30 YEARS AGO, A POT SMOKE-IN SPARKED THE GASTOWN RIOT

The Hippie Counterculture Clashed With A Straight Establishment That
Tried To Crack Down On Soft Drugs

It was a warm August night in 1971 when Vancouver police Inspector
Bob Abercrombie stood in front of a crowd of hundreds of long-haired
youths smoking pot and lounging around Maple Tree Square in Gastown.
He ordered everyone to disperse within two minutes. But hardly
anyone heard Abercrombie. He was using a megaphone that barely
projected his voice.

Five city police officers on horses approached the crowd by the
Europe Hotel. They formed into a V under the direction of Constable
Jake Bachmeier. Although slightly nervous at the prospect of riding
his horse Captain into the crowd, Bachmeier had his orders. Hours
later, after 79 people were in jail and the police turned a peaceful
protest against the country's marijuana laws into the Gastown Riot
Bachmeier went home confident that he'd done a good night's work.

Panic erupted as soon as Bachmeier and the other mounted officers
rode into the crowd.

Police on horseback and on foot started beating protesters with
batons and riding crops, chasing people west up Water Street and on
to side streets.

Police attacked and arrested people at random, including shoppers who
innocently left Gastown stores to find a melee on the street.
Fuelled by anger and fear, a handful of protesters threw beer bottles
and bricks at riot police.

After it was over, a public inquiry accused some officers of
over-reacting and using excessive force. But the only penalty
imposed on police was a demotion from first-class constable to
second-class constable.

Something good did come out ofthe Gastown Riot. Vancouver police
radically changed how it dealt with subsequent protests. Activists
of the era say police became focused on being professionals who
didn't take sides rather than moral enforcers.

Had the police simply left the "Grasstown Smoke-in" alone, it likely
would have passed unremarked into history. Instead, the police
turned it into one of the counterculture's defining moments in Canada.

According to the calendar, the Gastown Riot occurred Aug. 7, 1971.
Spiritually, it was a child of the 1960s.

Across North America, young Baby Boomers mixed politics and culture
in a way never seen before. It was the era of free love, hippies,
rock 'n' roll, and protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam.

In Canada, Vancouver was the centre of the country's youth culture.
Initially, the city's hippies congregated in the low-rent,
working-class homes and apartments in Kitsilano around West Fourth
Avenue. But by the early 1970s a second centre developed in and
around Gastown, close to the editorial offices of the Georgia
Straight, the voice of the youth culture in its early years.

In Vancouver, the youth culture's opposition was personified by Mayor
Tom "Terrific" Campbell and Police Chief John Fisk.

Because illegal soft drugs, such as marijuana, were the new
generation's mind-altering substances of choice, police used existing
criminal laws to arrest and intimidate hippies and other youths.

In the first six months of 1971, police arrested 574 for possession
of LSD and marijuana, up from about 800 arrested for all of 1970 on
possession charges.

Police cranked up the pressure even more when they launched Operation
Dustpan in late July.

On the streets, police randomly searched long-haired youths. In beer
parlours in Gastown, police would bar anyone from leaving and then
physically search everyone inside.

Coupled with open-line host Jack Webster providing sensational
covrage about the need to "clean up" Gastown, the "soft-drug capital
of Canada," the police campaign against the city's youth culture
resulted in almost daily drug-related arrest stories in the Vancouver
Sun. Altogether, Operation Dustpan sent about 100 youths to jail.

In response the Georgia Straight announced that a "Grasstown Smoke-in
& Street Jamboree" would be held on Saturday, Aug.7 starting at 8:30
p.m. at the Maple Tree Square at Water and Carrall.

From the start, members of the Youth International Party - the
Yippies - who organized the smoke-in, saw it as an act of civil
disobedience. They were prepared to be passively arrested and go to
jail for their belief in the right to smoke marijuana, but they
didn't want a riot. A Georgia Straight article by Ken Lester under
the headline "How Not To Get Busted At The Grasstown Smoke-in"
informed readers how to protest, have a good time and not end up in
jail.

