Garth Mullins: A Ghost In My Own Life
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Garth Mullins is a journalist and radio documentary producer who focuses on the decriminalization of drugs, issues of race, class, environment, capitalism, colonialism, and oppression. Listen in as he details the struggles he has had to work through in order to become one of the leading voices in the fight for a safe and legal drug supply. In his words, this could completely eliminate the overdose crisis as we know it.
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EPISODE CREDITS
Written, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Luz Fleming. Original Music and sound design by Garth Mullins, Luz Fleming and James Ash. Executive Produced by Jacob Bronstein. Production assistance by Davis Lloyd. Theme music by Andy Cotton. Yard Tales branding was designed by Andy Outis.
RELATED LINKS
Listen to Garth Mullin's’ podcast at the Crackdown Podcast Archive.
Check out Garth’s music, radio shows and awesome audio on his Soundcloud.
Follow @GarthMullins on Twitter.
Learn more about VANDU on their web site.
Visit the web site of our storyteller from this episode’s Call-In Yard Tale: James Ash
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Yard Tales – Garth Mullins: A Ghost In My Own Life
Luz Fleming:
This episode contains strong language and mature subject matter. It may not be suitable for young ears.
What up, this is Luz Fleming. You have come to the place where we tell tales of the train and bus yard, the tenement yard and the prison yard. We detail close calls and chase stores. We dig into larger conversations about crossing boundaries, the other side of the tracks, borders, and forbidden space.
Whether to make big life changes, to forward the artistic or professional practice, to escape peril or just for the sheer thrill of it.
Garth Mullins:
It's so grim, I’m fucking holding a mic out into this howling storm and documenting the apocalypse. You know, we're, we're losing. Things are fucked.
Luz Fleming:
Today, we are unbelievably lucky to have Garth Mullins tell his tales of crossing boundaries and living in forbidden space. He is a journalist and radio documentary producer who focuses on the decriminalization of drugs, issues of race, class, environment, capitalism, colonialism, and oppression. Garth has written for the Vancouver Sun, Georgia Straight, Vice.
His documentaries have appeared on CBC Radio One. He has spoken publicly at countless schools, protests, conferences, and media outlets, and holds multiple awards for his work. Garth is a drug use activist who has worked with organizers to campaign for a safe and legal drug supply, which in turn could completely eliminate the overdose crisis as we know it.
He also happens to host and produce one of my all time favorite podcasts, Crackdown.
As a person with albinism, Garth has had to confront many boundaries and his lifelong relationship with opioid use and addiction have forced him to navigate many spaces that society has deemed forbidden. But perhaps the biggest line he has had to cross was not away from illegal drug use, but fully towards activism, harm reduction and a safe and legal drug supply.
His arguments are backed by a lifetime of experience and hard research, and he has truly shifted my perspective on opioids, the overdose crisis, and how these problems can be solved.
So sit back and let Garth Mullins tell you some of his very own Yard Tales.
Garth Mullins:
Yeah, I mean my first memories are really in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. It’s a great place, I love being there, but as I got just a couple years older, you know, started elementary school and stuff, you could see that it was also, you know, kind of a haunted place. Like there were lots of things going on in the town. that weren’t cool. This was the Northwest Territories in the seventies. Everybody was there for mining. All the boys wanted to be miners when we grew up, that’s what I wanted to be. That was the thing, the coolest thing to do, the most manly thing to do.
There were two mines in Yellowknife and I just imagined that there were tunnels under the whole city and I sometimes would dig in the sand boxes as a kid to try and join up with the miners.
The Cold War was also in the north, they’d built the distant early warning line, a string of radar stations across the Arctic Circle to spot, you know, Soviet nukes coming to bomb us or whatever. There was a satellite called Kosmos 954 that was a Russian spy satellite that spiraled out of orbit. They lost control of it, I guess in Moscow, or whatever, and it fell and it crashed into the Northwest Territories and it spread its nuclear fuel all over the Arctic. And so this was like, it was this weird front in the Cold War, like a cold front in the Cold War, and a resource extraction place and my parents went up there for government jobs and you know you could get up a few rungs higher on whatever ladder you’re trying to climb by going north. Lots of people did it, CBC journalists did it but it was a real colonial kind of outpost kind of mentality.
You know, when people, white people brought all kinds of their little alien cultural artifacts, like cub scouting, and musical theatre and like all these unusual enterprises to the north, and that was the town. So that’s where I grew up I didn’t know all that stuff obviously but you could start to feel the weirdness as a kid.
All the adults in the town as far as I could figure out used booze to combat the really, really long dark cold winters there. You know, the sun would go down, like when I came home from elementary school, got home from elementary school at three sometimes it would be dark. Sun wouldn’t come up until ten so if the sun was up and I mean visible through blizzard clouds or something as a gray, grayness, for five hours, people sure drank those really long subarctic nights away. And that was around my house too, that was everybody’s house, everybody’s parents that I knew.
