DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE HERO FACES FATAL NEW ADVERSARY

At the time in his life when he has so much to say, John Turvey, 59, the
Downtown Eastside's most outspoken activist, can barely speak.

A fatal genetic disease, mitochondrial myopathy, preys on his nerves and
muscles like the pimps and drug pushers who feed on the drifters he's
helped for 35 years.

Having survived a heroin addiction at age 14, the man who pioneered giving
out free needles to junkies is now forced to eat through a tube injected
into his stomach.

Perhaps Vancouver's leading expert on poverty and addiction, Turvey is
moving Sunday to spend his final days growing flowers and seeing relatives
in Comox on Vancouver Island. Though his health isn't getting better, the
born fighter vows to battle to the end.

"I'm trying not to be seduced by disability," he says in the Commercial
Drive apartment he's leaving this weekend. "I have to take the energy that
goes into being pissed off and channel it into stretching my own limitations."

Next Wednesday, the former St. George's private school drop-out will
receive The Order of British Columbia at Government House in Victoria.

"Turvey challenged all levels of government," says a government news
release announcing the award. "He was a determined and outspoken defender
of socially excluded citizens and a role model for aspiring social workers
and community activists."

But Turvey says the award isn't as great an achievement as discovering the
wonders of family life with his wife Deb, a downtown east-side social
worker from Comox he married 11 years ago, and son Chad, from another
marriage, who has come back to him recently after years apart.

"Here's a guy with little experience with a functional family," says
Turvey, who ran away, at age 13, from fundamentalist Baptist parents in
Chilliwack who later separated.

"Now I'm experiencing family. I'm overwhelmed. Excited."

But his longtime colleagues say Turvey has indeed had a family -- thousands
of street kids.

"He was just so approachable for people. People knew they could come to him
with their problems," says Allan Roscoe, 61, who began working with Turvey
to help street kids in 1979, and later formed the Downtown East-Side Youth
Activity Society, or DEYAS, with him. "I can't remember any individual ever
saying that John had let them down. He was always there . . . visiting
people in prison, attending court with them."

Back in the 1980s, in the relative innocence of Expo-era Vancouver, Turvey
had a lot of ideas considered wacky at the time, like giving sex trade
workers free condoms, setting up free injection sites for junkies, and
turning an old museum into a service centre for the homeless.

"When John was involved in that, it was like setting up a Satanic cult,"
says Mark Townsend, who works with the Portland Hotel Society, which
sometimes competed, and clashed, with Turvey over funding and strategy. "It
was very cutting edge, the concept of giving drug addicts clean needles.
Even if people disagree with him, at least he cares about people. That's
what gives him that edge that probably some people say they don't like."

"John had to fight hard with the city," recalls Roscoe. "There was an
attitude that because you're offering free, clean needles, that people who
aren't addicts are going to come try it. That myth is gone."

Roscoe remembers the time when Turvey got the idea for Canada's first free
needle exchange from a sex trade worker who said she needed more than just
free condoms.

"You're not really doing it all until you're giving us clean needles, too,"
she told them. Together with Dr. John Blatherwick, then the city's medical
health officer, he helped convince the city to spend $100,000 on a free
needle exchange program to stem the spread of a new, misunderstood disease
- -- AIDS.

Since then, a constellation of aid groups has arisen to shed light on the
city's dark corners. DEYAS, which started as a two-person youth project,
now has 70 employees working in youth detox, life skills, drug and alcohol
counselling, as well as a needle exchange and a mobile nursing van. Most of
the needle exchange's 15 workers are ex-users.

That means a lot of sad goodbyes on the phone, and at a tribute luncheon at
the Croatian Centre off Commercial Drive last week, where Turvey received
an award from Vancouver Quadra MP Stephen Owen.

Social workers wonder who will step up to fill Turvey's role as champion of
the victim.

"The media liked John because he could communicate in a way that made
sense. It was clear and simple," Townsend says. "We don't know who can
replace that."

"I'm no John Turvey. But I'm going to do my utmost to preserve his legacy,"
says his successor at DEYAS, Judy McGuire. "He just connects so well with
people, because he understood, because he cared, because people are people
are people. He had huge amounts of respect for everybody. He had an
incredibly acute political understanding. He's a consummate analyst. He
would speak and speak and speak and his arguments couldn't be bypassed,
because they were so accurate."

Turvey's admirers and opponents alike say his legacy will live on.

"Instead of calling them teen hookers or 'baby pros,' he reminded us that
those were sexually abused children out there," says Roscoe, his voice
choked with emotion. "He's tried to put a face to addicts, to indicate they
aren't any different than the rest of us. Because of John, this community
will never again suffer in silence."

Outlining a Plan for Change, From One Who's Been There

John Turvey calls his vision "a continuum of care."

"Services can't solve the problem if they're not developed in a continuum,"
he says. "The province has never had continual care for substance abusers.
So we see people relapse all the time."

With the help of his wife Deb, who's also an aid worker, he outlined the
details of his proposed solution:

- - Do a comprehensive study to find out where addicts come from. "There's
never been a study of the addict population," he says, other than
"pseudo-studies. We still don't know statistics about addicts."

- - Don't criminalize junkies. Give five years in prison for dealing drugs to
kids around schoolyards.

- -Treat addiction as an illness. "You should be able to go to a pharmacy and
get a syringe, anywhere, including around worksites and schools."

- -Have a regional strategy, instead of "silver bullet" solutions that solve
only specific aspects of the overall problem.

- -Decentralize funding and projects. "They [non-residents] shouldn't have to
come to the Downtown Eastside for emergency services."

- - Move drifters back to a "normal" life in their "source" communities, such
as Prince George or Nanaimo, instead of allowing them to remain in the
Downtown Eastside, where they only get worse. "If these regions have
resources, then returning home becomes an option, because the services
would be there to meet their needs."

- - Have victims, not politicians, decide. "Users and residents in the
community should make decisions on services, not a group of politicians,
because they're there, they know what works and what doesn't.