Fighting for Space Page 2
“Let’s go down and hold signs on Cherry and Summit,” one of the guys suggested. Cherry and Summit is a busy intersection in Toledo where panhandlers sometimes congregate. The idea was to break the stereotype of a heroin addict as an unwashed homeless person standing on the side of the road asking drivers for drug money. Toledo is part of America’s Rust Belt. The region was devastated by North America’s loss of factory jobs. Then, in the early 2000s, prescription opioids swept into town. Heroin followed shortly after. In Toledo—and right across North America—addiction was a disease affecting families. Team Recovery wanted families to be able to talk about it. Just like the homeless addict people imagine when they think of heroin, Bell and the guys decided they would go down to the intersection of Cherry and Summit and hold cardboard signs. But instead of asking for money, they would give it away.
“Honk if you hate heroin,” one of their signs read. “Heroin’s killing our town,” read another. And a third, “We used to take, now we give.”
Into the hand of each driver who stopped to chat for a second, they placed a one-dollar bill. “Completely flipping the stereotype,” Bell explains.
People loved it.
Just about everyone who drove by Team Recovery that day knew someone who was struggling with an addiction. Many had already lost someone. Stigma prevented them from talking about it, Bell remembers thinking, but everyone knew what was going on.
The guys had created a Team Recovery Facebook page a few days earlier. It only had twelve followers, but nobody cared. It was just an inside joke and an easy way for the guys to stay in touch. If it spread a little awareness about addiction and recovery, that was a bonus. The evening after they’d taken signs down to Cherry and Summit, Bell uploaded a few photos to the Facebook page. The next morning, when he woke up and logged online, the pictures of the guys and their “Honk if you hate heroin” signs had more than 200,000 likes. In February 2016, Team Recovery decided it wanted to organize something bigger.
After they put the word out on social media, more than a thousand people gathered in the parking lot outside Zepf Recovery House one chilly afternoon. There was free food, coffee, and hot chocolate for kids. It was a family event. They had a bouncy castle and face-painting stations. On a small stage, politicians, police officers, and recovering addicts spoke about a need to break the stigma around drug use in Toledo.
A journalist with a local newspaper reported that the head of the Toledo Police Department was there that afternoon and stood on the stage to say that it was time Ohio take a new approach to addiction. “Chief Kral called the heroin addiction a ‘public health crisis’ and said, although it might seem counter-intuitive to some, the police department is ‘moving away from putting everyone in jail to putting the right people in jail,’” the article reads.9
From Zepf Recovery House, the crowd marched down Collingwood Boulevard, making a public call for government action on Ohio’s overdose epidemic.
The city had never seen anything like it, Bell remembers. Toledo is a conservative town, and people seldom spoke publically about a friend or family member’s drug problem. If somebody died of an overdose, that was never mentioned in the obituary. The February 2016 rally began to change that.
Team Recovery grew from there. They established a twenty-four-hour hotline for help accessing treatment services as well as for people who called just to talk. They launched an education and prevention campaign, visiting more than fifty high schools and speaking with more than 27,000 students in the first year. Team Recovery now holds twice-weekly support groups for the families and friends of people who are struggling with an addiction or who have lost someone to drugs.
In mid-2016, Team Recovery partnered with Ohio Mental Health and Addiction Services to teach overdose response. Its family-support groups usually meet at a church, and at the end of those meetings, attendees can stick around to learn how to use naloxone (the generic name for Narcan), a prescription drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose.
“In Lucas County, we’ve put out more Narcan than the health department, all pharmacies, and every other facility combined,” Bell says. “And it’s confirmed that some of these kits have saved lives.”
Bell won’t call it harm reduction. He emphasizes that Team Recovery focuses on abstinence-based treatment. They don’t even encourage widely accepted opioid-substitution therapies such as methadone.
