Spider Robinson, the author of 35 books of science fiction, knows about moulding the present into a possible future. With his big idea, the Bowen Island resident now working as writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library does the same for troubled Main and Hastings, the heart of the Downtown Eastside.
Tell me about your big idea.
“We eliminate Vancouver’s biggest and most shameful eyesore at the corner of Main and Hastings or, as it is more commonly known, the intersection of Pain and Lastings. Try what they tried in the TV series The Wire. Make drugs available to anyone who wants them under controlled, safe conditions. Let’s handle the war on drugs the way the U.S. typically handles real wars that have dragged on forever without achieving their objectives: Declare victory and go home.”
Would this be just something for this particular part of Vancouver?
Phasing it in will be tricky. When you start small, it’s hard to scale up from there, but they’re trying it right now in places like Zurich. It’s not all of Switzerland, but in Zurich, heroin addicts can go get injectable heroin on prescription and they can get oral methadone if they want to wean themselves off heroin, which startling numbers seem to want to do, and they have got needle exchange and safe shooting galleries. Medicalized drug use has removed the glamour and they say the number of new drug users in Zurich has been falling steadily since they did this about a decade ago.
How would the provision of drugs in such a manner eliminate the things you don’t like, the things that you find distressing about Main and Hastings?
It wouldn’t eliminate the need to take drugs. It just seems to me that if we are going to run a society which is so painful to live in that a significant number of our citizens need heroin to get through a day, it seems to me the least we could do is make it available to them as conveniently and cheaply as possible since it was our fault in the first place. People don’t take drugs for fun. It doesn’t work that way.
There are concerns and consequences of illegal drug use in various parts of British Columbia. Why try this at Main and Hastings?
We just had the Olympics up here and the one thing you kept hearing over and over was people would say many wonderful things about Vancouver and how amazed they were at our beauty, but always Main and Hastings would come up. Always, people would talk about this open-air eyesore, worse than anything they had come across.
How feasible do you think it would be to expect policy-makers to embrace this kind of solution? There’s a debate about even Insite, even providing a place for the safe use of illegal drugs, never mind outright providing illegal drugs.
Unfortunately, the downside with the scheme is that we would probably have to go to war with our own federal government and that of the United States. But I don’t think we would end up having to go to war with many provincial or state governments because most of them are discovering they can’t afford to continue this stupid, drug war and they don’t really want to.
Would rehab and guidance in the proper, safe use of drugs, with clean needles and that sort of thing, be a part of this?
