only place Canadians are dying unnecessarily.
In June, a federal Public Health Agency study predicted the national overdose death toll would mount to more than 2,500 by the end of this year. Vancouver itself is on track to see more than 400 deaths by overdose this year. Lupick’s new book argues that lessons learned in our city are vitally important as governments work on policy responses to the horrifying death count.
Lupick, who has been ably covering the opioid story in the pages of the Georgia Straight for years, turns his attention to Vancouver’s last big overdose crisis and the grassroots responses that emerged as drug users and their allies fought for harm- reduction programs and strategies in the 1990s and the first decades of the new century.
Lupick is a highly competent researcher and elegantly deft writer, and his book tells stories about the emergence of the Portland Hotel Society and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. These and other groups led or influenced by addicts became passionate advocates for harmreduction strategies like supervised injection sites, heroinmaintenance programs, an end to failed policies of drug prohibition and more low- barrier, housingfirst approaches. He also provides international context by looking at research and harm- reduction efforts around the world.
Lupick’s book is humanized by his closely observed and respectful portraits of some of the people who first championed the radical idea that drug users should have a leading voice in designing any government interventions in their lives. The portraits include Ann Livingston, a fierce advocate with a salty vocabulary and a seemingly boundless commitment to grassroots democracy; Bud Osborn, poet, IV drug user and activist, and Mark Townsend and Liz Evans, the couple who played a key role in creating the Portland Hotel Society as a selfdescribed “hotel of last resort.”
Lupick also argues persuasively that we need to expand some of the harm- reduction strategies pioneered by brave grassroots activists to respond to our current crisis.
Not every reader will be persuaded, and some readers may fault Lupick’s account of the funding crisis at the Portland Hotel Society in 2014 as overly pro PHS and insufficiently critical. Nevertheless, this is an important book full of human drama and useful policy suggestions. Fighting for Space should be read widely and heeded by citizens and policy- makers.