“We realize that everybody has their own path, but the way that we got clean and sober was through twelve steps,” he says. “Harm reduction is not our purpose. Yes, it will stop the spread of disease and it will stop people from sharing syringes and all that stuff, but we think that getting somebody clean and sober will stop those things too. I can’t actually support any kind of needle exchange,” Bell continues. “I just can’t wrap my head around it. I get that it works in other places and I know the data behind it … but that’s just not in our mission. In Ohio, it would never happen.”
Few people involved in that February 2016 march down Collingwood Boulevard had ever heard the name Bud Osborn. Bell concedes that he never had. Osborn grew up in Toledo. Many years later, in Vancouver, Canada, Osborn was a key figure in a grassroots movement of drug users who transformed how Canada responds to addiction. He helped pioneer North America’s first harm-reduction programs, expanding needle exchange and eventually establishing the continent’s first supervised-injection site.
Some thirty years before Team Recovery existed, Osborn arrived in Vancouver, in a rundown part of the city called the Downtown Eastside.
5Statistics throughout the book for drug-overdose deaths in the United States up to 2015 are sourced to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html
6“Ohio Had More Than 4,000 Overdose Deaths in 2016,” The Associated Press, May 28, 2017.
7Jacob Soboroff, Mitch Koss, Aarne Heikkila, “‘Mass-Casualty Event’: Ohio County Now Tops U.S. in Overdose Deaths,” NBC News, June 19, 2017.
8Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever,” New York Times, June 5, 2017.
9Taylor Dungjen, “Ohioans Rally against Heroin Abuse,” The Blade, February 26, 2016.
Chapter 2
Hundred Block Rock
Walton Homer Osborn Junior was born on August 4, 1947 in Battle Creek, Michigan. But he discarded the name at a very young age.
“I was terrified of that name,” Osborn recalled. “I had been told—and this really screwed me up, this was, I think, the worst thing you could do to a child—I was told that I never knew my father, that he died in the war. The thing is, because I had memories—actually memories of him, yet I was told I never knew him—I thought there was something wrong with me. Something really wrong with me, mentally, and my perception of reality.”
When Osborn was still just a little boy, his family moved to a rough part of Toledo, Ohio. “A white trash neighbourhood,” as he described it. “These little kids in the alley asked, ‘What’s your name?’ And I said, ‘Robert,’ or something. And one little kid said, ‘No it’s not. It’s Bud.’ And so I insisted, from then on, on being called Bud.”
Bud Osborn passed away on May 6, 2014, at the age of sixty-six. Just before he died, he was hospitalized for pneumonia and a heart condition. But the larger cause of his death was simply living a very hard life.
The last lengthy interview that Osborn gave was in September 2012, to a British journalist named Johann Hari. Hari wrote a book about the war on drugs called Chasing the Scream and, in researching that book, spent hours with Osborn at his home in the Downtown Eastside. Hari shared the tapes of those conversations.
Osborn’s father, Walton, fought in World War II, flying a fighter plane for the United States Air Force. He was shot down over Austria, captured by the Nazis, and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Walton’s legs were badly injured in the crash and while he never spoke of the experience to Osborn, there’s little doubt that his imprisonment was a traumatic o
rdeal from which he never recovered.
“When I was three, my father hanged himself in jail,” Osborn said. One night, while on a bender, Walton had tried to throw himself out of a window. Police showed up and took him to the Toledo jail to sleep it off. “He was taken there for safe-keeping, ironically,” Osborn said. “While he was there, he tore his coat into strips, tied it to the grating, and hanged himself.”
Later that week, the newspaper where Osborn’s father once worked published a lengthy and bizarre account of events leading up to the suicide. Osborn’s mother, Patricia, had been having an affair, and the newspaper shared private parts of her life in detail and explicitly blamed her for Walton’s death. “These are the consequences of violating the morals of the community,” the article reads, alongside a large photograph of Osborn’s mother.