And then when the summer came, the summer was really quick. All the plants would fire out of the ground, all of the people shoot out of the house and drink in celebration, you know. And the kids were, you know, free to roam the town up until midnight because the sun was up, forever. And you know it was nice because the midnight sun couldn’t burn someone with albinism because it wasn’t too bright but you could still be outside and play so that was good but yeah I definitely saw how when there’s tough things to do you can really take the sledgehammer of booze and knock the shit out of it. And so, yeah I started applying that when I was thirteen, fourteen I guess.
And then around that time, a couple grades into elementary school, you know I got my first bully, uh, you know he led other kids in calling me names and shit for being an albino. For being a person a with albinism which is like you, got no, melanin, no pigment in your skin, hair or eyes. And also I am blind, I just have a tiny bit of eyesight. And so they called me names that weren’t very creative but, um, one of them was Ghost, you know, sometimes like Casper the Ghost but it’d get shortened to Ghost. And that one really stuck with me because as I grew older I started to feel like a ghost in my own life. Like a ghost in my own family, a ghost in my own storyline, like I was outside of it. You know, like I was just haunting my own reality, not like fully there, you know, everyone in Yellowknife, there wasn’t lots of consumer opportunities so everyone had the same off-brand Northstar sneakers and crappy parkas or whatever.
So there wasn’t like this, this big, I don’t know, Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald style coolness about really anybody. You know the teenagers would wear Mack jackets and jean jackets and drink in bush parties and stuff, it was very, I don’t know, very hoser at times, you know. But when I moved down south, in Vancouver, with my family then it was just like, this is the eighties, everyone’s got to be rich and look good and drive a car to their high school and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and so I was just like, “Well I can’t drive at all, I don’t look like any of you people so, um, I guess I’m doing something else.”
But when I started high school, there was this girl Janet who was in grade twelve and she just, she recognized, oh here’s this alienated little alien kid who needs help and she was punk-rock, you know, and she, you know, we went to eat lunch together and she’d play her Nina Hagen tapes and stuff like that. And the fact that I was a freak was a feature, not a glitch, for her and so she was one of the people who I felt, oh there’s other humans out here, you know there’s other people that I can know. And I also realized a lot of them were into punk and stuff and probably that’s how come, that’s when I started you know listening to music and going to shows. And meeting people who are not in high school, who are not from my school.
Probably Janet gave me, uh, like a dubbed copy of London Calling by The Clash and I was like, “This is fucking great!” Look at this there are people who are like the world is ending, it’s a nuclear era, all that stuff you know, London’s down and out. I was just like, “They don’t care!” They’re like happy to make music about it. They’re not like complying with some mandatory optimism or anything, they’re saying, “Everything’s fucked and besides fuck you.” I was just like, “Ah, sign me up!” Whatever that is, I want to do that.
And then on that record there’s no rules, they all play different kinds of music and I’m like this is, this is excellent this is what I want to do. I wanted to go to school, I also knew that as a person, as a blind person, there’s not a lot of jobs right, so I had done in the summers construction and moving and a few, and worked in phone banks and stuff like that. So I realized the employment market was really tight for, you know, people like me, like if you have a disability your way more likely to be unemployed and be poor and so I was just like, “Fuck, I got to get some qualifications” or something.
So I applied to the universities in BC and they all said no and so I went to work in the summer after high school in a mine back up in the Northwest Territories, in a gold mine. At the same time I was writing, I wrote these appeals to the universities like, “Oh I’m, you know, like I’m not going to try to be a brain scientist or engineer, like I am going to do social sciences. You don’t have to look at my grades for math and chemistry. And also you should be trying to make your institutions accessible to people with disabilities.” And so UBC and SFU said, “No, fuck you” and the University of Victoria said, “Ok, we’ll give you a shot.” And so that’s where I went to.
I was doing alright in school, once I started in first year, you know, I all of a sudden realized, oh, I am not as dumb as I thought I was. Like, I had figured out how to read better and I could write and I realized these skills were more about eyesight. That was what was really blocking me from getting anywhere in high school. So once I started to realize that, that was good, but I still felt like a ghost in my own life and in my own world and stuff, so I sort taken that along too.
Yeah when I was at UVIC I was, uh, I had a radio show there called, “The War Measures Act” which was like I’d play punk-rock records and i’d do interviews and kind of politics and music and stuff and I really liked that because I was learning, you know, I was learning politics, I was learning tech, I was learning what music I liked and I started playing in bands around that time. And so you know you play in little crappy bands and you’ve got a, like you’ve got to do your own tech a lot of the time or repair your own amp or whatever. Like the first guitar amp I got was left in this guys apartment when his roommate moved out. It was a Peavey, like, uh, one twelve, combo amp and it had been dropped in a mud puddle, the guy had said, the guy who I got it off, Leo. And he said, “Oh it’s been dropped in a mud puddle, probably doesn’t work.” And I thought, “Oh that’s real exaggeration.” I went over and got it but there was a mud line like about four inches up the cab. It was like all brown because it really had been like obviously sat in a mud puddle and you can get a lot mud off but it never sounded like it should but I kind of liked how it sounded anyway.