As the day approached, Operation Dustpan got even more aggressive.

At the Gastown Inn,police put on a choke hold on a suspect to release
a cap of heroin. When that didn't work, they used handcuffs to pry
his mouth open, breaking several of the suspect's teeth.

The second incident occurred the day before the riot.

At 3 p.m. Friday, about a dozen police officers raided the Last
Chance Saloon, a hippie hangout on West Fourth Avenue. Police didn't
arrest anyone. Instead, they simply trashed the place, ripping apart
walls, smashing musical equipment and throwing food over the kitchen.

In a story in The Vancouver Sun, Philip Hugh, who was at the saloon,
is quoted as saying only marijuana and LSD were allowed in the Last
Chance, not heroin or speed.

"A cop poured a can of paint on a box of fruit. They figure if they
wreck us often enough we'll quit. They want to destroy us by
destroying our property. Well, this won't stop us."

On Saturday, Aug. 7, young people started congregating around Maple
Tree Square in the early evening.

As the evening progressed and the numbers swelled to about 1,500
people living in the rooms around Maple Tree Square moved their
stereo speakers to the windows so protesters could dance. Organizers
distributed about 200 ice cream sandwiches.

At one point, a huge marijuana joint was hoisted through the crowd.
It was actually a roll of foolscap paper stuffed with straw made by
students from the Langara campus of Vancouver City College.

At the foot of Carrall Street, just to the north of Maple Tree
Square, Lester condemned Operation Dustpan and recounted recent
police tactics that led to the smoke-in. He burned a copy of the
Criminal Code and led an impromptu obscene cheer against Mayor
Campbell.

As Lester was trying to get a band of musicians to the square, a
group of three friends who had been drinking in a Gastown beer
parlour showed up to see what was happening. On a lark, they walked
into the Europe Hotel and climbed up the stairs to the hotel's
balcony, which forms a kind of natural stage on to Maple Tree Square.
All three of them dropped their drawers and mooned the crowd.
Everyone cheered.

For Abercrombie, that kind of behaviour was the final straw. Later,
he told the public inquiry into the riot that he had to act because
of the affront to law and order, authority and decency "the way I
like decency."

At the inquiry, Abercrombie said he gave the following warning before
police moved in on the smoke-in: "This is Vancouver police. Can I
have your attention please? This area is completely blocked off by
people. I intend to clear it and will give you two minutes to
disperse."

Some people could see what the police officers were about to do.
Organizer Bob Sarti remembers trying to get the crowd to move to
Victory Square as the police mounted squad and riot officers massed
on Powell in an attack formation.

But then the police charged. Sarti said he never heard any warning by
Abercrombie, despite being near where they charged the crowd.

In the panic that followed, demonstrators ran in fear. Some hid in
store entrances as baton-swinging officers chased after them. Others
ran into restaurants where they were greeted by the eerie calm of
people eating dinner, completely unaware of what was going on
outside. Some businesses even locked their doors to block anyone
trying to escape from police.

Others innocently walked out of stores on to Water Street as police
were clearing the area. One case of police falsely arresting a
couple who were out shopping eventually cost the city $5,000 in an
out-of-court settlement.

Ed Sweeney was an alderman at the time and a supporter of the police
in their war on soft drugs.

He was at home that night when Gastown developer Larry Killam phoned
to say there was trouble in Maple Tree Square.

Sweeney hurried down.

"It was a hot August evening and the riot was in full swing,"
recalled Sweeney, now 71. "Police on horses were trying to get the
participants out of the area. The problem was that both ends of the
street were closed off by uniformed police.

"These people had nowhere to go and the riot just got worse and worse."

Rand Holmes, creator of the legendary underground comic hero Harold
Hedd, was drinking beer in the Europe when the riot broke out. He
and some friends had dropped by the smoke-in earlier.