“After that, she began running,” Osborn said. Patricia fled Toledo and the gossip and accusations that tormented her there. “She ran mainly to bars. She was either working in bars or hung out in them. So bars felt more like home to me than anywhere I’d ever lived.”
As a child, Osborn regarded one person as a refuge: his grandmother. She was shot and killed by his aunt, who then turned the gun on herself.
Osborn recalled that his mother regularly brought men home to whatever trailer or small room they were renting at the time. “Really brutal drunken people,” Osborn said. She would sleep with them and some would beat her. “I saw her raped right in front of me when I was four,” Osborn continued. “I ran after [the man], and he just flicked me away,” Osborn said. “I mean, he was a really big guy. Certainly, to me, he was really big. And then I went after him again, and he really hit me hard. This time I hit the wall. My mother just screamed, ‘Stay there! Stay there.’ And it was a one-room place, so I just tried not to feel, to not be aware.” Osborn described the experience as “evil stabbing me.”
“I vowed I would never again be intimate with another human being,” he said.
Osborn was made acutely aware of pain and death at a very young age. One year after Osborn witnessed his mother being raped, he made his first attempt to kill himself.
“We had moved to some other place, and it had a really high porch on it,” Osborn began. “I just hated the life I was living, the way it was. I mean, all those men, moving all the time, all the violence, all the trouble and everything.” He hurled his little body off the porch and angled himself so that his head came down first, connecting with a large rock on the ground below. Osborn managed to crack open his skull.
As he got a little older, his mother began to routinely disappear on him. “That my father left one day and never came back, and my mother was always leaving—she’d say, ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ and wouldn’t come back for a few days—I thought, ‘Well, the reason these people, my parents, aren’t with me is because there is something really wrong with me.’”
It was a coping mechanism. If he wasn’t the cause of his parents’ abandonment—if it wasn’t he who had driven his father to suicide and led his mother to leave—that would mean he didn’t matter at all, that he was totally worthless, as if he didn’t even exist. It was better to think that, although he was only five years old, he’d done something to make them leave.
“I hated myself,” he remembered.
Throughout his teenage years, Osborn remained extremely depressed but was able to channel all that negative energy into an obsession with sports. He would walk to a public basketball court in Toledo and shoot hoops there by himself for hours on end, running to one end of the court and back to the other. “It was like a trance,” he said. Then, in his final year of high school, Osborn discovered alcohol.
“I drank for oblivion. I knew, if I drank enough, it would just knock me out.” He spent the better part of a decade that way, some years intermittently attending AA meetings but often drunk for years on end. He drifted from one town to the next, aimless and depressed. One Christmas, when he was thirty-five, Osborn was back in Toledo, staying with his sister. “I had totally bottomed out,” he said.
On Christmas Day, he got drunk. “I fuelled myself on alcohol.” Then he took his car out for a drive. “I didn’t want anybody else to be around, I didn’t want to hurt anybody.” On the expressway that runs through Toledo, Osborn got his speedometer up to sixty or seventy miles an hour and then steered the vehicle straight into a concrete barrier. “The last thought I had before hitting that wall was, ‘I’m dead now,’” he said.
For some people who have attempted suicide, waking up in a hospital room feels like a new life, a second chance. For others, it’s the ultimate defeat and the resumption of a nightmare. When Osborn regained consciousness, there was “a surgeon picking glass out of my face. And I thought, ‘Oh no.’”
After alcohol came heroin. “I felt that I didn’t want to kill myself anymore,” Osborn said about his first time injecting the drug. “It made me feel like I wanted to be alive, as long as I could get more heroin. And also, poetry. Poetry helped keep me alive.”
Osborn had begun to read the works of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and their late-nineteenth century contemporaries. “I saw their lives were a total mess and that they used drugs and all that,” he said. “But what they gave me was a reason to live another hour, another day, another week, another something. I decided that this is maybe something I could do. Because I’m so totally fucked up and they’re so totally fucked up. But they were able to do something that actually gives something.”