And, uh, then I got a Sears guitar from, traded a guy a pack of smokes for the guitar and, uh, so yeah we were off and running and, uh, the guy who gave me the guitar for the pack of smokes he said, “Here’s how to play a power chord. That’s basically all you need to know.” I was like, “Great!” Let’s go make a band. So yeah I think it was like that, that stuff, um, it gave me an interest in music and broadcasting and radio documentary. It’s all kind of the same thing a little bit, you know, in my mind.
Sometime around when I was eighteen I think or I was nineteen, I did heroin for the first time. And immediately that feeling of being a ghost in your own life, that was just like, stopped, like a switch. You weren’t alienated from yourself, I wasn’t at war with myself, there wasn’t this terrible, I don’t know, terrible feeling of being outside and in flight from your own truth. Everything was fine, you know, and that was the thing with heroin was like, I always see in popular culture, like, how fucked up you get or how high you get or something is interpretation but the great euphoria in it was the relief of all those things that weren’t there anymore, so I actually felt just, I felt pretty normal. Oh this must be what everyone else is feeling all the time. Not out of control and crazy high or something like that, just like what an incredible relief it’s like you’ve been carrying a very heavy backpack and then you get to put it down. And so once you feel that you can’t not go back. So I just started going back all the time and if I could keep the money and keep a supply of heroin ok I could do fine working and going to school or whatever I was doing but periods of time I didn’t have money, uh, that led to chaos in everything, relationships, work, school, whatever.
Would have been mid nineties I got accepted and went to the London School of Economics and I studied political sociology there. It’s kind of a long shot, and um, while I was applying I was having about a two hundred dollar a day habit and so I got accepted and had to move my completely wired ass to the U.K. and I did and I was just immediately dope sick as soon as I got off the plane. You know I did the last big whack of Canadian dope in the airport and, um, thought this would see me through to Gatwick or whatever. And it did and I got through, you know, the customs I had all the you know letter of offer and stuff from the university printed and then when I got out in front of the airport, was just like, waves of dope sickness were starting, but my plan was just to get somewhere and hole up for, you know, ten days and knuckle through it. And, uh, I did try to do that and I did, I guess I did get through a lot of those days but I very quickly found someone I knew who lived Hackney and, uh, scored dope and swore I would never try to quit by cold turkey again.
I had this little tiny office in the same library that Karl Marx did his research in, the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences and I use to try to do my homework in there and also do dope in there and it was really, it was nice, they obviously had nice offices in there at one point and then they divided them all up into these really tiny ones. It was still the original height but it was super narrow and small and so this very strange shaped tall box with a leaded window in it and a clanking heater and um I just stayed in there, slept in there sometimes and the people who ran the library just didn’t really care. So, yeah it was nice.
It’s really laborious, like I have to use a very high powered magnifying glass and it only shows a couple of words at a time, so when most people read a few feet away from a book, you got it in your hands, I gotta be a few inches away so I see a few words at a time, so it’s actually, especially as I was learning it’s like a huge effort to extract the meaning of a sentence when you get a couple of words at a time and you got to kind of scan along at the rate that your brain can absorb the words, you know. It also helps you grasp an argument fast because like I don’t want to read the whole hundred pages to understand the argument I’ve got to figure out a way of understanding the argument quicker so there’s a certain kind of pattern recognition brain that you get when you can’t see. You always see patterns and disruptions to patterns, you know, like in identifying what’s a bus coming at you, out of the blurry mess that the world is or an argument coming at you in a large and densely written book.
So, I guess I had to find books that I really wanted to get something out of and social theory was some of them.
You know, social theory is where all the secret explanation of why the world is so fucked up lives. You know people have been writing books about why is the world like this for a couple hundred years and some of them unlock a great key to understanding history and everything that’s wrong currently. I love academia for that and I also hate that its fenced off from everything, it’s so hard to access. You know the tricks of trying to get into a school, to try and fund that, the very words the very way that people write and talk, can be intentionally, offensively, exclusionary, you know like a little castle trying to keep people out of, but they have good shit in that castle and I want to get there, I want to get some of that.
Yeah so I am starting to find like, the ability to do writing and get paid for it. I wrote essays for the Vancouver Sun a little bit. They used to pay fifty cents a word that was pretty good. You know, I covered the G8 summit in Calgary for the Sun and wrote while I was there. I remember buying enough methadone off the streets to see me through that week that I spent covering the G8 and the G8 protests in Calgary, which I was part of.
And there was other jobs that I was getting, like research contracts, and this and that. So it was, you know, it was coming together, and I had a good heroin connection, so I was able to just get up in the morning, call my dealer and have them come by and drop off a quarter or a couple of quarters or whatever.And that would see me through the day and I could go to work and do work and it was remarkably stable, like that was just, that was fine.
So I was maintaining a habit and a working life, pretty good and playing music, playing in bands, playing gigs on, that was all going fine. And my band mates didn’t, they knew, oh, he's gonna, he's gonna need a hit pretty soon. And they just like, um, let's take a break and then Garth's going to do his heroin and then we'll, you know, finish playing or whatever. Then we'll load out from the set, from the show or something.
That was all going pretty good, but, you know, the periodic disruptions of dope sickness were, were hard. And I eventually did realize, like, I wanted something that wasn't just this constant weird treadmill that, that, because you do spend all your money on it. Right. So even though I was working, I was always broke, like constantly broke.
I couldn’t, never was able to improve my music gear ever. Like I just always had terrible, shitty music gear and, you know, would get evicted, but, but then they wouldn't evict me all the way. Like I get the eviction notice and then struggle to pay the rent. And so I was just in this cycle like that and you know, the close calls with law enforcement and, uh, and the periodic dope sickness. I was just looking for alternatives. So I was getting myself towards methadone and I eventually, it wasn't easy, but I got on a methadone program and then I was still using heroin and methadone. And just other prescription opioids, you know, that weren't prescribed to me just like bought off the street, for a bunch of years after that.
You know, I would get periods of using methadone longer and longer without using anything else. And I started to be able to trust this could work and I started to be able to pay off debts and, you know, like I was getting my head above water. I was getting where I thought I wanted to be. And I met Lisa, she's a journalist, she was reporting from the Balkans. She speaks a couple languages, super smart, super interesting person, like really worldly going to journalism school. And we were just, it was just the first couple of months of us dating and, uh, we are going to hang out and I was just on the way to the pharmacy to get my methadone.
And then we were going to go hang out, you know, and it'd be all fine. And, uh, they said, “Oh, we don't have anything for you, you know, uh, the script didn't get faxed from your doctor” Or something like that, and it was the weekend so there's nothing I could do. Meant no methadone for, you know, at least until Monday, 48 hours. I was just like instantly in panic, like I'm going to be dope, sick, horribly dope, sick. I was on a high dose of methadone. This is going to be awful. So I, I just told Lisa like, look, “This is happening, I got to go deal with it and we'll just hang out later.” And she's like, “No, no, no, I'll come with you.” and I was like, “No, please don't, I'm just, I'm going to score drugs to make myself well, and I don't want you involved in that.”
But she insisted, she came with me and, uh, you know, I was already extremely dope sick and I was trying to get something together to make me not sick and really early in our relationship, she saw me in my sketchy life for all it was worth and didn't turn away, didn't run. And, uh, that was, uh, April the fifteenth of 2010.
And, uh, after that, I just was like, I don't, I don't want to be scoring drugs and being dope, sick. I just don't want any of that anymore. And so I really tried to just stick to methadone. And you know, I’ve mostly been successful at that since. And I just thought, you know, part of this is I'm just not going to, I'm not going to be spending time with, around drugs so much, I'm just gonna maybe put this whole thing behind me. Like maybe I don't have to think about heroin or anything anymore. Like I'll just go take the methadone and I don't have to worry about this anymore.
Luz Fleming:
Hey guys, this is Luz, the producer of Yard Tales. I want to take a minute to ask you for a favor, a show like this takes a lot of time and effort to produce. We're not a big team. It's mostly just me. We don't have any sponsors contributing money or influencing what I make or what I say.
This is independent media.
If that's something you support, please help me to keep making this show and providing it to you for free by donating to Yard Tales. Even one dollar helps, but if even a small percentage of listeners gave the price of one of those fancy cups of coffee, I know you've been drinking, well… you get the picture. Just go to yardtales.live/donate, and click on the button that says “Donate Now”. That's yardtales.live/donate. Any amount is really appreciated. Thanks so much.
And now let's get back to Garth's new life with Lisa.
Garth Mullins:
Her and me started making radio together. We made a few documentaries for CBC, freelance, you know, she was really confident with the journalism skills and we pitched documentaries and made them together, and it was a really great experience. I learned journalism skills off her and, and kind of radio documentary skills.
And, um, and we got married. We're starting to get a couple of, uh, awards even for the radio work we were doing together. And everything was, everything was pretty good, pretty stable, right, and, I just thought, you know, maybe I've maybe I've closed the door on things, heroin stuff.
On her recommendation I got PTSD treatment all of a sudden the ghost got reincorporated into me. I wasn’t apart from myself anymore and it's now it's even hard for me to remember what that's like, because it was such a dramatic change. And so, um, you know, I thought, “This is it.” This is what I had dreamed of for so long.
