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.