Osborn purchased used collections of these writers’ poetry and cut individual lines into tiny little pieces. Then he would eat them. It was an attempt to bring the greatness and the comfort he found in those words inside himself.
“What I wanted to do was help someone in that way,” Osborn said. “I mean, to really connect deeply in their pain, in their suffering, the same way these poets did with me.”
The state had other plans. Osborn had been drafted to fight the war in Vietnam. “There was certainly no way I was going to go somewhere and learn how to kill people,” he said. “I was just adamantly opposed to it.” He drove to the nearest draft office, proceeded to the first clerk he saw, and told her: “I don’t accept your authority over me.”
For years, the military’s draft cards continued to find him, somehow arriving in the mail wherever Osborn laid his head. Eventually, Osborn was indicted by a federal grand jury and fled to Canada. After a few years in Toronto, he ended up in Vancouver, in the Downtown Eastside. It was 1986, and the neighbourhood was flush with potent China white heroin.
“[A]fter the board of directors meeting at the carnegie community centre I walk outside the theatre where the meeting was held to the balcony overlooking an alley to smoke a cigarette,” Osborn wrote of one early memory from Vancouver.
in the alley I see a man methodically going through the trash in an overflowing dumpster and it reminds me of men I’ve seen panning for gold in rock creek
I see empty syringe packages floating or sunken in dark and dirty pools of water and I see a pink blouse in a heap and drug addicts scurrying to fix and I hear shouts and screams and curses and sirens blaring
and I see a woman wearing a sleeveless white blouse with large purple polka dots and a short white skirt with blue stripes
she’s barefoot and has a multitude of bruises up and down her legs and black needle marks on the backs of her knees like a swarm of ants feasting on something sweet
and there are needle tracks on her arms and on her jugular vein and she has open cuts and scratches and a white gauze bandage around one wrist the bandaging of a kind I’ve known to cover stitched and slashed wrists. for even china white can’t quiet the flashbacks united from a childhood of rape and beatings and abandonment so common down here.10
East Hastings Street running through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Photo: Amanda Siebert
Osborn felt at home like he never had before. He was still chronically depressed, self-destructive, and n
ow wired for a heroin addiction. But he was home.
To an outsider, the Downtown Eastside can be a difficult place to describe. It’s not scary, if you know it, but it can look scary if you don’t.
It’s crowded and noisy. Through the Downtown Eastside runs East Hastings Street, Vancouver’s skid row. Sidewalks on either side of Hastings are wide but still congested until late at night. Street vendors lean against buildings with blankets set out before them and used goods displayed for sale. People injecting drugs or smoking crack don’t hide it here. Dealers similarly operate in the open. The neighbourhood hosts a large homeless population, many of whom struggle with a mental illness. Vancouver is one of the only major cities in Canada that seldom receives snow in the winter, and so a disproportionate number of the country’s down-and-out end up here, in decrepit hotels, hectic shelters, or on the street. There’s the occasional person wandering in nothing but a hospital gown, and young men wearing the gray sweats and white sneakers that the prison system gives inmates upon release. The alleys buzz with just as much activity, but with a gritty subculture to them. It’s chaotic, but embedded in the commotion is a strong community. There is crime and bad things happen here. But if a woman is alone and crying on the street, another woman doesn’t have to know her before she’ll offer a hug. People look out for each other. The bodegas give short lines of credit to those who can be trusted with it. Most people don’t have much, but they share what they can. It feels like everyone knows everyone. The Downtown Eastside is a place where you can’t walk far before bumping into a friend with whom you’ll stop to chat.
Osborn was thirty-nine years old when he moved into the neighbourhood. He was dramatically good looking but worn from a hard life and the last decade spent using drugs in New York City and Toronto. He had brown hair cut just above his shoulders that he wore unkempt, letting it flow in the wind, and usually dressed in faded blue jeans and a loose button-up shirt.