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25 Reasons to Love Vancouver

COVER ILLUSTRATION: JENNIFER TAPIAS DERCH; WHITECAPS: DUNCAN NICOL; GROUSE MOUNTAIN: EVA AN KHERA J; MAK N MING: ANDREW QUERNER .

Our affable soccer hooligans. Our burgeoning vegan district. Our bureaucracy-defying help for addicts. Here’s why we’re crushing on this spectacular city right now.

The Fixer Dr. Evan Wood has a controversial idea for treating the fentanyl crisis—fight drugs with drugs. Are we ready for his radical plan?

City 17 At Issue When vigilante justice goes awry, who’s there to watch the self-appointed watchmen? 20 Snapshot Up atop snow-covered Grouse Mountain, it’s a winter wonderland.

Taste 23 The Dish The dumpling that’s the epitome of luxury. 24 Reviews Mak N Ming brings wild ambition to quiet Yew Street. 26 Moveable Feast Victoria Drive is the city’s undiscovered foodie gem.

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49 Gift Guide The best locally sourced goodies and gadgets for everyone on your holiday shopping list.

58 City Informer Our intrepid reporter answers that age-old question: just who is the voice of the SkyTrain?

VA N M A G . C O M N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7

General Manager | Publisher Dee Dhaliwal Editorial Director Anicka Quin Art Director Paul Roelofs Executive Editor Stacey McLachlan Senior Editor Jessica Barrett Food Editor Neal McLennan Associate Art Director Natalie Gagnon Associate Editor Julia Dilworth Assistant Art Director Jenny Reed Staff Writer Kaitlyn Gendemann Videographer Mark Philps Contributing Editors Frances Bula, Amanda Ross Editorial Interns Jessie Blair, Stephanie Mitchell, Alicia Neptune, Vincent Plana Art Intern Lydhia-Marie Bolduc-Gosselin Editorial Email mail@vanmag.com Account Managers Judy Johnson, Jenny Miller, Manon Paradis Sales Coordinator Theresa Tran Production Manager Lee Tidsbury Advertising Designer Swin Nung Chai Marketing & Events Manager Dale McCarthy Event Coordinator Kaitlyn Lush Marketing Assistant Rachel Cheng Sales Email t.tran@vanmag.com Vancouver Office 3rd Floor, 2025 Willigdon Avenue Burnaby, B.C. V5C 0J3, 604-877-7732 National Media Sales Representation, Mediative Senior Account Manager, National Sales Ian Lederer, 416-626-4258, ian.lederer@mediative.com U.S. Sales Representation, Media-Corps 1-866-744-9890, info@media-corps.com Yellow Pages Digital and Media Solutions Ltd. Vice-President & Chief Publishing Officer Caroline Andrews

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Certain people can make a city great.

WHEN SOME FRIENDS and I first heard the sounds of ’90s rock and followed the music up and into the Comox Long Bar—a live band was playing a ridiculously wide range of genres and eras—I couldn’t have known that this out-of-the-way place would become a regular haunt of ours. For one, it’s above the intersection of Comox and Denman, and, like most Vancouverites, I rarely leave street level nor notice anything above it. (RIP, every restaurant that tested its fate at Denman and Barclay.) But a lack of pretense about the place and the draw of Friday-night karaoke kept bringing us back—that, and one particular server who has an uncanny ability to remember each of our drink orders week after week, along with little details about what’s going on in our lives. “How did that wedding go last weekend in Strathcona?” she might ask, or “How’s your redneck cousin doing?” She’s also charmingly blunt. When the team at VanMag started thinking about this month’s story, “25 Reasons to Love Vancouver” (page 29), we knew there would be bigger moments on the list: a changing, starchitecture-filled skyline, Chinatown’s evolution into a vegan hot spot, the launch of Indigenous Fashion Week. But we wanted to highlight some of the people who are lighting up the city’s smaller corners, too—and who are making a big impact in their own part of the neighbourhood. And that’s where our server, Mary-Lynne MacGowan, comes in. When I first learned that the Comox was closing this fall, I asked her where she was heading next—thinking that where she went, we would likely follow and make that our new favourite spot in the city. “I’m not sure,” she replied. “I’m 63 years old.” And when I stammered out my disbelief, she said, “Honey, I’ve been working here since 1984.” For 33 years, Mary-Lynne has been at the Comox, cracking up patrons and charming celebrities. “I got to be buddies with Farrah Fawcett,” she told me. “I knew she had the affair before it came out.” She’s poured drinks for Norm from Cheers, Kenny Rogers and John Travolta. And she’s got a hand-written note from Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, lamenting that he missed seeing her at the bar. But she’s best at remembering the regulars who crowd her pub on any given night and making them feel at home. If it’s the people who make a city great, then it’s great people like her who can make a Friday night in a never-renovated, four-decades-old beer joint feel like the best place in the world to be.

Coming Up Next Issue Power 50 It’s our annual deep dive into who runs this city, from the developers changing our city skyline to the politicians who affect just how livable this city is to the activists whose hawk eyes ensure that said politicians are making the right moves for Vancouverites. Taste Test: Holiday Edition You may not love fruitcake (it’s fair to say I’m the only one on our team with any kind of love for dried fruit), but stollen manages to cross cultural boundaries as a beloved holiday treat. We’re discovering the best in the city.

On the Web Our New Pot Columnist! Piper Courtenay joins us every other week to share some of her favourites from the dispensaries around town, breaking down the CBD-to-THC ratios, the effects of sativa versus indica strains, and which bud works best for a baseball game.

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PORTRAIT: EVA AN KHERA J; ST YLING BY LUISA RINO, MAKEUP BY MEL ANIE NEUFELD; CLOTHING COURTESY HOLT RENFREW, HOLTRENFREW.COM. STOLLEN: ARIANA GILLRIE.

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AT ISSUE

Catching the Creep Catchers The vigilante groups who wage war against suspected sexual predators often miss their mark—and one B.C. man is out to expose the collateral damage they cause. BY

Jackson Weaver

SEAN SMITH is no longer surprised by the emails. Over the past year they’ve increased in frequency, and these days the educational consultant from Campbell River is up to about four a month. Each message is a plea for help from someone about to be publicly accused of a horrific crime—not by police, but by vigilante groups bent on ridding the internet of would-be sexual predators. It might seem an admirable goal, save for the fact that not everyone the groups target with their high-profile “sting” operations—posing as underage teens on dating sites, arranging public meetings, then posting videos of the confrontation on their websites—has criminal intentions. Though popular with supporters j

VA N M A G . C O M N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7

City

AT I S S U E

online, these public humiliation campaigns rarely lead to arrest and conviction. More often than not, they simply result in ruined lives, tarnished reputations and, in extreme cases, thwarted investigations by actual law enforcement. For Smith, that puts these vigilante groups squarely in the wrong. “You know, I just received an email,” he says, interrupting himself as we speak. “‘Hello sir. I’m a recent victim of entrapment by SCC; please advise me on what I should do to stop them from publicizing the video. What lawyer would you suggest I use?’” While so-called “creep catcher” groups have sprung up across the Lower Mainland and Canada in recent years, the Surrey Creep Catchers, or SCC, have achieved a particular level of infamy. President Ryan Laforge is facing at least two defamation suits (one from Smith after Laforge accused him of pedophilia for criticizing the group), as well as a handful of assault charges stemming from the SCC’s entrapment schemes. Meanwhile, an investigation by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) found the SCC violated the privacy of two men it targeted who arranged to meet what they thought was an underage girl. In July, the OIPC ordered the group to remove videos and chat logs pertaining to the men from its website, but Laforge, who did not respond to an interview request, has publicly said he has no intention of complying. It’s this disregard for the rule of law, as well as the perversion of a central tenet of our justice system—innocent until proven guilty—that really gets Smith. That, and how the tactics employed by these catchers—“false accusations, incitement of a mob, using social media for shaming” (Smith rattles these off like bullet points from a lesson plan)—are the antithesis of what

VA N M A G . C O M N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7

think is a “creep” isn’t enough, he says, noting vigilantes have nowhere near the training necessary to collect evidence that can stand up in court. MacFarlane’s career saw him attend myriad conferences, lectures and seminars in order to properly investigate suspected predators, and a single wrong step—appearing to initiate sexual talk, revealing his “age” in the wrong way or at the wrong time—could nullify months of work. “All of your chat logs you have to present to court,” he explains. “And they go through those with a fine-toothed comb.” On top of that, Toronto sex specialearlier this year after hoping to meet ist Dr. James Cantor argues creep catcher groups only reinforce a hystea girlfriend on a dating app, an Edria surrounding pedophilia that does monton woman—herself a victim of child abuse—committed suicide over more to increase victimization than fallout from a creep catcher confron- mitigate it. Therapists are required to report a client to police only if a child tation in late 2016, and a man under is in danger, Cantor explains, but investigation by actual police fled to Winnipeg after being “busted” by an they often report anyone who admits to harbouring these attractions. As Alberta creep catcher group. There a result, many pedophiles don’t feel he was charged with molesting two they can seek help from mental health children, but police said he could professionals without risking legal have been arrested sooner had the repercussions, and the mentality of creep catchers not gotten to him demonization, evinced in the extreme first. The callous disregard for the by creep catchers, drives those indiimpact of their actions has Smith viduals deeper underground until convinced these vigilante groups have confused justice for something they do offend. “It’s like we’re daring them to do it,” he says. more akin to reality TV. So how do you stop vigilante “It’s got absolutely nothing to do groups that seem immune to legal with the greater good of stopping injunctions or public criticism? child predation. It has everything to Smith has made it a personal mission do with ‘How famous can I get for doing this thing?’” he says. “That should to fight back with facts. His website, be enough to tell the public they don’t Truth About Creep Catchers, is a detailed repository of police stats on want these people out there protectsuccessful arrests of suspected preding them from the bad guys.” ators, as well as the failings of vigiAnd yet, the groups have ardent lante catches to stand up in court. It’s supporters who view the catchers as heroes, doing vital work they perceive also a place for Smith to engage with creep catcher supporters and, most police either can’t or won’t do. importantly, to show that he, for one, But Mike MacFarlane, a retired Vancouver police officer who spent his won’t be shamed into silence. “I’m not going anywhere,” he career posing as a little girl in adult chat rooms, says creep catchers don’t says. “I’m going to be their worst goddamn nightmare.” help. Simply finding someone you

he teaches children in school workshops on safe and responsible use of social media. It’s his job to explain how damage done online can have devastating implications in the real world—and the human toll exacted by the catcher groups provides plenty of proof: a 21-year-old mentally disabled Burnaby man was fired from his job

These vigilante groups have confused justice for reality TV.

THE BEST OF VANCOUVER ALL ONLINE Daily stories that connect you to the best of our city. Fresh, exclusive insight that resonates locally. Plus the Vancouver Restaurant Guide, with 1,000+ authoritative reviews that you’ve come to expect from your city magazine—as gorgeous on your phone as it is on desktop. But that’s just the beginning. See more at VanMag.com— your playbook for our playground.

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Winter Magic

Grouse Mountain in the summer may be synonymous with the heart-pounding Grouse Grind (hello, nature’s StairMaster). But in the winter the alpine resort hosts a much more tranquil scene. Trail runners and sports drinks get swapped for ice skates and hot chocolate as we warm up to the Peak of Christmas. as told to photos by

Dominika Lirette Evaan Kheraj

1. There’s a steady line of kids waiting for Santa’s helpers to bring them into the workshop. But many are just as happy to log some ice time in the sunshine while they wait for their audience with the big man himself. 2. Aldert White is having a great time exploring Vancouver on his holiday from England. “The people are so welcoming and pleased to see you,” he says. But that’s not the only thing that’s left an impression. “The scenery combined with the weather is just breathtaking.” 3. Wes Gordon and son Matthew are visiting the Peak of Christmas for the second time, and they plan to return. “I think it’s turned into a tradition,” says Wes. “He’s having a blast, so that’s the most important thing.” 4. Leonardo and his family recently moved to Vancouver from Brazil, and the twin girls are loving their first white

Christmas. Fresh from sliding down the hill on snow carpets, the girls say, “It was fun and it was fast!” 5. David Megahy has been a professional Santa for about 20 years. He first wore the suit to hand out gifts to children for the food bank. Back then his beard was fake, but these days Megahy’s take on Santa is all natural. “As time went on my hair went white, and then I realized my beard was white, too. So, I just thought I would become Santa.”

6. Ying Pian’s first time on the ice came with some trepidation: “I’m excited. I’m nervous.” Fouryear-old daughter Melanie, however, has had a little more practice—this is her fourth time skating. 7. A gingerbread village casts Christmas cheer atop Grouse. The candycoated houses are all sponsored in support of SOS Children’s Villages,

4 20

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which provides safe homes for orphaned and abandoned kids around the world. Visitors can cast a ballot for their favourite house in person or online. 8. Wildlife ranger Kevin Langford thinks the reindeer have it pretty good. “They’re here really to rest up before the big night. And then they’re going to come back here afterwards as well so they can rest after their work on Christmas Eve. They’ll be with us until just the beginning of the new year.”

9. Santa’s reindeer, Dancer and Vixen, usually get along quite well, except when it comes to feeding time. “Dancer is kind of the more dominant one. She likes to push Vixen off the food,” says ranger Langford. “So there’s a little bit of competition there.”

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Taste

THE DISH

BRING ON THE LUXE OH BOY, WHERE TO BEGIN? At its heart we have a restaurant that’s aiming to take our city’s beloved Cantonese cuisine and give it some much needed elevation in both its ingredients and in the surroundings it’s served in. So you get a Shanghai soup dumpling spiked with sweet-and-sour broth and Iberico ham served in a room that looks like

a 1930s movie set. Or the above: a siu mai like no other, with that same pricey Iberico minced with organic prawn and wrapped around a barely cooked quail egg. And topped with a flourish of black truffle. If the Trump tower’s namesake were to call it “terrific,” it would be the truth. Mott 32, 1161 W Georgia St., vancouver.mott32.com

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Not fettucine, but cooked egg cut in ribbons

Chef Makoto Ono Sommelier Roger Maniwa

IS MAK N MING VANCOUVER’S MOST AMBITIOUS RESTAURANT? by

Neal McLennan

photoGRaphs by

Andrew Querner

IF OUR CITY’S fine-dining scene had observed a gangland hit and needed to enter the witness protection program, there’d be worse places to hide out than on Kitsilano’s Yew Street. It’s an area where parking is non-existent and where most diners are more interested in the daily pint special than in an obscure Italian aperitivo that pairs well with a perfectly poached peach. But it’s here—right smack dab in the laid-back salty air— that chef Makoto Ono has opened the elegant Mak N Ming, a 26-seat ode to Michelin-style fine dining.

VA N M A G . C O M N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7

Ono has always been one of the country’s most talented, if perplexing, chefs. He shot to national acclaim in 2007 by winning Canada’s first Gold Medal Plates and, in true Ono style, he capitalized on his new fame by immediately leaving the country—first for Beijing and then Hong Kong. He returned to Vancouver in 2012 to open Pidgin, but the controversy around its location overshadowed the good work being done and he quietly ended his tenure there a few years back. There were rumours he had pulled a Daniel

Day-Lewis and become a fishmonger, but the actual reality is equally as surprising. To call his new restaurant a bold move would be an understatement: a bold move is charging for bread and butter or having a fully natural wine menu. A highconcept tasting menu in the middle of Vancouver’s most casual ’hood is bordering on performance art. His partners in the Mak N Ming act are Amanda Cheng (in charge of pastry) and the incomperable Roger Maniwa (he was this magazine’s Sommelier of the Year in 2016), who decamped from the cushy environs of Hawksworth to work in a space about the size of that esteemed restaurant’s coatroom. The interiors by Scott and Scott are elegant without looking like they’re trying too hard (clean-looking blond wood, bentwood chairs, honedmarble tables) and as airy as can be in less than 900 square feet. We start with a gratis glass of something creative and

Client: C|Prime / Size: 4.6” X 4.9” / CMYK / Vancouver Magazine

Taste

REVIEWS

seasonal and a menu so spare that it looks like E.E. Cummings wrote it. There are just two options: the four-course $54 demi menu (if you’re in the mood for Humboldt squid, rutabaga, seaweed) or the more expansive $78 seven-course chef’s menu (if it’s an abalone, cucumber, black garlic sort of day). Both are laser focused. There are no safe-harbour choices—like comforting pasta—sprinkled into the lineup and even a dish that sound straightforward—like chicken and rice—is in reality a highwire interpretation of Hainan classic that involves unorthodox techniques, in this case, slowpoaching a chicken breast and then being confident enough to serve it unadorned in all its whiteness with a scant scattering of wild rice and confit of chicken leg dotted like islands in a light broth. If you choose to go with Maniwa’s pairings ($43.50 for the chef’s menu), don’t expect Untitled-3 any softballs, either—sake and vermouth play key roles, and his compact list contains gems like a 1999 Chenin Blanc from Savennières (a steal at $142). Cheng’s desserts loosen the reins…a little. A summer peach pie is deconstructed, but the spot-on ingredients (a ripe Okanagan peach poached in cardamom and ginger and served with a pâte brisée crust and cold vanilla cream) can’t help but be an approachable crowd pleaser. By the time you read this, the menu will no doubt be different— one imagines Ono shuddering at having something as hokey as a “signature dish”—so what could one expect? “Perfection” seems a bit grandiose, but it’s fair to say you’ll find no team in town that, night in and night out, is striving to reach that lofty goal more so than the crew at Mak N Ming.

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Amy O’Brian Ariana Gillrie

photoGRaphs by

THE RESTAURANTS along Victoria Drive can be intimidating in their modesty. Absent are the slickly designed interiors with comehither appeal, and the culinary choices can be overwhelming— if not downright confusing. Immigrant influences abound in this neighbourhood, deep in the heart of East Van, barely touched by the gentrification that has reached Fraser and Main streets. Menus along this compact strip—between East 32nd and 36th avenues—run the international gamut, from traditional German goulash to Myanmarese chicken biryani. It’s hard to know what to try first.

Kalvin’s Szechuen

FROM THE WEST

Sandy La Amay’s House

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Deutsches Haus Adelitas

1 Deutsches Haus at the Vancouver Alpen Club (4875 Victoria Dr., vancouveralpenclub.ca) anchors the row at its north end. This long-standing institution has been serving up schnitzel, lager and its famous pork hock since 1935. The dining room in the gargantuan bunker-like building has plenty of wood and patterned carpet to lend it a vintage ski chalet feel, while the menu (printed in German and English) reads like a historical document for meat-and-potato lovers. Farther south, a sunny pair of Mexican restaurants offer soul-warming cheap eats that transport you straight to Sayulita or Oaxaca. 2 Adelitas (5178 Victoria Dr.) and 3 El Caracol Cafe (5190 Victoria Dr.) look similar from the sidewalk, but the latter—on the block since 2000—distinguishes itself by serving Salvadoran and Honduran

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dishes such as pupusas and sopa de res, as well as $4.99 huevos rancheros. Adelitas is a tad newer but has earned legions of devoted diners who rave about the tacos al pastor and chile rellenos. How to choose between the spots? Pick the one with an available table.

TO THE EAST Flavour-craving plant lovers flock to VanMag’s Bronze Award winner for best vegetarian, 4 Chau Veggie Express (5052 Victoria Dr., chowatchau.ca) for bright, clean Vietnamese-inspired dishes like the Midnight Swim bowl, Golden Temple soup and Namaste rolls. Vegans and those in conflict with gluten can also revel in the abundance of green-lit items, including sinful desserts like caramelized banana cheesecake and coconut vanilla bean

Kawa Sushi

tapioca. The room, like the food, is light and cheerful, while the service is smooth and efficient. Beware of lineups at peak times. A few doors south is 5 Amay’s House (5076 Victoria Dr., facebook.com/ amayshouse), which describes its menu as Burmese and Asian, and includes samosas, curries and pad Thai. Among the specialties are the rich and spicy chicken biryani, fermented tea-leaf salad and coconut curry laksa. On the same side of the street is 6 Kawa Sushi (5088 Victoria Dr., kawasushi .weebly.com), a small, bright spot that prides itself on serving wild salmon and creative rolls. A little farther, at the corner of East 35th, are the steamy windows of 7 Fatty Cow Seafood Hotpot (5108 Victoria Dr., facebook.com/fattycowhotpot). Don’t be intimidated by the secret-club ambiance and contradictory name. The place is often nominated for the city’s best hot pot, which

is essentially the Chinese equivalent of fondue. Across Victoria Drive, on the west side of the street, is 8 AA Plus Restaurant (5207 Victoria Dr., facebook .com/aaplusfishnoodlesoup), which specializes in build-your-own noodle soups. On the corner, in a mini-mall facing a gas station, is 9 Sandy La Chinese Restaurant (5257 Victoria Dr., sandylachineserestaurant.com), which is a late-night staple (open until 3 a.m., and they give you free congee if you spend $20), and, finally, in the middle of the block, is 10 Kalvin’s Szechuen Restaurant (5225 Victoria Dr., facebook .com/kalvinsszechuanrestaurant), a longtime favourite that sees frequent lineups, so it’s better if you’re dining early. From Chinese hot pot to Mexican enchiladas, all within four blocks—it doesn’t get more Vancouver than that.

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C OV E R STORY

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Reasons to Love Vancouver Right Now

Even on the rainiest, most real-estatecrisis-y of days, we’re head over heels for this weird, wet, wonderful city of ours. So consider this our love letter to Lotusland—crow sidekicks, opera savants, soccer hooligans and all. The Vancouver Mural Festival is one reason the city’s looking bright these days. Story, page 35.

SOUTHSIDERS CHANT

When I see you, Whitecaps I go out of my head I just can’t get enough I just can’t get enough All the things you do to me And all the things you said I just can’t get enough I just can’t get enough Here in the Southside, I’m falling in love And I just can’t seem to get enough of (while bouncing) Do do do-do-do-do-do Do do do-do-do-do-do No. 01

Our soccer hooligans behave themselves Are they loud? Sure. Are they rowdy? Most certainly. On game days, the group is on its feet, chanting, hollering and drinking from kickoff to the last whistle. But the Southsiders—the Whitecaps’ unofficial fan club, which occupies the southeast corner of BC Place and, at 1,200 members and growing, is the largest crew of organized supporters in Canada—would rather sing tweaked versions of Depeche Mode songs than riot any day.

Because

Opera Man is still serenading the streets Reports of a beautiful tenor have been common among the west-side set for 35-plus years. On any given day, Opera Man—a.k.a. Francesco Pepita, landlord, poet, southern Italian, hero to us all—can be found on the mean streets, belting out Italian arias as he goes about his life. Identifying Opera Man: Is he wearing a baseball cap over a shock of white hair? Is he loudly and unabashedly singing opera? Natural habitat: Sightings have been reported in South Granville, Fairview and Kits, but he once performed on the bus (receiving a standing ovation), so really, he can be found anywhere.

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Should you encounter a wild Opera Man: Close your eyes and savour the music. Do not attempt to challenge him to a sing-off.

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Mary-Lynne has been working at the Comox since 1984 She’s got a stack of greeting cards from regulars, including a poem, and a note from a Blue Rodeo legend that’s signed: “Sorry I missed you, next time, love Jim Cuddy”— proof that server MaryLynne MacGowan has been charming regulars at the West End’s Comox Street Long Bar since it opened 33 years ago. In a city that says goodbye to its favourite watering holes more often than not (we miss you, DV8), over three decades of an iron-clad memory and “not putting up with shit” needs celebrating—and her

legions of fans truly adore her. “Two gay guys, older, they’ve been coming for years. They said, ‘How are we going to live without you? Because if ever we came into money, you’d be the first person we’d want to give some to,’” she says. “I said, ‘You could have just asked me. I would have given you my number.’” The Comox is closing this year, and MacGowan is figuring out her next adventure. “I never thought that I would live my life to be a waitress,” she says. “But it’s been a really good life. A very good life.”

OPERA MAN: NIMA GHOL AMIPOUR; MARY-LYNNE: EVA AN KHERA J; SOUTHSIDERS: DUNCAN NICOL

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No. 04

Because

Craft beer kicked off a revolution After a shakeup in 2013 that saw the province’s harsh liquor laws relaxed, the craft beer scene exploded; now it’s only a matter of time before craft breweries outnumber Starbucks. Following in beer’s footsteps, spirits, ciders and now-trending mead are all finding a place to call home in our bustling craft scene. —Christine Beyleveldt

Because No. 05

Renters are banding together

Sunday Cider: Wild Vancouver’s only craft cidery makes Wild with bittersweet Kingston Black apples from the Okanagan and serves it up at their sporadic afternoon dance parties (and at bars around town, too).

Roots and Wings Distillery: Double Vice This familyowned Langley craft distillery infuses vodka with espresso, bringing in hints of chocolate and caramel.

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Humblebee Meadery: The Bee’s Knees Mead is one of the world’s oldest drinks, and this takes all of the oldfashioned appeal of the brew and spruces it up with an earthy green-tea flavour.

The Vancouver Tenants Union (VTU) launched in April and by May had its first victory: the cancellation of an eviction notice against a long-time tenant in a downtown SRO. By July, it had organized residents of a Mount Pleasant building to fight a renoviction notice—and win. As the housing crisis continues, at least there’s power in numbers.

Because

When they’re not dive-bombing us, crows can be our best friends A scrappy urban bird wouldn’t be everyone’s ideal sidekick, but for Vancouverite Shawn Bergman, Canuck the Crow is the perfect feathered friend. Each morning, Canuck arrives at his front door to escort him to the bus stop; on weekends and evenings, you’ll find him following Bergman around, riding in his car or perching on his shoulder as they explore the city together. It’s essentially an East Van version of a Disney movie and it is no surprise that Canuck’s become a local hero. The crow first came to the attention of the world when he stole a knife from a crime scene. His kleptomania hasn’t been curbed since his rise to fame—he’s snatched computer keys from the PNE, fries from McDonald’s—but now he’s starring in Canuck and I, his own documentary about his unusual friendship with Bergman. Fame really does open doors.

No. 07

Cricket bars might be the new California roll The California roll was allegedly invented in the 1970s by local culinary icon Tojo, who introduced sushi to the masses by crafting inside-out rolls with cooked crab instead of raw fish. Coast Protein founder Dylan Jones could be similarly groundbreaking with his line of cricket-based protein snacks. One day we could be chowing down on roasted crickets tossed with chili and lime like they’re nigiri.—C.B. Q: WHAT IMPACT DO YOU HOPE CRICKE TS WILL HAVE ON THE VANCOUVER FOOD SCENE?

Dylan Jones: “Our mission is to normalize insect protein, or eating insects, within Western society. And we’ve chosen to do that through consumer goods like protein bars and protein shakes because it’s an easy format for people to understand and for people to consume, rather

than just introducing whole insects or roasted insects. Vancouver is a pretty forward-thinking city, obviously, and it’s a pretty forward food city. We want to be that next company that really brings forward the change in our local food systems.”

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Because

No. 08

We’re finally getting a skyline Development is nothing new in this town, but the plethora of architectural statement pieces slated for construction right now is going to redefine the urban landscape. Parq Vancouver Architect: IBI Group The design: The giant “urban resort” houses a casino, eight restaurants, two luxury hotels and 60,000 square feet of meeting space—but from the outside, all we see is glittering copper siding. Expected completion: Fall 2017

Vancouver House Architect: Bjarke Ingels Group The design: The twisting glass residential tower rises out of a modern, angular greenroofed living complex. Ingels describes it as “gesamtkunstwerk”: a total work of art. Expected completion: 2018

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We’re on the cutting edge of classical music

No. 10

Because

Artists can still find places to gather MEE T THE NE IGHBOURS

A few all-stars from the Parker Street crew Michael Thomas Host, MTH Woodworks, reclaimed wood meets modern resin Steven Pollock, concrete designs Renée Macdonald, Westerly Handmade Shoes, timeless kicks Fredi Rahn, colourful, functional pottery Jin Choi, meticulously crafted wood furniture Kari Kristensen, intricate linocuts and screenprints Judson Beaumont, whimsical furniture

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This is not always a city that is friendly to the starving artist set (hello, proposed four-percent rent increase!), but the century-old Parker Street warehouse provides an impressive, accessible home base for painters, woodworkers, makers and weavers alike with its 110 studios under one roof in industrial East Van.

radio,” said David Pay, artistic director of the concert series Music on Main (M0M). “This is a little bit kooky.” (Better still: MoM is also Vancouverites’ only opportunity to crack a beer while listening to a string quartet play Morton Feldman.)

This November, MoM is copresenting World New Music Days—kind of the Olympics of new music. It’s a chance to show we’re on the cutting edge of musical taste. “We’re a town that says, if you’re creating music, let’s listen,” says Pay. —Matthew Parsons

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We take umbrella etiquette seriously CL ASSICAL MUSIC: NIMA GHOL AMIPOUR; PARKER STREET: PARKER ART SALON

Any given season brings Vancouver great classical concerts. But the city is specifically acquiring a reputation as a hot spot for “new music”: classical-style music written by living composers. “This isn’t music that everybody listens to on the

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1550 Alberni Architect: Kengo Kuma Architects and Associates The design: A curving 43-storey glass-andwood tower propped up by intersecting domes. Expected completion: 2020

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No. 13

We’re saving the bees Finding a solution to the dying honeybee population is a vital goal for scientists at the University of British Columbia, as commercial bee pollination contributes an estimated $4.6 billion to the Canadian economy (and, you know, helps produce enough food for the human race to survive). “We’re trying to selectively breed for traits that are valuable to us,” says UBC molecular biologist Dr. Leonard Foster—these future breeds will hopefully be resistant to disease, produce more honey and be better able to survive Canadian winters. —Kerry Banks No. 12

Because

BEE ILLUSTRATION: BENG, RESIDENT ARTIST OF MNSTR GALLERY

You don’t have to grow up This past May long weekend, a summer camp for adults—Camp Camp—sold out in days: bunkbeds and colour wars were paired with craft beer and Beyoncé dance classes. East Van’s Hula Hoop Club jams out at Trout Lake Park on the reg. The most coveted tech start-up jobs are the ones with nap rooms and candy dispensers. Is this trend toward embracing your inner kid regressive? Maybe. But it’s also pretty fun— see you at the Stanley Park water fight.

Because

We finally have a fashion week worth going to Joleen Mitton shies away whenever she’s pulled into the spotlight to introduce herself as Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week’s founder, so you’d never guess she led an international modelling career as a teenager. But she left the fashion industry nearly a decade ago, only to return full force this year to lead the most anticipated fashion show of 2017. During the four-day event in July, Torontobased Lil’wat designer Curtis Oland sent traditional materials, including horsehair and lambskin leather, strutting down the runway, and Vancouver designer Dahlia Drive turned heads with her collection of exquisite scarves and kimonos featuring silkscreened prints of master carver Reg Davidson’s Haida patterns.—C.B. Q: WHY DID YOU LE AVE THE FASHION INDUSTRY TO WORK WITH YOUTH IN YOUR COMMUNIT Y?

Joleen Mitton: “I needed a reason. Honestly, I have had a life that people would think that they would want, which doesn’t really make you happy. I’ve had some people be really envious and, at the end of the day, you need to know who you are and need to have a reason to be here. It’s more spiritual and reflective than trying to leave a legacy. I didn’t set [Indigenous Fashion Week] up to do that. It just kind of happened.”

For an in-depth interview with Mitton, visit vanmag.com

T YLER JACOBS

LORR AINE GUS

PAM BAKER

T YLER JACOBS

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Because

We’re (probably) getting a High Line of our own In a city where the real estate market is positively bonkers, it seems equally insane that several acres of prime waterfront property could be left as fallow concrete fields for decades. Such has been the case for Northeast False Creek, where the wheels of development on land owned by Concord Pacific Developments have been turning at a painfully slow pace since at least the 1990s. In fact, neighbouring residents had all but given up on ever seeing the park long promised for the area. But lo! This year the project finally jolted out of stagnation with the release of a proposal for an 11-acre park to be designed by the same team that did New York City’s über-popular High Line. Under the proposal, the park would see vacant industrial lands become a glittering urban gem right on the waterfront, including a skate park and an “elevated park” situated on a decommissioned Dunsmuir viaduct. Not everyone is a fan of the proposal, since it relies on removing the viaducts in favour of an alternative traffic route into downtown. But for fans of urban design and inner city renewal, or for those oh-so-patient residents of Crosstown who just want a damn park, the impending reinvention of Vancouver’s waterfront is something to celebrate.

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Because No. 16

No. 17

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We take care of our own Beyond the grim statistics of the opioid overdose crisis, a picture has emerged of a community rallying to protect its most vulnerable. Alongside InSite, which hasn’t had a single death in its 14 years of existence, overdose prevention sites have opened all over downtown and free naloxone kits have been distributed. And Spikes on Bikes sends “peers”—current or former drug users—to connect with users in need of clean needles and look out for people overdosing. The message: No matter who you are, you are part of this city. And we’ve got your back.

Because

We’ve mastered athleisurewear

Sure, we wear leggings all the time. But thanks to these local-hero brands, they’re really nice leggings. 1 Lululemon The granddaddy of athleisure has achieved world domination. Wunder Under Hi-Rise 7/8 tight, $98 2 RYU A spinoff from luxury boutique Leone, this technical workout gear still carries a high-end vibe. Tough Tight HiRise, $100 3 Reigning Champ Seamless knit designs turn comfort into an art form. Reigning Champ x Adidas Women’s Primeknit tight, $160 4 Kit and Ace “Technical cashmere” makes for soft and sophisticated basics. Cashmere Sweater pant, $348 5 Dish and Duer Technically these are jeans, but this made-in-Van company has crafted a denim that moves like yoga pants. Performance Denim Skinny, $129

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No. 18

City streets are looking much brighter

WRESTLER: EVA AN KHERA J; MURALS: FLICKR ROAMING-THE-PL ANET; FISH WAFFLES: 720 SWEETS AND ETC.

For proof that the irritating “No Fun City” moniker can finally be buried, look to the colour-soaked facades of Mount Pleasant, Strathcona or, heck, even once-dreary alleyways downtown. Between the Vancouver Mural Festival painting the town and More Awesome Now—the laneway “activation” that pink-washed an alley near Granville and Hastings—our civic landscape is more vibrant than ever. And that’s not just because of fresh paint; props are also due to projects like Public Disco that are bringing the party to our newly spruced-up streets.

Because

We always have a creative solution for the housing crisis

Because

We do fish waffles better than Japan Sometimes memorable culinary experiences are about circumstances. One day in Kyoto, Japan, I found myself in the basement of a department store holding a piping-hot custard-filled waffle treat while a woman in a surgical mask sang me a song. The song was “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun,” the official song of the treat I was holding—a popular dessert called taiyaki. Taiyaki is Japanese for “fried fish,” but happily the name is derived only from the fish-shaped waffle. It’s filled with custard or sweet red beans and is best enjoyed hot off the grill. In Vancouver, Snowy Village makes a Korean variation that uses croissant dough instead of the usual waffle batter. And 720 Sweets also makes them fresh. Getting someone to sing you the song is more a matter of luck. —Steve Burgess

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No. 20

An art teacher can become a wrestler The city’s Elite Canadian Championship (ECCW) Wrestling league may have launched the careers of WWE stars like the Bollywood Boys with their monthly sellout shows, but ECCW’s training classes give the wrestling-curious the chance to practice body-slamming their way into spandex-clad glory. That includes Carina Piccioni, a 37-year-old art teacher, who started training on the ropes two years ago and now sometimes even climbs into the ring (though usually only to wind up getting kicked in the head). “I was five feet tall and barely knew who Hulk Hogan

No. 21 Whether it’s making mixed-income communities out of shipping containers on Alexander Street or putting modular homes at Main and Terminal, we’re squeezing in extra housing anywhere we can. CityHive Vancouver’s “Empty Nests” program, for one, is trying to fill 800,000 empty bedrooms in the city, pairing young folks with older ones to exchange cheap rent for in-home care.

was, but I went to tryouts just to see—it was a bit of an early mid-life crisis. There was this gauntlet of squats and pushups, and I made it through. I was impressed with myself— and really sore. “Since then, it’s been a big learning curve; there are so many unspoken rules, codes and secret handshakes. You have to be insanely fit, too. I’ve been doing it two years and I’m still not quite ready. I’ve been a referee and sold T-shirts, and I’ve only interacted in the show two or three times so far—I ended up getting squashed. It’s a thing they do with little guys to make other characters look ferocious. But the whole throwing-youaround part? I’m totally fine. My character is this plucky indie rock guy. It’s kind of like a drag queen identity: you take your character from your personality and amplify it.”

For more shots of Vancouver’s wrestling scene, visit vanmag.com

Because

AUR A DISPENSARY

No. 22

Dispensaries are getting classy of dispensaries is trading in the basement rec room vibe for upscale environments aimed at attracting a more diverse clientele. Places like the Scandinavian-chic Aura on Kingsway, the West Coast cool Leaves of Zazie near Main Street and the wood-clad Green Panda have us hopeful this soon-to-be legal industry is finally growing up.

Because

We use our power of protest for good

Our penchant for protests can sometimes be hard to take seriously. Case in point: two marches, with the same colour scheme even, collided along Granville Street in June, causing mass confusion among those walking for their respective causes (sex workers’ rights on the one side and ending slaughterhouses on the other). But when a couple of dozen extreme right wingers planned an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rally at city hall in August, about 4,000 people turned up to rally against racism and show that, in this town at least, love really does trump hate.

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Vegans can feast in Chinatown Say what you will about gentrification, but the vegan crowd finally has a home in Chinatown, thanks to a wave of trendy plant-based rooms that have set up shop within a few square blocks of each other. Hit 1 Virtuous Pie (583 Main Street) for the Stranger Wings pizza, complete with cashew-based “cheese” and spicy buffalo cauliflower, or 2 Kokomo (611 Gore Avenue) for a superfoodpacked acai bowl, then savour a scoop of heavenly non-dairy gelato—we love Drunken Cherry—from 3 Umaluma (235 E Pender Street) before stocking the pantry at 4 Vegan Supply Shop (250 E Pender Street).

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Find more vegan and vegetarian options at vanmag.com/restaurants

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Virtuous Pie

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We’ll climb mountains, even in the dark If you want the Instagrammable experience, gather with the thrill-seeking group of hike organizers called Chasing Sunrise early Sunday morning, armed with a flashlight and hashtag, and I’m sure they’ll be glad for the company. But you

don’t need an officially sanctioned event to enjoy the mystery and magic of moonlit hiking: just get up and go. That’s what I did one night in Paradise Valley when some friends and I got the idea to hike to the Weather Bluffs just after midnight. Laden with headlamps, walkietalkies, bells, blankets and a boom box to scare away any cougars (I was also sure to stick to the middle our motley cohort), we scaled the ill-lit rocky traverse and 40 minutes later reached our destination. There, we sat in contemplative silence, listening to the hooting owls and roar of the Cheakamus River below. Then the spellbinding moment was cut short by a voice over the radio, telling us to come down or risk becoming cougar fodder. So, on second thought: maybe a higher-profile adventure is a safer bet. —C.B.

VIRTUOUS PIE: ANDREW QUERNER; AURA DISPENSARY: SAMANTHA MALONG

When cannabis dispensaries popped up like, um, weeds throughout the city a few years back, it wasn’t just their ambiguous legal status that raised eyebrows. Early pot purveyors papered the city with the most cliché markers of marijuana culture: neon pot leaves, Bob Marley posters and cringe-worthy names like “Mega Ill.” Thankfully, a new generation

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VA N M AG PROFILE

The Fixer

Are we ready for a radical approach to addiction that includes experiments with psychedelics, decriminalizing drugs and challenging the idea that recovery equals sobriety? Maybe not yet. But Dr. Evan Wood, head of the new B.C. Centre for Substance Use, is on a mission to get us there. by Bruce Grierson

photograph by Pooya Nabei

Dr. Evan Wood, photographed on location at St. Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hospital on Friday, September 8, 2017.

The rising death toll in the fentanyl epidemic means it’s never been more urgent to come up with something that works more reliably—and to quickly clear a legislative path for it. The new thinking, Wood’s thinking, is that, far from being a kind of defect of the psyche, addiction may in fact be an evolutionary inheritance—a deeply human trait that turns out to be ill fitted in some ways to the modern era. Wood is exploring pharmaceutical treatments for addiction, pioneering an approach where abstinence isn’t necessarily the end goal, and even using common street drugs to temper its expression. All of this would seem to cast him as a fox in the henhouse here. And yet Wood is given a warm setup by the man who invited him here tonight, Marshall Smith, a former top B.C. government bureaucrat whose own lost“i’m going to be the least compelling speaker you’ll now-found story is as dramatic as they come. hear tonight,” Dr. Evan Wood tells me as we pull Ten years clean after a brutal cocaine addiction up in front of the Anvil Centre auditorium in New that left him unemployed and living in a shipping Westminster. People are already trickling in for tonight’s container, Smith is now in full reboot. He runs a nonevent, Recovery Speaks, featuring inspiring personal profit recovery centre on Vancouver Island, coordinates tales of sobriety on the other side of hellish addiction. these speaking events and serves as a senior advisor at Wood holds a fistful of titles—including professor of the BCCSU, a $10-million provincially funded network medicine at UBC, Canada Research Chair in Inner-City aimed at developing an evidence-based framework for Medicine and head of the province’s newly established addiction treatment. Part of the mandate is to tap the response to the opioid crisis, the British Columbia “lived experience” of users to develop effective new Centre for Substance Use (BCCSU). He’s giving the strategies, which is where Smith comes in. Wood hired keynote address tonight—and he’s going to have to him after he realized Smith’s credibility and charisma thread the needle. could help shape the evolving narrative of addiction Many of the attendees here are part of the “recovery treatment in B.C. community”—their journeys involve getting clean It was nuts, both men realized, to present largely via the 12 steps. The path involves fierce personal themselves as adversaries—penning opposing opreckoning and surrender to a higher power until the eds in newspapers, pitting harm reduction against demon slowly loosens its grip and you get your life back, abstinence-based recovery—when all that did was though with eternal vigilance and abstinence as part make the entire addiction-medicine space radioactive of the deal. to politicians and potential funders. “We clearly “Twelve-step facilitation therapy,” hatched some came from different perspectives, we clearly came 80 years ago by the American Bill Wilson (or simply Bill from different personal experiences and we clearly W., as he’s known in AA circles) and Dr. Robert Smith, represented different constituencies of substanceis still the prevailing model for treating addiction, using people,” Smith says. “But . . . we were in absolute both in the U.S. and in Canada. It’s traditionally a cold- agreement that the system we have now is failing people turkey approach: just you and your god and the dark at best and killing people at worst.” night (with your support group on call). Wood’s own Wood steps up to the lectern without notes. view is that there’s a less torturous and more effective Bespectacled and self-contained, he has the air of an strategy. Reduced to a bumper sticker, it might read: uncle about to give a toast at Thanksgiving dinner. He Get off drugs with drugs. tiptoes through a decent joke before quickly establishing It sounds like pretzel logic: drink your way to a sensitive, commiserating tone that finds common sobriety. Use to get clean. Yet this is the chatter on ground with Smith. “The system of addiction treatment the frontier of addiction medicine—an emerging field in British Columbia isn’t broken,” he says. “There. Is. promoting evidence-based strategies to treat addiction No. System.” Sufferers are left alone to figure out their instead of the entrenched old ways, no matter how options amid a Wild West climate of murky regulations beloved they might be. and an absurd circumstance where opioids are Abstinence, the evidence increasingly suggests, prescribed to people who don’t need them and withheld doesn’t work for many people. More than 80 percent of from those who do, one in which rehabbing users are those who try it will relapse, some studies show. discharged from detox with a handshake and directions

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to the bus stop, and where wait-lists for rehab facilities can be months long. Every story he’s hearing, in this room and out there in the world, Wood says, every scrap of data he’s gathering, will go into the batter of this new thing they’re cooking at the BCCSU. He gets a standing O. IN THE GIANT’S SHADOW i first met Wood, 43, in his upstairs office at St. Paul’s Hospital, tucked away from the emergency room, where fatal opioid overdoses have become an almost daily occurrence. His eyes were red behind his spectacles: too many short nights in a row. He was wearing a crisply cut suit in banker’s blue—the better to convene high-level meetings with senior staff of health agencies, convey gravitas in media interviews and beat the bushes for funding. That suit, and his quiet, squeaky-clean intensity, evokes Eliot Ness, the famous Prohibition-era Chicago crime fighter. Only their missions are exactly backwards. Wood is at war against the War on Drugs and all it has wrought—from rampant gang violence to a lethally toxic drug supply. He’s less interested in bringing drug criminals to justice than he is in restoring justice by decriminalizing drugs. But politics are not his official brief. As head of the BCCSU, Wood’s loftiest goal is to change the way we think about addiction. To make us understand it as a kind of contagion—albeit a social rather than viral one. The best strategy to suppress an outbreak? Deploy massive resources at multiple levels all at once. Toss a blanket over the fire so that it sends out no sparks. Wood’s job one is to wrangle those resources and channel them toward an effective treatment model. That means training doctors and nurses who work with addiction sufferers on which drugs work best to curb cravings and ease withdrawal, when to use them, and how to wean folks off them where appropriate. It means laying out clear options for users who want to get clean and making sure they have access to them. Right now, it means hosting lots and lots of meetings with addicts and their families, the people whose voices most need to be heard. Wood’s current position is an evolution of his career at the forefront of public health and epidemiology, but he began by tackling a different scourge. He grew up in West Vancouver, raised by his socialworker mother. His father was an inventor who designed marine navigation systems and who separated from his mother when Wood was two. Wood approached the medical-health field in a gradually tightening circle. In an undergrad geography degree at UBC, he did a term project that involved mapping the spread of HIV, which nudged him to pursue medical geography—a subfield that looks at airborne

and vector-borne illness. He applied for a summer job at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, where he quickly distinguished himself as a protégé of Dr. Julio Montaner. Hired as a junior research assistant, the young Wood churned out a provocative paper so quickly that Montaner read about it in the newspaper he opened on a flight later that same summer. After Wood knocked off a PhD in epidemiology in 2003, he began publishing at a furious rate. He and Montaner would go on to co-author dozens of influential papers, including two humdingers—one published in The Lancet that helped shape the conversation around AIDS treatment in Africa and another on anti-viral drug strategy, published in The British Medical Journal, that was dubbed Science magazine’s 2011 scientific breakthrough of the year. In 2005, Wood and his colleague Thomas Kerr—an epidemiologist and now co-director of the BCCSU— found themselves almost single-handedly trying to save InSite, Canada’s first supervised drug-injection site, from a court challenge by the Harper government, which vehemently viewed drug use as a criminal matter. The battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Wood and Kerr arguing evidence should trump morality when it came to reducing the risk of disease transmission and overdose. In the end, their efforts ensured one of the world’s most high-profile experiments in harm reduction, one that has since become a global model in public health, was spared the knife. In the mid-aughts, Wood interrupted his progress in HIV/AIDS research to go to med school, thinking he would have more impact as a physician. He blitzed through the University of Calgary’s compressed curriculum, putting himself in the comically intense position of being a professor at UBC while a med student in Calgary. He completed his MD in two years and nine months. Upon returning to Vancouver, however, Wood discovered the fire he was now doubly armed to fight was nearly contained. The death rate from AIDS was down 80 percent, as was the number of new HIV cases. Wood pivoted to apply his harm-reduction strategies to another issue affecting the same at-risk communities he’d come to know through his work with Montaner. He emerged as a leader in addiction medicine around 2010, just as a drug called fentanyl began to show up on city streets, igniting yet another public health crisis and thrusting the issue of addiction into the spotlight. WHAT HUMANS DO in the lobby of the Anvil Centre, during intermission at the Recovery Speaks event, a woman named Lynn buttonholes Wood. Her 23-year-old son is in treatment, battling a heroin addiction. He’s been in an abstinencebased treatment facility for several months and is due home soon.

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THE FIXER

Wood listens silently, rabbinically. (Privately, he is a little worried about this young man, who is about to be sprung loose, his tolerance low, onto a landscape mined with fentanyl and carfentanil. “Anyone in that position is just a sitting duck for a fatal overdose,” he tells me later.) Wood allows that some people do manage to get clean all at once just because they decided to, overriding primitive instructions from a brain that has actually been rewired, by trauma or stress or crushing circumstances, to crave solace. But it’s clear which side he believes the science tips toward. The data doesn’t support abstinence as Plan A. Lynn tells Wood she has discovered a book touting a pharmaceutical “cure” for alcoholism. You simply take a drug—an alcohol antagonist—an hour before you plan to imbibe, and it whisks the reward off the table. So a drink is just a drink, not a ticket anywhere, and you stop at one or two. Eventually the thrill is gone. You can drink socially without fear of drinking to excess—then taper down to complete sobriety, or not. There’s evidence the drug works for opioids too. This approach would clearly not be embraced by most of the people in this auditorium. But Wood believes the data shows that you can manage addiction without trying to hold it at bay through brute abstinence. It may even be the more humane tack. “The vast majority of people who have what we would now call substance-use disorder are working, they have families, they’re going about their life, but they have this compulsion to use,” Wood elaborates later. “They may wish to cut down but have difficulty doing so. They might get withdrawal if they stop. But they’re getting along with their lives pretty well.” In the new landscape of addiction treatment that he envisions, “if people come to a health-care provider, we could offer things to help them cut down, or quit, or reduce their cravings. “This is really part of the human condition. The oldest written records show people using things like alcohol. We could have coffees in front of us. We could be having a glass of wine tonight. I mean, this is what humans do.” And here is where Wood and Smith—not to mention the people who have shared their heartbreaking but hopeful personal stories tonight—really do have a common cause. They deeply believe that people with substance-abuse issues ought not to be vilified for being a little more demonstrably human than everybody else. (Smith admits his position on abstinence has softened somewhat as the evidence for harm reduction has piled up; he now includes substitution drugs like Suboxone at the rehab centre he oversees.) In a sense, people prone to addiction—and “about 50 percent of the burden of substance use is genetic,” Wood says—are simply exquisitely attuned to the promise of rewards. For most of human history that was a good thing. “Being a good reward appreciator,” as the addiction