"Nothing was really happening. We smoked a few tokes and we just
decided to slip into the Europe," recalls Holmes, 59, who now lives
and paints on Lasqueti Island.

"All of a sudden, people started streaming in the doors. We jumped
up. I looked out the door and a cop on a horse went riding right by
me on the sidewalk. - just about flattened me against the wall."

Holmes ducked back into the beer parlour and spent most of the riot
there. The next day he drew a savage cartoon that would run on the
front page of the Aug. 9 Georgia Straight.

One panel showed Mayor Campbell sodomizing himself with a police nightstick.

Another panel showed police officers beating on Charles Traynor, the
owner of the Tin Ear record store in Gastown.

Traynor "was quite a respectable guy," Holmes recalled. "He wasn't a
hippie. The cops beat the tar out of him right on his own premises."

Traynor, now 51, is a management consultant living in Victoria. He
remembers that night clearly.

"They were brutal," he said of the police. "They really were. They
came in swinging. They didn't ask people to move, they came in
swinging."

People panicked as the mounted police rode down the streets, slicing
the air with their metre-long clubs.

"There were a lot of people getting banged up. And they had... a
couple of paddy wagons and they were throwing people into the back of
the paddy wagons."

Traynor stood in front of his store, "hollering" at the police and
trying to get their badge numbers. But the police weren't wearing
badges and refused to identify themselves.

"A couple of them came along and cracked me over the head and dragged
me off and threw me in the paddy wagon."

Traynor spent the night in jail but was never charged.

"My youth dropped away completely at that point," he said.

"I certainly lost my idealistic notions about the system being right,
inherently right...I guess it quashed my notion that justice would
always prevail in the world, because it very clearly hadn't in this
case."

When the Vancouver Sun came out Monday, the front page had a huge
photo showing youths fleeing and a riot-equipped police officer on
horseback. The event's defining image was taken by photographer Glenn
Baglo, one of several media workers who were harassed by police
during the riot.

Because of the media coverage, police were on the defensive from the start.

Within weeks, Attorney-General Leslie Peterson appointed Justice
Thomas Dohm to head a public inquiry into the riot. It found that
police used "unnecessary, unwarranted and excessive force."

"The greater weight of the evidence is that the majority of the crowd
was not an unpleasant crowd at the time that the police decided to
move same," Justice Dohm said. "It was not a mob. The violence
erupted only when the police intervened in the manner described.
Riot gear and horses should have been the last resort and not the
first."

City prosecutor Stewart McMorran said there was enough evidence for
five officers to be charged with criminal offences but Peterson,
citing recommendations of his staff and Justice Dohm, decided no
charges should be laid.

Abercrombie and Bachmeier both took early retirement but said it had
nothing to do with their roles in the riot.

The only penalty meted out to police was to Constable John Whitelaw.
He was demoted to second-class constable at a loss in pay of $77 a
month. The demotion was over an incident where Robert Elliott had
his leg broken in a confrontation with police in a Hastings Street
parking lot.

Of the 79 arrested that night, 38 were charged with various offences,
ranging from causing a disturbance to possession of a dangerous
weapon. Charges against several people were dismissed, others
received minor fines. The most severe penalty was meted out to Jerry
Leggett. He was sentenced to four-and-a-half months in jail for
throwing a brick at police.

Despite the passage of three decades, the Gastown Riot lives on as
part of the city's mythology.

Today, a "30th Anniversary Smoke-in and Jamboree" is being held in
Gastown. Organizer David Malmo-Levine, protesters and pot smokers
will be gathering around Maple Tree Square starting about 2 p.m.

Malmo-Levine said the point of the smoke-in is to remember what
police did 30 years ago and to put some pressure on politicians to
change the law to make smoking dope legal. It's also to show support
for drug dealers.

He'd like anyone involved in the 1971 protest to participate.

"We can defeat prohibition with the old hippies and the new hippies
coming together one more time," he said.

- - With files from Lindsay Kines and Tom Barrett