Pubdate: Wed, 17 Sep 2003
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2003 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  http://www.vancourier.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474
Author: Allen Garr

MOTLEY REFORM CREW TAKES ON WAR ON DRUGS

As North America's media focused attention on the opening of the 
continent's first legal supervised injection site in Vancouver this week, a 
small group of drug reform revolutionaries prepared to hit the road once again.

They are a curious collection: A middle-aged woman with her kid in a 
stroller, a tattooed junkie with a seemingly unbeatable habit, a 
documentary filmmaker who is more comfortable in the shadows than in the 
spotlight, and an old man in a business suit. They come armed with their 
commitment to a cause and a 96- minute video.

The woman with the stroller is Ann Livingston, the often strident, zealous, 
former president of VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. She 
used her own money to help set up a safe shooting site back when officials 
wouldn't give her the time of day. The junkie with the tattoos is Dean 
Wilson, Livingston's lover, father of the child in the stroller. He once 
peddled computers for IBM.

The filmmaker is Nettie Wild. She is a woman with an uncanny political 
sense for a story and the ability to operate on a shoe-string budget. She 
can gain the confidence of the most wary of combatants, from the remote 
regions of Chiapas in southern Mexico to the desperate back alleys of 
Vancouver.

The gray-haired guy in the suit is Philip Owen, the man Larry Campbell 
still refers to as "the Mayor." His lengthy political career would have 
been no more than a smudge in the pages of history if a fire had not sprung 
up in his heart and led him to the radical path he is now on.

For his passion, he was drummed out of his own political party and 
ultimately out of office. It was the prelude to what Maclean's magazine 
called Canada's "first drug election."

The film, Wild's film, was supposed to be a six-month project. It became a 
two-and-a-half-year marathon that gobbled up 300 hours of videotape. It 
aired as a 45-minute sprint on CTV as FIX: The story of an addicted city. 
Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje declared: "As a political act, FIX is an 
urgent and just and heartbreaking film. As a work of art, it expands the 
known limits of human nature with remarkable portraits."

Of the unlikely collection of people in the travelling road show, Philip 
Owen says: "We are a funny bunch, I want to tell you. But we get the juices 
flowing."

Those juices have flowed in dozens of cities and towns all across this 
province and into the prairies since the film was first launched in the 
middle of the last civic election. It has been the catalyst for 
conversations and confessions. It played no small part in propelling that 
first safe shooting site into existence.

While communities like Nanaimo and Kelowna are still officially in denial 
about the drug problem that is destroying lives there, their citizens are 
not. Owen recalls a woman in Nanaimo, a longtime addict, who is finally 
clean and wants to help spread the word on harm reduction. In Kelowna the 
film sold out. It outdrew X-Men at a local theatre.

Wild talks about a disheartened doctor who runs a methadone program in 
Vernon and had to be coaxed to make a public appearance in the panel 
discussion that follows each screening of FIX. He was treated like a hero.

While U.S. legislators, supporters of the destructive War On Drugs, 
threaten to tighten their borders in the face of Vancouver's safe site, the 
appetite for the message being delivered by our radical little band is 
spreading across the globe: an invitation from Lisbon, an award in New 
York, a screening planned for Australia, a French translation for Quebec.

"I don't know where it's taking us," says Owen, who is as amazed as anyone 
by this success. "We're just rolling along with it."

See FIX later this week at the Van East Cinema and at Surrey's Hollywood 3.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom