Fighting for Space- a book launch and harm-reduction history
Through the 1990s, Vancouver experienced a drug crisis similar to the epidemic that America 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 and what lessons should be applied now.
He'll deliver a history of harm-reduction activism that connects the story in the book with North America’s response to the fentanyl crisis today.
- FREE event and everyone is welcome -
The continent is in the grips of an overdose epidemic. In 2016, there were an estimated 64,000 fatal drug overdoses across the United States, up from less than 15,000 twenty years earlier. For people under the age of fifty, an overdose associated with an opioid is now the number one cause of death in the United States.
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 drug users and their allies. In "Fighting for Space," Lupick recounts how 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.
Books will be for sale at the event and Lupick will be available for signings and discussion.
This event is held in partnership with Reframe Health and Justice, Chosen Few, AIDS United, and The Potter's House.
This book tour was only made possible with generous support from the Seeing is Believing campaign and Arsenal Pulp Press.
To learn more about the book, visit fightingforspace.com.