And I also, uh, felt guilty. Like I was leaving everyone I knew, everyone I came up with, behind and I'd learned how to make radio documentary. And I learned how to negotiate bureaucracies and use academic sources and stuff. And I was just, “Oh, I'll just take all those skills and go make my own life better. Fuck everybody else.” So I felt, I didn't feel good about that, you know.
So I thought a lot about what I would do and right around that time, BC started making changes to the methadone program and I noticed Oppenheimer park right on the corner, I remember the day, maybe 2014 or 2013, there are signs, you know, dope alert signs, like bad, dope signs on the, on the posts. And I had, I had been a drug user in the nineties when that was really common.
You know, I scored and use drugs on the downtown east side, when there was really strong, dope, and there was lots of overdoses and people were dying. And they, even the health board here declared it an emergency in the city, like, so I've lived through an overdose emergency before, and I saw these posts and I heard these two guys that I kind of knew of who used to hang around there and both died off the same batch.
And there was a siren somewhere and I got this feeling like in my stomach and in my feet, like this really deep sense of déjà vu, you know, it's like in the matrix where the black cat walks past you and you know the program's glitching and I'm like, “This is going to happen again. This is happening again.There's an overdose crisis. There's a, this whole thing is going to happen again.” And I, and then I thought I can't sit out.
You know, I want to be with the people who are pushing back, the people at the Vancouver area network of drug users. This is a union for drug users that people organized in the late nineties or starting then anyway.
And there's the people there that I've learned so much from and work with, like Laura Shaver, she's a, you know, a methadone activist, but also a really, for decriminalization and a safe supply of drugs and all that. And me and her have worked on a bunch of campaigns now, and lost friends together.
But then, back then I went to VANDU and just met her and, Laura is the person who taught me really how to talk about being a drug user. How to say this stuff and not be ashamed, you know, to look people in the eye and just say, this is who I am and just deal with it. I really learned a lot of that from her and, yeah, I felt like I couldn't sit out of this one, you know, because it's not right. It’s not right to sit out.
The government here switched people onto this new formulation of methadone and, it didn't work for most people. So people were getting dope sick and starting to use heroin again, who hadn't been for a long time, including just when fentanyl was entering the picture. So people were overdosing. So this switch to a poorer version of methadone for a minor cost savings really contributed to the overdose fatalities.
This switch happened about 2014 and so me and Laura and a bunch of people were lobbying the government to change it back and to stop. And, uh, we were in meetings for a long time and they said, “Oh, there's no proof of this. It's just all in your mind.” And so we met this guy, uh, Dr. Ryan McNeill, who was with the school of population and public health at UBC.
And he was like, “Well, we could do a study. We could just ask a wider group of people.”
And he did, really quick, and so did some other academics like Alyssa Greer and we started to get studies that showed that other people were feeling what we were feeling. So we started meeting with all the government officials we could, and we met with the minister of mental health and addictions, and we brought Ryan McNeill to these meetings and we would go around and say what our experience was with the methadone program.
You know, Laura would talk about it, our friend Chereece Keewatin would talk about it and Ryan would present the findings and the studies and, these meetings kind of were all the same. And we felt like a bit of a dog and pony show, and we weren't changing anything, you know, with the policy. And on the way out to one of those, I was saying, “Oh, you know, this might make an interesting radio show, but it's not changing anybody's mind in that room.”And Ryan said, “Oh yeah, we could probably do that.”
“So are we going to take the risk of having coffee and gear in the same location?”
So we brought together that group of people, including Laura and Chereece Keewatin and people like Dean Wilson, who was involved in the struggle to get insight going and like Jeff Loudon, who’s a guy I came up with for a long time. Just like a group of activists. Dave Murray, who kept Crosstown going, which is a pilot heroin assisted treatment program.
People who had decades in as drug users, like real veterans from the movement. We got everybody into a room and said, “Should we do this? Like we could do a podcast.”
And, um, that's pretty much how we started Crackdown.
You know, I've played in a lot of little bands and we played gigs to like a dozen people, or we played gigs to like the other people in the bands that are playing the show, you know, like I'm sure that I've played a gig that nobody came to who wasn't doing something like running the sound or working the door or being in one of the other bands.
So I was prepared for that. I was like, We'll make this and maybe it'll be for ourselves or, you know, a handful of people or whatever. But, um, it went right to the top of iTunes Canada, and just found a big enthusiastic audience almost from the first episode. I was so shocked, I honestly was very surprised.
“I’m Garth Mullins. This is Crackdown.”
“Episode One: War Correspondence.”
“Ginette Petitpas Taylor Canada's minister of health is making a speech.”
“The discussions yesterday and today, and had made this symposium very worthwhile for all of us. Although it's painful to have these conversations…”
Vague platitudes about the overdose crisis, but no real commitments.
“Our discussions over the past few days have shown that there are diverse views and many aspects of the opioid crisis. There was a time however…”
Then a young drug user activist takes the stage. Slipping behind the minister she unfurls a sign. “They talk, we die.” It says.
The activist is Olympia Trypis from Toronto. She holds the sign above her head, silently, defiantly. Unfazed and like a robot the minister keeps talking and we keep dying.
“I encourage you to continue to raise your voices and I promise that I will continue to listen. Once again thank you so much for participating in this and listening.”
I don't know. I wouldn't want to take credit for anything because so little has happened, you know. 2020, we had a record overdose deaths in British Columbia, so whatever the government says it's doing, it's not doing fuck all as far as I can tell. And I'm sure that we have contributed to there being a more polite conversation towards drug users.
And we have, you know, we've come alongside the drug user liberation movement, which has put demands like decriminalization and safe supply on the table and defunding the police. You know, we've been in our little way trying to amplify those kind of demands and that kind of action. So I think we've helped put that into some mainstream conversations, but I don't know that we've created any material changes.
Honestly, just between you and me, it's so grim. I couldn't possibly want to stand there and say I had anything to do with that. It's terrible. You know, we're losing, so we're not winning. Things are fucked. I'm fucking holding a mic out into this howling storm and documenting the apocalypse, and if you say, “How have you impacted that?” I don’t know, It's just, it's so grim. I can't, I can't see how.
If you see drug users on the street, that's a housing problem. There's way, way more drug users using inside in their houses. There's like between eighty and a hundred thousand people with what they call opioid use disorder in British Columbia. That's a big amount of people and most of us are at home. And when we die, we're mostly found at home and half of us, we’re getting up for work the next day.
And the reason you need a safe injection site is because the whole world becomes an unsafe injection site because people die from this and this demand actually came from the last overdose crisis a generation ago in the nineties when we had, if you can believe it, an overdose crisis because of really strong heroin combined with an epidemic, a virus.
So we got fentanyl and COVID now back then it was China white and HIV all at the same time and safe injection sites came about because of China white and HIV, because in a safe injection site, you always get, you know, a new syringe. Back when I was coming up, you couldn't get them, you know, we shared, I didn't understand how HIV transmitted.
I didn't understand properly and that's because we had people running this fucking place that did not want me to. Bill Vander Zalm, he was a premier from the eighties, fundamentalist, Christian, who opposed, proper HIV education in high school. So he made sure I didn't know properly.
We had the premier of Alberta as a young guy in San Francisco at the same time as me going to his, whatever God university he was going to there and being an activist against gay rights, you know, like he was part of the problem at the time. I mean he still is.
That's what safe injection sites are for is to prevent the transmission of HIV and also to give people Naloxone and reverse an overdose. They're a hundred percent effective at that, you know, like there, no one's died in a safe injection site. And the reason you need safe supplies because not everyone is in a safe injection site.
Like I said, most people die at home and they die from a contaminated drug supply, and that drug is available at every pharmacy. You know, there's a pharmaceutical equivalent of pretty much every drug people are doing right now. It's behind the counter it's by prescription. The only thing that stops us is the rules around how to get them.
So we could end the overdose crisis tomorrow. You look at the last year or so, and it's all been about the COVID vaccine. Is there going to be one, doing the research for one, um, getting the contracts for one. When are they going to be approved? When am I going to get them? All about that vaccine. Well, we've had a vaccine for the overdose crisis for, since drugs became illegal, for over a hundred years and it's practically in every pharmacy. It's just the cowards who are in charge won't let us get it.
So, yeah, I mean, people are dying, not from bad drugs, but from bad drug policy.
When I was a kid, you know, I had bullies and being a disabled kid makes you an easy target and then there was, you know, an adult in my life that should not have been in charge of kids who was in charge of kids and that fucked me up. And I became, like I said, kind of a ghost in my own life, but for my oldest pal he was taken from his mom.
He was born on the Curve Lake First Nation and when he was eight months old, the state snatched him and all his brothers and sisters before and after him off of the Curve Lake First Nation and gave them to white families. And he went through his whole life just thinking his mom didn't want him and threw him away, and threw his brothers and sisters away.
And I can't imagine what that does to you. My little becoming a ghost traumas can't hold a fucking nothing, got nothing on him, got nothing on my pal Jeff. You know the state was there for him to provide carceral services, to arrest him, to fuck him up. And so colonial policy on policing, incarceration, the sixties scoop, the legacy of residential schools, housing and drugs followed him and marked his life at every moment.
And so as an indigenous guy, he's in the cross hairs in a way that I won't ever be and that's why indigenous people are overrepresented in arrests, and carding, and prison populations and in overdose fatalities. Because that aspect of colonization, you know, like Jeff was ripped right out of his family and his life and his nation.
You know, I was just, I was set beside mine I could still see mine. I may have felt like a little ghost in mine, but I was still there. He was just beamed up. Like by a fucking white alien spaceship or something.
So like that shit, you know, you get displaced, you get displaced and displaced and displaced, you know, there's the first displacement of colonization and then there's the displacement of gentrification and poverty and a drug war and everything else. I mean, the drug war started here in Vancouver out of racism.
