In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the city of Vancouver, Canada, experienced an epidemic of drug-overdose deaths similar to the crisis that jurisdictions across North America struggle with today. The area that was hardest hit was an impoverished neighbourhood called the Downtown Eastside. There, activists marched in the streets to demand a say in drug policy. Their efforts culminated in 2003 with the establishment of North America’s first supervised-injection facility, Insite. A piece of that story all but lost is the Hair Salon, an unsanctioned injection facility that was built in secret in the same location where Insite would open one year later…

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In May 2001, Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen had successfully pushed his councillors to adopt a plan called the Four Pillars framework that heralded a new direction for the city’s response to drug addiction. Included in the plan was a pledge to establish a task force that would “consider the feasibility of a scientific medical project to develop safe-injection sites or supervised consumption facilities in Vancouver.” But in 2002, there was an election and Owen didn’t run for office.

He was succeeded by Larry Campbell, who knew Vancouver’s drug problem well through his work as a coroner. Campbell was onboard with harm reduction, and during his election campaign he promised to open an injection site. But drug users didn’t trust him, or any politician, by this point.

On April 7, 2003, it appeared their lack of faith was justified. “Police on horseback, motorcycles and foot patrol launched an unprecedented block-by-block campaign Monday to rid this city’s notorious Downtown Eastside of drug dealers,” reads one newspaper’s report. Campbell had increased the number of police officers assigned to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside from twenty to sixty.

For the next several months, police swarmed the neighbourhood. While those battles raged in full view of the public, the nonprofit Portland Hotel Society (PHS) had initiated a covert operation.

PHS was established in 2001 with a modest contract to provide mental-health services to 10 rooms inside just one building in the Downtown Eastside. By 2002, the organization was receiving millions of dollars in government funding every year. But its founders, Liz Evans and Mark Townsend, were still running PHS like the small nonprofit they had formed a decade earlier. The government didn’t like that and was intensifying pressure for more formal organization.

   They kept telling us they wanted an org chart and so I said, ‘Fuck you, we’ll send you an org chart,’” Townsend says. 

In response, Townsend recalls how he and Evans sat down with their two cofounders, Dan Small and Kerstin Stuerzbecher, to essentially fabricate official duties to list alongside everyone’s name in an effort to placate their bureaucratic overlords.

“They kept telling us they wanted an org chart and so I said, ‘Fuck you, we’ll send you an org chart,’” Townsend says.

Small remembers the meeting the four of them held as a little more productive than that. “We broke up the organization’s key roles for the directors,” he says. “Everyone would have a cluster of responsibility.”

Evans would manage staff, essentially functioning as the Portland’s human-resources department, leading training sessions, negotiating contracts, and that sort of thing. She also liaised with political partners. Much to her disappointment, it all inevitably left her with a lot less time with tenants. Stuerzbecher took the lead on program implementation and became increasingly busy with budgets and financial planning. Townsend would continue to steer the organization on political activism and also manage nuts-and-bolts operations and the maintenance team. “And under my umbrella was all the most controversial stuff,” Small says. “All the nuclear radiation: needle exchange, and a safe-injection site.”

“We decided at that meeting that we were going to do it,” he continues. “That we were really going to do it.”

Small and Townsend went for a long walk around the city one day, scouting an appropriate location. In the end, they settled on the exact spot where they had begun their search: the 100 block of East Hastings Street. This was the heart of Vancouver’s drug scene. Downtown Eastside activist Bud Osborn had named an entire collection of his poetry for this strip of pavement: Hundred Block Rock, published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 1999.

“Hundred block rock,” begins the poem from which the collection takes its name.

shoot up shock
……police chief
……….cold grief
…………..war on drugs
………………pull the plug
………………….clean it up
……………………..nowhere to go
…………………………ground zero
…………………………….overload jail
………………………………ground zero
………………………………..rock and wail
……………………………………where a
……………………………………….dopefiend stood
…………………………………………..comin soon
………………………………………………to your neighbourhood

blue teardrop tattoos
……what’s the plan
……….tear it down
…………..let ’em drown
………………too much reality
………………….fixin the alley
……………………..blood streamin
…………………………naked girl tweakin
…………………………….hundred block reelin
………………………………..vancouver’s first
……………………………………western world’s worst
……………………………………….hiv
…………………………………………..public health emergency
…………………………………………..fuck ’em around
………………………………………………till their lives burst

  Hundreds of intravenous drug users were concentrated on the 100 block, so it wasn’t like opening an official injection site there would attract many more. They were all already there, so why not give them a place where they could use inside instead of leaving them in the alleys?  

