Fighting For Space: a book launch and discussion

Date de l'événement: 

14 Mars 2018

Fighting For Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction

AQPSUD invite you for a book launch followed by a discussion with local harm-reduction advocates and activists as well as the author, Travis Lupick, around the issues exposed in the book: drug-user advocacy, harm reduction, gentrification, police brutality, prohibition, human rights, overdose deaths, social struggles, and intersectionality of struggles.

The discussions and book launch will mainly be in English, but discussion contributions and questions can be made in French or English.

The event is FREE, open to all, and wheelchair accessible.

More info to come.

About the book and event:

Through the 1990s, Vancouver experienced a drug crisis similar to the epidemic that Canada struggles with today. Travis Lupick, author of "Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction," will recount how the city responded then and what lessons should be applied now.

He'll deliver a history of harm-reduction activism in Vancouver that connects the story in the book with the Downtown Eastside’s response to the fentanyl crisis today.

In the 1990s, drug overdoses killed hundreds and then thousands of people in Vancouver. Eventually, the city responded in incredible ways. Politicians listened to the demands of drug users and that led Vancouver to establish the continent’s first supervised-injection facility, Insite. Solutions to Vancouver's crisis of the '90s came from the drug users themselves.

In Fighting for Space, Lupick recounts how Downtown Eastside activists marched in the streets to force politicians to change how we respond to the challenge of addiction. It was a political war that took nearly two decades but the activists eventually won. Today Vancouver is championed for pioneering harm reduction.

This book launch has been made possible thanks to the University of Ottawa Criminology Graduate Student Association, CACTUS Montreal, AQPSUD.

The event is dedicated to all those whose lives have been impacted or ended abruptly because of the drug war.