There was a great wave in the beginning of the 20th century of anti-immigrant fear, anti-Chinese racism. They had something called the Asiatic Exclusion League, had a big parade, big march down Hastings Street, and you know, the city's great and good were there, and there were speeches, and then there was a burning of an effigy and someone smashed a window.
And then there was a riot and this white mob went and smashed up Chinatown and Japan town.
And then after, you know, in the months after that the federal government sent out a senior level bureaucrat to come and sort of check out what happened and to, you know, does their compensation due to some business or something. And this guy found out, oh no, there's opium being produced here. And, you know, the press was full of these breathless stories about how it's a danger to white women and girls, you know, the foreign influence can travel through the opium pipe.
So it was made illegal. So the Opium Act of 1908 was there's a straight line from racism to the Opium Act of 1908. And the first prohibition law in Canada was the Indian act that at the end of the 19th century, outlawed alcohol for indigenous people.
So there's never been prohibition laws, there's never been a move in the drug war that isn't racist. It's not accidental. It's not a by-product, it's not a fellow traveler of the drug war. The drug war is colonialist and racist, right to the core and so since, you know, the first drug arrest in Canada happened here, it happened in 1908. It happened right behind the Carnegie Center. This Chinese guy and the newspapers couldn't even get his name right. Like it was not an Anglo name, it wasn't a Scottish name, so they couldn't spell it right. Or consistently.
And so I don't even, we don't even know who he is or who he was, but that was where it started is right there. Right in the downtown east side. That's why VANDU is there. That's why there's this historic mandate to end this thing here.
You know it's hard to, it's hard to think of your life as a coherent narrative. I just think, man, there's a bunch of random shit that's happened to me. And, uh, I hope it's leading to something. But, uh, it's not a redemption story, you know, it's not like I found the bottom and stopped digging and followed some steps.
And now I'm a comeback kid. I, I just don't feel like that. You know, I still take methadone every morning. I took it this morning. I know that if I get cut off, I am supremely fucked and I know that I probably won't always be able to a hundred percent keep to just methadone. You know, I'm gonna, I'm going to fuck up.
Everything's a struggle. There's no nice linear progression, but it's better. You know, like I do not feel like a ghost haunting my own life anymore. I feel like I'm more in possession of who I am and I can get my fists up fast and get back in that fucking fight and maybe land a few punches for our side, you know.
I want to be a foot soldier in the drug war, not a victim of it. I want to fight back and I want to win it. I want to win the drug peace. I want to be part of that. You know, people have been fighting for a long time. People took risks to make sure that I got harm reduction supplies, that I got new needles back in the day that I got access to methadone.
And I owe it to people who fought before who spent their time and risk their Liberty for me, I owe it to pay it forward. So fucking aye I'm going to do that.
Stay safe and for God's sakes keep six.
Luz Fleming:
Keep six, meaning watch your back for the cops, which is something many of us say to each other when having to navigate forbidden space. Thanks so much Garth for being so open and sharing your incredible and powerful stories with us. You always provide us with so much in everything you do. We really appreciate the work you're doing.
If you aren't already following the Crackdown Podcast, I strongly urge you to check it out. It can be found at crackdownpod.com and you can follow Garth on Twitter @garthmullins. You can also go to soundcloud.com/garthmullins to hear a bunch of his amazing music, radio shows and other awesome audio.
I recorded and produced this episode of Yard Tales on the unceded territory of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations, or Vancouver, BC. Yard Tales is executive produced by Jacob Bronstein. Andy Outis is the design director, production assistance by Davis Lloyd. Additional music and sound designed by Garth Mullins, myself and James Ash.
You might hear a fair amount of overlap between the music on Yard Tales and Crackdown because James has contributed so much to both shows. Thanks for all that you do James and thanks for helping to get Garth on Yard Tales. Shout out to Andy Cotton for the dope theme music. Thanks for letting me put a little remix on it for this show.
If you like Yard Tales be sure to follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And please use Apple Podcasts to rate and review Yard Tales, because it really helps point more listeners to the show. You can find more information, images, and additional audio at yardtales.live and check us out on Instagram @yardtales at Facebook @yardtalespodcast.
If you want to leave feedback or reach out for any reason. I send an email to info@yardtales.live. Be sure to listen to the end of each episode, where we feature audience members, own Call-In Yard Tales, and be sure to tune in next week when luminary, musician, producer, and engineer Scott Harding tells his own life-changing Yard Tale.
Scott Harding:
I guess, you know, on impact I just sort of closed my eyes and felt like we were kind of spinning around, but I couldn't really tell what was going on. And then it kind of like opened my eyes and I'm like, okay, I can't feel my legs.
