NEEDLES, LOVE AND REVOLUTION

How a Documentary About Vancouver's Drug Plague Altered a Civic Election

IT'S AN EASY 10-minute walk from the Cineplex Odeon theatres on Granville
Street in Vancouver to the worst of the city's drug-addled Downtown
Eastside. No, scratch that, it's not easy at all. It's an awful walk, past
crackheads and junkies scamming, dealing and selling themselves for more of
the drugs that kill them, or leave them vulnerable to disease and human
predation. For tourists who make a wrong turn, it's like stumbling into a
vision of hell. Most Vancouverites -- and federal legislators for that
matter -- have simply avoided the area as they would a plague zone. That
changed this fall, in one of the most remarkable municipal election
campaigns in memory.

The Downtown Eastside is the defining issue leading to the Nov. 16 vote.
"It's Canada's first drug election," says documentary filmmaker Nettie
Wild, the woman who helped set the agenda.

Wild is co-producer and director of Fix: The Story of An Addicted City. She
travelled to Ottawa last week to screen the film before parliamentarians
and key staff, hoping to "turn up the heat" on the tepid federal commitment
to a national drug strategy.

The issue is at full boil in Vancouver, due in part to Fix, and to public
revulsion at the scores of drug-addicted women who've been murdered or gone
missing from the neighbourhood. Wild's unblinking and beautifully rendered
portrait of the carnage of injection drug use has been one of the
top-grossing movies at the Granville 7 Cinemas for almost a month.

It seems an unlikely success.

Why pay, when the real thing is just blocks away? But Fix is an unlikely
story, surprising no one more than Wild and her co-producer, Betsy Carson.

It began, Wild says, as a documentary about a quest by the Vancouver Area
Network of Drug Users, VANDU, to open safe injection sites staffed by
health professionals. It evolved into a love story.

Two love stories, really, and a revolution. Fix is the tale of two
mismatched outsiders: Dean Wilson, a tattooed, heroin-addicted ex-IBM
salesman and president of VANDU, and Ann Livingston, a non-drug-using,
church-going advocate for the organization. She attacks her role with
missionary zeal, part of her Christian duty to "stand in the most
uncomfortable place." The foil in this political set-piece was to be Mayor
Philip Owen, the ultimate insider -- a man of wealth, conservative values
and bumbling good cheer.

Yet, over two years of filming, Wild realized she was capturing a
tempestuous love affair between Livingston and Wilson, and the conversion
of Owen from agent of the status quo to hero of the downtrodden. He
championed at huge political cost his Four Pillar Approach as a "holistic
and compassionate" response to the city's intractable drug problems.

The first three pillars -- prevention, treatment and enforcement -- seem
obvious. The controversy comes from pillar four: harm reduction, including
the heretical notions of providing heroin and safe injection sites for
addicts. Wild has filmed revolution before in Mexico and the Philippines;
she came to realize she was a witnessing one at home.

True to form, this revolution devours its children.

The film records Wilson's continuing battle with heroin, to the anguish of
Livingston. As for Owen, 69, he told Maclean's last week that his drug
strategy cost him the support of his party, the conservative, pro-business
Non-Partisan Association, and any chance for another term. Yet, in a
perverse twist, the outcry over his ouster forced every serious mayoral
candidate to pledge fealty to Owen's strategy. "Isn't that interesting?" he
asks with a sardonic laugh.

Now unlikely partners Wild and Owen want a Canada-wide audience for Fix
(which received major funding from Rogers Media Inc., which owns
Maclean's). A shortened version will be broadcast on CTV next year. Owen,
through his political connections, has helped raise $100,000 toward a
national cinematic release.

He tells of a family friend, a 21-year-old woman who died this July after
an overdose in the Downtown Eastside. This is a national tragedy, he says.
His message to Ottawa is that it can't be ignored, as it was in Vancouver
for far too long.