Pubdate: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC) Copyright: 2006 Vancouver Courier Contact: http://www.vancourier.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474 Author: Allen Garr TURVEY'S MOMENT WAS BRILLIANT John Turvey was a friend of mine. We met sometime between his kicking his heroin addiction and when he started Vancouver's first needle exchange. He died last Wednesday, the inevitable result of his four year battle with mitochondrial myopathy. It's a disease that interferes with nerve function. Turvey could neither hold his eyes open nor properly swallow. The end was a blessing. While his passing was inevitable, there was nothing inevitable about Turvey's life. He was one of those babies kept in a bubble when he was born in Edmonton. He had rickets and severe allergies. A hospital nurse and her husband, both Baptists, adopted him and moved to Mission, B.C. At 13, he ran away from home, lived on the streets in Vancouver and became a junkie. Five years later he was married and had a son who was saved and raised by caring great-grandparents on the Prairies. Turvey kicked his habit in his early 20s, thanks to a rehabilitation program run by the Anglican Church. At the church's lay training centre in the Interior, he literally took the plunge. He was baptized and found God. That newfound belief came with him when he returned to Vancouver. It was nowhere evident by the time we met. Friends who knew him then say Turvey, with only a Grade 6 education, was a voracious reader and a determined debater. Within a few years he was the head social worker at Vancouver's Bayswater Crisis Centre for kids. About that time he was also the chair of the provincial government's Kitsilano Resources Board. He tossed it all aside in the early '80s. For a time he sold coffee beans at the Granville Island Market. But he wasn't out of social work for long. He was hired on a small grant as a street worker based out of the newly re-opened Carnegie Centre. Working the streets at night, he handed out condoms and needles to the sex trade workers and junkies on his beat. He had his own needle exchange going before he convinced then Vancouver mayor Gordon Campbell to come along with a pile of money. To the rest of the country it was shockingly radical. To Turvey it was sensible and lifesaving. It earned him international recognition in 1988 from the Atlanta Centre for Disease Control. By that time he'd started DEYAS, the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society, which was the home of the needle exchange. Turvey built it into a formidable empire that employed 50 people. His career and his influence were at their peak. He was the go-to guy for media who wanted to know about drugs and the street. Governments opened their wallets. It was like that for almost a decade. Then, as AIDS spread, needle exchanges proliferated and DEYAS lost the franchise and the influence that came with it. Other institutions, the Portland Hotel Society and VANDU, a drug-users organization, in particular began to gain leverage and compete for funds on what was once Turvey's exclusive turf. When former mayor Philip Owen began to push his Four Pillar Approach, he found himself at odds with Turvey, particularly on the issue of supervised injection sites. Turvey lost the argument and was pushed to the sidelines. The one-time radical was considered reactionary by the new voices which had the ear of politicians. By the time Turvey was forced by his disease to resign from DEYAS, the organization was in serious decline. But for that brilliant moment, those years where he burned most brightly in his life, Turvey was recognized and will be remembered. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of British Columbia. He received the Order of Canada a few months ago. He was joined in that final ceremony by his wife Deb, his son Chad-with whom he was reunited a few years ago after decades of estrangement-Chad's wife and their child. John Turvey was 61. - --- MAP posted-by: Elaine