Raise Shit!

Social Action Saving Lives

Susan C. Boyd, Donald MacPherson, Bud Osborn

This book tells a story about community activism in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DTES) that culmi-nated in a social justice movement to open the first official safe injection site. This story is unique: it is told from the point of view of drug users — those most affected by drug policy, political decisions and policing. It provides a montage of poetry, photos, early Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) meetings, journal entries from the Back Alley, the “unofficial” safe injection site, and excerpts from significant health and media reports. The harms of prohibition, and resistance, hope, kindness, awakening and collective action are chronicled in these pages.

raise shit
 
we have become a community of prophets in the downtown eastside
rebuking the system
and speaking hope and possibility into situations
of apparent impossibility
 
to raise shit is to actively resist
and we resist with our presence
with our words
with our love
with our courage
 
by Bud Osborn
 

About the Authors

Susan Boyd, PhD, is Associate Professor in Studies in Policy and Practice and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia, University of Victoria. She is the author of From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy (2004) and Mothers and Illicit Drugs: Transcending the Myths (1999). She has published work in a number of scientific journals, and her academic background is augmented by her outreach work and community activism working with harm-reduction and anti-drugwar groups.

Donald MacPherson is the former Drug Policy Coordinator for the City of Vancouver. He has been active for many years working on social justice issues that both strengthen and sustain the community in DTES.
 

Poet Bud Osborn is a founding member of VANDU. He has been active for many years working on social justice issues that both strengthen and sustain the community in the DTES.

Excerpt

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