At the 100 block’s east end is the Carnegie Community Centre and the open drug market of Main and East Hastings. One block in the other direction is the old Portland Hotel and Pigeon Park, another hub for dealers. On the 100 block itself is the Portland’s Washington Hotel and the adjoining Washington Needle Depot, as well as two more PHS buildings: the Sunrise and the Roosevelt. There’s also the Balmoral Hotel, the Regent, and Brandiz—three notorious private SROs long known as a few of the city’s very worst hotels. Hundreds of intravenous drug users were concentrated on the 100 block, so it wasn’t like opening an official injection site there would attract many more. They were all already there, so why not give them a place where they could use inside instead of leaving them in the alleys?

“Mark and I looked around the city for the right area where this would make sense,” Small says. “Our vision was to put it in the eye of the hurricane, where the people are.”

There were a few storefronts tucked in between the 100 block’s rundown hotels that might have worked. But only one building was really large enough for what they had in mind. It was 139 East Hastings, a nondescript three-storey building positioned almost exactly in the centre of the block’s north side. It was so ordinary looking that Townsend felt like he’d never even seen it before that day.

“I’d never even really noticed this fucking place, and it’s right between the Washington and the Sunrise, which we were operating,” he says. “This building was like God had just plunked it down in the middle of the block.”

There was a man hosing down the sidewalk. Townsend thought he was the building’s janitor and started to chat with him. “Who owns this building and what’s the story?” Townsend asked. “He explains that he owns the building. He’s lived there for twenty years, he’s brought his daughters up here, they’ve all gone on to [university], and now he lives on one floor and uses the SRO rooms on the other floor for people he tries to help out.” That was Kwan Lee, or “the Korean General,” as Townsend later came to affectionately call him.

Technically, the building has two addresses, but they’re connected on the inside. On the ground floor, Lee sold sandwiches out of one of them and at the other, pizza by the slice. He lived with his wife and two children on the second floor. The third floor was an SRO, where Lee rented small rooms to the same sort of down-and-out tenants that occupied the rest of the block.

When Townsend and Small struck up that first conversation with Lee, they hadn’t yet agreed on how they were going to convince him to offer his building to a bunch of drug addicts. At one point, they thought it might be smart to hide their intent to open an injection site and draft the lease with vague language about a health-care facility. “But we kind of wanted to have a partner on this,” Townsend says.

On the street, they continued to chat with Lee. It turned out that while they had never noticed him, he had been keeping an eye on the Portland Hotel Society. “I’ve watched you for a long time down here, and you’re the only people who do anything,” Lee said.

Townsend and Small caught each other’s eyes. “What are we going to do?” Townsend remembers Small’s glance communicating. “Are we going to rent the store without saying what we’re going to use it for, or are we going to just go for it and lay it all out on the line? And so we laid it all out on the line for the guy.”

Lee didn’t know what a supervised-injection site was. He was familiar with the drug issue, given where he lived. But he’d never heard of giving people addicted to drugs a safe space to inject them.

   “I’ve watched you for a long time down here, and you’re the only people who do anything,” Lee said. 

The previous year, Kerstin Stuerzbecher had travelled to Frankfurt, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland, and Small had visited Sydney, Australia, to see the injection sites already operating in those cities. He shared photographs with Lee, explained how the facilities worked, and described how those health-care programs operated in contrast to the scenes of squalor and misery that Lee witnessed outside his storefront every day.

“We went into his office and looked at all that,” Small says. “We had a glass of orange juice together—he made homemade orange juice—and we talked about this.”

At this stage, the Portland’s injection site was not going to be the Portland’s. PHS was responsible for housing hundreds of people, the vast majority of whom struggled with a mental illness, a serious addiction issue, or both. If PHS opened an illegal injection site and the government came down hard on them for it, all of that would be at risk. By 2002, it looked like all three levels of government were just about ready to see someone open a sanctioned injection site. But that was far from certain. At the same time, Evans, Townsend, Stuerzbecher, and Small had agreed they were done waiting. This injection site was going to open even if government support never actually materialized. And so to protect PHS and its tenants, Small established a separate nonprofit organization called Health Quest.

“It was another avatar or firewall to protect the Portland,” Small explains. “Because we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Health Quest didn’t have any money or support from government—no one at city hall even knew it existed. That made it a risky partner for Kwan Lee.