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psychologist Anna Rose Childress put it, would have made an individual more, not less, evolutionarily fit. Only in the last 75 years, when consumer culture began producing a glut of irresistible temptations, did that trait stop delivering benefits and start creating problems. Now that same quester who was once first to try a new food, a new route, a new mate, is now first to fall hard for the shiny poisoned bauble. Not long ago, certain variants of a gene called OPRM1 were found to be linked to impulsivity and risk-taking behaviour—and a predisposition for drug addiction. But, Wood explains, OPRM1 is really an attachment gene. “In rhesus macaque monkeys, having the gene correlates to how upset the babies get when they’re separated from their mother.” The gene is thought to work in a similar way in humans. “So here you have this attachment gene that makes great sense for survival, so you don’t go wandering off a cliff,” Wood says. “But that same gene, if you get prescribed Oxycontin by your doctor—and Oxycontin is extremely rewarding—it can just grab hold of you.” Wood works the room. He is adept at saying the right things and leaving out the right things. He chats with the private donor who quietly gave $1 million to his centre and with mothers who have watched their children slip through their fingers—grieving moms have become the face of the fentanyl crisis. Wood’s own kids, aged 4 and 9, are still too little to worry about in this respect. There’s something almost epidemiological about the way he circulates, each point of contact meaningful in some hard-to-measure way. If the root of all addiction is dislocation, as a recovery-community adage has it, then an antidote for addiction is connection. This is a second belief that both camps share. Indeed, you could say that the secret sauce of supervised injection sites like InSite is not that they prevent substance users from overdosing to death right now (though they indeed do that) but that they bring users into contact with potential social lifelines—health professionals whom they can trust to help them get their lives back on track. Wood has been welcomed here. The kumbaya factor is high. But there remains one major, lingering disconnect: the God thing. ANOTHER PATH TO TRANSCENDENCE the psychoanalyst Carl Jung advised Bill W. that without a spiritual dimension to AA, it would never work—the roots of addiction run too deep. Many in the recovery movement hold fast to that theory, but the required belief in a higher power also prevents many seeking recovery from buying into the program. Wood believes there may be a way to square the circle here—to bring God into the picture without losing one’s evidence-based bona fides. The last five or so years have seen a resurgence of

clinical interest in psychedelics—the old hippie drugs that can open what Johns Hopkins psychologist Roland Griffiths calls a “spiritual window” through which deep insight might flow. “The neuroimaging work that’s being done around this, particularly in the U.K., is really fascinating,” Wood says. One way to look at addiction is as a communication failure on a neural level. The most primitive part of the brain—the instinctive, reptilian part that drives compulsive behaviour—“doesn’t typically talk to the frontal lobe that’s really wanting to make changes,” Wood says. “But on psilocybin, those two brain regions are talking like crazy.” In preliminary experimental trials, the deep emotions that hallucinogenic trips unlock seem to help users reach a profound level of insight into their self and their predicament—which can prove a powerful weapon against hard-to-resist cravings. Indeed, Bill W. himself experimented with LSD after he became sober, and found it to be such an effective spiritual assist he considered making it a standard part of AA meetings. “So the science is showing that we can probably bring about a spiritual awakening for people at a much higher rate this way than our traditional motivational techniques can,” Wood says. This spring, the BCCSU announced plans to fasttrack hallucinogenic experiments. Drugs such as psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” LSD and/or MDMA (ecstasy) will be administered in a controlled setting—a dedicated, soundproof room in the BCCSU’s headquarters on Powell Street. (Right now the room is bare and clinical; it’s definitely going to need some groovy-ing up—and a bathroom.) “It’s just a question now of the clinical protocols and then getting them through ethics,” Wood says. “And then getting these medications made by pharmaceutical labs, storing them and then doing the trials” with trained psychotherapists. “But we hope to be doing them in the next year.” This isn’t something the BCCSU is trying to sneak past the public. The initiative is openly displayed on the website, along with other research such as “Intentional cannabis use to reduce crack cocaine use in a Canadian setting: a longitudinal analysis.” The message? The road from “sick” to “well” is not a straight shot. For many, the endgame is total sobriety, but for some it will never be. While working at the heroin prescription clinic on the Downtown Eastside, Wood always asked his clients about their long-term goals. In some cases it was as straightforward as “Hey, if you want to see your kids again, this cocaine thing is going to be an issue.” But for others, say, an alcoholic who just wants to be able to drink socially, “recovery” has a different meaning and requires another protocol altogether. A system that can handle both has yet to be developed.

The endgame, which Wood sees as inevitable, is the decriminalization of all drugs along the lines of what Portugal has undertaken. The fentanyl crisis may eventually seal the fate of the disastrous, larcenously expensive century-old War on Drugs, Wood believes, but we’re not there yet. “If you look at the situation in the States, the opioid crisis is the biggest issue that’s being debated around health-care reform. The Republican base of middle-class white conservative Americans, they’re being hit hard. And this thing hasn’t peaked yet. “I think fentanyl is going to lead to pretty dramatic changes in Canada, for sure. I think we’re going to see prescription heroin. Investments in things like therapeutic communities”—long-term, professionally staffed rehab facilities—“on the other end. “Unfortunately, before that happens, there are going to be thousands more dead people than there should be.”

The Wonder Drug? For sufferers of opioid addiction, the journey isn’t over when they get out of detox. Willpower alone is a fragile defence against monstrous cravings— more than 80 percent of users will relapse, studies suggest. But a new drug may improve those odds. Vivitrol is a slowrelease version of the “opioid antagonist” naltrexone. It works by jamming the opioid pleasure receptors in the brain, so users are deprived of their expected high. But the drug has another benefit: it sharply diminishes cravings for opioids in the first place. While naltrexone therapy has been around for a while, it has drawbacks. Recovering addicts in Canada have to visit a pharmacy every day to get an oral dose of the drug, which eventually proves too much hassle for many rehabbing users. Vivitrol’s slow release is the gamechanger. A single injection lasts up to a month,

making it much easier for users to comply with the treatment. A Russian test using the treatment in 2010 had such dramatic results, the FDA approved it for use in the United States on the basis of that study alone. Canadian authorities have been more cautious. Last fall, St. Paul’s Hospital began the first clinical trial of Vivitrol in Canada, administering injections to 25 test subjects, all former heroin addicts. A positive outcome will likely nudge Canada closer to approving it for use here. But while Vivitrol may be a promising step in addiction treatment, recent American trials suggest it should be considered a management strategy rather than a “cure.” When Vivitrol was used to treat alcohol dependency, most users were able to cut down their drinking. But very few—under 10 percent—quit drinking outright.

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