"TERMINAL CITY": MICROCOSM OF DISLOCATION AND ADDICTION
Vancouver, British Columbia is located on the Pacific coast of Canada, in a temperate rainforest at the foot of the coastal mountains. About 6000-10,000 ragged junkies are currently disquieting the "downtown eastside" portion of Vancouver by buying, selling, and injecting cocaine and heroin, by panhandling aggressively, and by dying on the streets in record numbers. Between 1400 and 3000 of these junkies are HIV positive. Most are white, although the proportion of native Indians exceeds that in the general population. Compared to the more familiar picture of New York or Los Angeles, Vancouver's downtown eastside drug scene is less one of racial contrast and hot violence than one of homogeneous, sodden misery.
Spreading in every direction from the downtown focus of misery is a vast, doleful tapestry of less notorious, but often equally tragic forms of addiction. There are gambling addicts in the casinos, money and power addicts in the financial district, political junkies at city hall, computer geeks and workaholics in the universities, video game addicts in the arcades, skibums in the resorts, television addicts in the old age homes, alcoholics in the bars, food addicts on the exercise machines, love addicts in the bedrooms, religious fanatics on the farms, and on and on. Of course not everybody who engages in these activities is addicted, and some people who are addicted contribute creatively to art and business (e.g., Slater, 1998). Nonetheless, many Vancouverites are dangerously, miserably, and sometimes fatally addicted to one or more of these pursuits.
The notorious downtown junkies - the most publicized addicts in Canada - are not necessarily the most destructive ones. For example, some occupants of the country's boardrooms feed their own habits by ruinously exploiting natural resources, polluting the environment, misinforming the public and by directing the manufacture, sale, and use of modern weapons in third world countries. Severe addictions to power, money, and work motivate many of those who direct this destruction (Slater, 1980; Newman, 1991, chap. 17).
Vancouver's history of dislocation
Although justly admired for its beauty and civility, Vancouver is also, more than most, a city of dislocation. From the arrival of the first English settlers to the area in 1862, the space for urban sprawl was acquired by evicting Indians of the Coast Salish language group from nearly 100 villages around Burrard Inlet and False Creek. The Indians' hunting and ceremonial lands, sites of communal houses, totem poles, and food, became valuable "waterfront property" almost overnight and many of their ancient cultural practices were outlawed or mocked to extinction (Pethick, 1984). Many of these dislocated Indians' descendants populate the downtown eastside, and their ghosts continue to haunt the land's new owners.
In 1862, two decades before the city of Vancouver was founded, the first lumber mill began producing high quality lumber for Europe, South America, and Asia. The first saloon appeared in 1867, the first Indian reserve in 1869, and the first official attempt to restrict operating hours of saloons in 1873.
From its beginning until the present, Vancouver has been the landing point in Canada for a huge eastward migration of displaced east and south Asians, accelerating in the 1880s as shiploads of single Chinese men were imported en masse to labour on the railroad and in the coal mines (Pethick, 1984). Asians, although always a substantial portion of the city's population, were treated as aliens from its beginning through the second world war, during which the entire Japanese-Canadian population was stripped of its property and scattered into internment camps.
With the completion of Canada's first transcontinental railway in 1886, Vancouver also became the terminus for the westward migration of European people in Canada - Most of those who have landed here came direct from Europe or migrated one or more times through eastern Canada. Even today, it is a commonplace observation that the majority of people who live in Vancouver were born elsewhere. Vancouver was nicknamed "Terminal City" shortly after the railway was completed, and the name stuck.
The city of Vancouver was incorporated and given its present name in 1886, just over a century ago. Sparked by completion of the railway in that same year, the scattered farms, mills, and shanties exploded into urbanity. Speculators rushed to buy land, the first newspaper was established, an urban water system was planned, the first eastbound shipload of merchandise, 1,000,000 pounds of tea from China, arrived in the port and was loaded on railway cars for shipment. Markets were free and growth was unstoppable - the entire city of 400 wooden buildings burnt to the ground with some loss of life, but it was resurveyed and mostly rebuilt, including a new city hall, electric street lights, and a roller skating rink - all in the year 1886 (Pethick, 1984).
Today, Vancouver is a prosperous and beautiful city. It has never known invasion, bombing, revolution, famine, or plague. Although it felt the full force of the economic depression of the 1930's, it has been only been lightly brushed by industrial blight, class struggle, poverty, slums, and organized crime (McDonald and Barman, 1986). Vancouverites' complaints tend to target the provincial government and long rainy season, although it is generally conceded that the government is well intentioned and the climate is the most temperate in Canada. A Canadian nickname for British Columbia is "Lotusland".
However, whereas dislocation is a commonplace in modern cities, Vancouver's is extreme. Populated by diverse immigrants, Vancouver's values and institutions did not grow from a surrounding peasant culture, common religion, or single language. There has been too little time for extended families or clans to become important. Its predominant occupations - logging, fishing, and mining - separated working men from their families for months on end. Vancouver might, in time, have developed a unique cultural fusion as did New York and Boston, but its nascent culture seems to have been smothered in its infancy by American movies, music, figures of speech, textbooks, magazines, experts, computers, professional sports, fast food, spelling, and television. People from all over the world have come to Vancouver to join Canadian culture, but have instead found themselves part of an unstructured melange.
Dislocation and addiction
If dislocation is the precursor of addiction, "Terminal City" should be "Addiction City", despite all its good fortune. Alcohol and drug statistics suggest that it is. Vancouver has long been Canada's most drug addicted city, and British Columbia its most drug addicted province, with respect to annual per capita consumption of alcohol, death rate attributed to alcohol, prevalence of alcoholism, death rate due to heroin and cocaine overdose, availability of heroin and cocaine, self reported use of all illicit drugs, arrest rates for drug crimes, etc. This is so currently (Juristat: Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, 1999) and has been so throughout the 20th century (Murphy, 1922/ 1973). Heroin statistics provide the most notorious example. British Columbia is one of 10 provinces and 3 territories in Canada, yet 61% of all heroin arrests in Canada in the most recent year available, 1997, were in British Columbia.
Addictions that do not involve alcohol and drugs are much more common in Vancouver than is drug addiction (Alexander and Schweighofer, 1988). Unfortunately, it is as yet impossible to compare their prevalence with that of other places.
This historical case study suggests two generalizations. First, that the so-called "drug problem" is merely a special case of the diverse addictions of the larger society, most of which are not drug addictions. Second, that addiction is a way of adapting to dislocation. I have elsewhere reviewed experimental and clinical support for these generalizations (Alexander, 1990; 1994). This article reviews historical evidence concerning how and why these problems are endemic in free-market society.