“If the shit hits the fan, I will decloak, and I give you my word, I will take responsibility,” Small reassured him. “It will be me in the press, not you.”

Over the course of a week or so, they met repeatedly over orange juice.

“I believe that we will get this done,” Small told Lee. “I believe it will be legal eventually. We may have to set it up illegally, temporarily. It’s my view that we will get the grant for it, eventually, to pay for a lease. But if we don’t, I need your word that you will rip the lease up.”

If the whole venture collapsed, Lee would have moved his family and shut down his pizza and sandwich businesses for nothing. Or worse, he would be sent to jail. The risk for Lee and his family was considerable, but today he remains exceedingly modest about the whole thing.

“I’d been there a long time, long enough to know the neighbourhood,” he says. “And they were nice people, working hard … Bottom line is, I leased them the space, just as I would have leased it to anybody.”

They signed the deal in his office on the second floor of the building where Insite still stands today.

“Kwan took a leap of faith that this was the right thing,” Small says.

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“Now, obviously, you were not just allowed to build a supervised-injection site,” Townsend begins. You are allowed to build a hair salon. So that’s what they called it: the Hair Salon, operated by Health Quest.

Townsend called in the Portand’s notorious maintenance team.

Christoph Runne recalls the task as absolutely daunting. “For some reason, we only had ten days to turn it into a safe-injection site,” he says, “or a hair salon, I mean … So we were working through the night.”

The project’s tight schedule is similarly the first thing Phong Lam remembers about it. That, and then its secrecy. “We worked day and night,” Lam says. “Quietly, we worked inside the building, day and night. If you were tired, you went home, got some rest, and came back and continued working on it.”

   “It was exactly like Insite is today except cheap and cheerful,” Small says. 

Small notes that they actually only renovated half the ground floor during this initial phase of construction. The sandwich shop remained as Lee had left it when he’d closed the place up a few weeks earlier. The Hair Salon was built where the pizza place had stood. They ripped out the oven and sneaked debris out at night, through the exit to the back alley. Out on the 100 block of East Hastings, there wasn’t a hint of anything going on.

“Loose lips sink ships,” Small says with a smirk. “The inner circle of people at the Portland didn’t tell anyone. There was zero leakage.”

Lam remembers it was as if an injection site appeared out of nowhere. “Nobody knew about it,” he says. “Then Mark and everyone got together at four or five a.m. He got a disposal truck to come and take down the awning and wrap up. And then we were done. Like a surprise.”

Small remembers the Hair Salon really as not that different from how Insite looks today. There was a lobby at the front, larger than one might expect in an effort to dissuade crowds from forming outside on the street. Then, past the lobby, was the injection room. On the left side was a space for staff, and against the wall on the right was a row of sectioned booths. Each one had a mirror, a small sink, steel table, and a chair underneath. For a demonstration that PHS organized, each booth also had a bouquet of pink tulips.

“It was exactly like Insite is today except cheap and cheerful,” Small says.

Today, Lam reflects back on countless crazy tasks that Townsend and Small had assigned to the maintenance team over the years. The Hair Salon—building an injection site from start to finish in ten days—was by far the most challenging, he says.

“That is the best memory I have,” Lam adds. “Making it happen.”

Nobody ever used drugs at the Hair Salon. A few weeks later, everything they’d constructed as the Health Quest injection site was ripped out and destroyed.

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Travis Lupick is an award-winning journalist based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the author of Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction. He works as a staff reporter for the Georgia Straight and has also written about drug addiction, harm reduction, and mental health for the Toronto Star and Al Jazeera English, among other outlets.

For his reporting on Canada’s opioid crisis, Lupick received the Canadian Association of Journalists’ prestigious Don McGillivray award for best overall investigative report of 2016 and two 2017 Jack Webster awards for excellence in B.C. journalism. For Fighting for Space, he received the 2018 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. He has also worked as a journalist in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Malawi, Nepal, Bhutan, Peru, and Honduras. Follow him on Twitter: @tlupick.

This article, originally published as the chapter entitled “The Hair Salon,” is an excerpt  from Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction by Vancouver-based journalist Travis Lupick (Arsenal Pulp Press, June 2018).

(To learn more about Seattle’s effort to join Vancouver in creating supervised injection sites in Cascadia, read Kelsey Hamlin’s detailed feature at Cascadia Magazine, and view Jackie Dives’ incredible photo essay about the peer workers at Vancouver’s Overdose Prevention Society.)