Luz Fleming:
And if you're still listening, that means you might've had a real connection to Yard Tales, and maybe you have a Yard Tale of your own that you want to tell. If so, go to yardtales.live/callinyardtales for detailed instructions on how to do so. If we dig your story, we'll feature it in a future episode.
And now we'll let James Ash take us out with his own Call-In Yard Tale.
James Ash:
Hey, how are you doing? My name is James Ash, and this is my Yard Tale. So in 2003, I was living in the Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and I read a story in the local paper about a woman named Lisa who was battling cancer. And she had made a list of all the things that she wanted to do before she died and had checked most of the items off that list.
She wanted to visit her grandson in Vancouver, she wanted to play bingo, she wanted to have ribs at her favorite restaurant and she'd done all those things. One of the things that she had not done was that she wanted to sing again and apparently she had been quite a singer in her day.
So Lisa was staying in a hospital, um, that I used to go to weekly with a group of youth and we would volunteer together running recreation programs for seniors.
So I decided to call her up and, uh, we met at the hospital for a coffee. And we had a long visit, talked a lot about, about life and music, both music lovers. And, uh, before I left, uh, I Lisa, know that I ran a music program for children and youth and we wondered if she might come down and sing a couple of songs with us.
So I asked her what her favorite songs were and she shared about “On Broadway” and “Stand By Me”. And, but, you know, she didn't know if she'd be able to sing them anymore. And even if she could she’d have to learn them in a different key as when her cancer had spread to her throat, she had to go through extensive therapy just to learn how to talk again, never mind, sing.
So before I left, she, she cleared her throat and she sang a few bars for me. And, you know, you can tell she was a little bit rusty as the first time she had sung since, uh, going through all of this therapy. And, uh, but she had this beautiful, beautiful, powerful voice and she sang with so much feeling, so we learned some songs and we invited her down to the community center and she's really very weak when she arrived, took her quite a while to get from her car to the community center.
She was using a walker, I remember she had people on the other side of her trying to help her. And she came in and sat down and she watches the kids deejaying and playing some songs and then she has some help to help her up to the turntables and she hopped on it. She was scratching this Dr. Dre instrumental after the kids showed her how to use the turntables, you know, for a woman who could barely stand, who could barely walk. She transcended her illness and she sang she belted out songs for like two hours that night. And I had never experienced anything like that before.
And fast forward to a few weeks later, and Lisa has passed away and I'm a pallbearer at her funeral.
It was a very emotional time for me. I'd lost my father to cancer and so it's bringing up all these emotions for me as well. Fast forward a few months and I'm now living on the unceded territory's of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Vancouver, BC, Canada, and volunteering at the Carnegie Center in the pool room at the Carnegie Center, corner of Main and Hastings.
So l leave my volunteer shift that day, walk down the front steps out onto the sidewalk onto Hastings street, walking towards the film school where I had a meeting aand a gentleman approaches me, asked if I want to purchase some items and said, “You know, I'm all good. Thanks for the offer, I’m good” And he busts into this stand up comedy routine about all these different things he could sell me.
And he, he was really funny and we both had a good laugh.
And then he'd asked if we could just walk and talk for a bit. So he hadn’t had a normal conversation in a while, so I said, “For sure.” So we're, we're walking towards the campus and he would stop a lot along the way and talk to folks and then catch up with me and as we got to know each other turned out we were both drummers.
We talked a lot about music and different bands and different drummers and whatnot. So we get to the courtyard at the film school and we're about to part ways and he says, “Hey, you know, you mentioned you're from Winnipeg. He said, you know, my mom was from Winnipeg. She was a singer and her name was Lisa.”
And I pause for a second, and then I jumped in and I said her last name and he took a few steps back from me and just seemed like he'd been hit by a truck and was so shocked. And he just said like, “How the hell did you know my mother?” And then I put it together that this was her son, Ben, who she'd been, estranged from for some time.
They'd been through some difficult periods. And I said, you know, I was a pallbearer at your mom's funeral before I came to Vancouver, you know, I said, I have, I have photographs of your mom and video of your mom singing for the last time before she died, you know, anyways, he broke down and wept and we had this very tender moment together.
And, uh, just said, “Hey, hold on for me for a minute.” Went up to film school and told the head of my department, “I need to blow off our meeting. That's something that's important to do.” And, uh, we went and had lunch at a place called the 44 and talked and whatnot and he shared that he was homeless at the time.
He had just gotten out of jail. Didn't know where his mom was buried. He just literally had nothing going his way. Suffering with chronic health problems and no place to live and just really, really, really struggling. And, uh, we, so we hung out over the next couple of weeks and we'd go shoot pool at the Carnegie center and we would listen to music and whatnot and, you know, I think it was, it was really important that we met and I feel like music was like this container that was something that his mother loved and he loved and, and, and I loved, and that credible force that it is, somehow was able to bring us all together and for everyone to have some closure around the significant losses that we've had in our lives and to just remember that we cross each other's paths for a reason.
And, that’s my Yard Tale.