The Four Pillars Revisisted

Bud Osborne was the unofficial poet of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, and he said a ‘genocide’ was happening to his neighbourhood. Soaring HIV, Hep C, and overdose rates killed 100s of people each year throughout the 1990s. He convinced the then-mayor Larry Campbell that opening up a supervised injection site would be a good idea. And, a few months after becoming mayor, Campbell oversaw the opening of Insite–North America’s first state-sanctioned supervised injection site.

Researchers and public health officials call this ‘harm reduction.’ It’s a simple idea, but it profoundly transformed the way Vancouver looks at people who are drug dependent; they are not criminals that ought to be punished, but patients that ought to be treated.

In Vancouver, these ideas are found in an 85-page document called The Four Pillars. Passed in 2001, it included 36 recommendations for a more progressive way to deal with Vancouver’s drug crisis. It was the most bold drug policy of any city in North America.

Where do those four pillars stand today? Some of the people who helped erect them fear the city may be failing to maintain what’s been built. This is a 5-part series that will investigate each of the pillars – prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. Hide full description

Bud Osborne was the unofficial poet of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, and he said a ‘genocide’ was happening to his neighbourhood. Soaring HIV, Hep C, and overdose rates killed 100s of people each year throughout the 1990s. He convinced the then-mayor Larry Campbell that opening up a supervised injection site would be a good idea. And, a few months after becoming mayor, Campbell oversaw the opening of Insite–North America’s first state-sanctioned supervised injection site. Researchers and public health officials call this ‘harm reduction.’ It’s a simple idea, but it profoundly transformed the way Vancouver looks at people who are drug dependent; they are not criminals that ought to be punished, but patients that ought to be treated. In Vancouver, these ideas are found in an 85-page... Show full description