John Turvey, DEYAS founder, retires

The non-democratic structure of the Downtown Eastside Youth Activity Society held the needle-exchange back, and its failures illustrate the caustic politics of all organizations in the area

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Ill health has hastened the retirement of Downtown Eastside Youth Activity Society [DEYAS] founder and leader, John Turvey. It's terrible that anyone, after a life of hard work, has to face declining health and physical suffering at retirement. However, an assessment of Turvey and DEYAS needs to be completed. DEYAS is a model non-governmental organization in the downtown eastside. It's structure, goals, and politics typify many such organizations in the area. A critical assessment of DEYAS's record would contribute to a useful assessment of these types of organizations throughout the area.

Turvey and DEYAS's crowning achievement remains the needle exchange. However, the needle exchange is also the central focus of criticisms of DEYAS. The main transmission of AIDS and Hep C was, and is, through the sharing of needles. The goal of the needle exchange was to stop the transmission of these diseases by providing users access to clean needles.

In 1995, the BC Ministry of Heath invited Dr Don DesJarlais, the director or research at the Chemical Dependency Institute, Beth Israel Medical Centre, New York City, to Vancouver. Dr DesJarlais said that part of the problem contributing to the HIV epidemic in Vancouver at that time was the limited number of clean needles the exchange dispensed per person. He said the most effective exchanges don't limit the number of needles handed out. Instead they "encourage large-volume exchanges, without limits, with hundreds to . even thousands of needles and syringes" being exchanged at a time. Turvey responded to the criticism by saying, "I've eaten shit all across Canada because we were the only syringe exchange in North America with a limit."

At that time DEYAS offered up to 42 new rigs per week, with the possibility of a further four per night from the exchange vans, for a total of 70 per week. Turvey felt this sufficient, because, he said, "I have a hard time figuring out who's going to be wearing out 10 syringes a day." But DesJarlais was not saying the user who accessed large quantities of needles would be using them. He saw, wrote reporter Rebecca Wisod, that, "users who make large volume exchanges are clearly distributing needles to their peers, and can be trained to act as AIDS educators."

But to distribute large quantities of needles would effectively decentralize the network of exchanges, and therefore weaken the central exchange. Working collaboratively with users, and as I will elaborate below, with other groups fighting the epidemics of Hep C and HIV, was precisely what DEYAS and Turvey have never been able to do. The anti-democratic structure and culture at DEYAS, as well as the politics of non-governmental organization funding, lay at the bottom of this problem.

Just as DEYAS could not collaborate with their addict "clients," they could not work collaboratively with other groups focussed on the same problems. For example, DEYAS closed down the first safe fixing site in Vancouver. Due to politics of non-governmental organization funding, activists in a small group called the Creative Empowerment Society accessed their funding through the auspices of DEYAS. (Basically they were considered too radical to fund directly.) This group ran a safe site on Powell Street. Eventually, Turvey pulled the funding from the project.

A key to understanding this act is that there are few dollars available for social service funding and the major preoccupation of the non-political, non-democratic organizations on the downtown eastside is to access what funding there is. A corollary of accessing funding is limiting the competition for that funding. So the larger groups (Native Health, DEYAS, Donwtown Eastside Residents Association, Raycam Community Centre) effectively work together to control available funding.

For an illustration of the nasty politics that the competition for funding leads to, consider what went on when the VANDU needle exchange was closed down by the police. DEYAS jumped at this, seeing the action as an opportunity, as the move could leave DEYAS once more the sole large distributor of needles in the area. Judy McGuire, then the manager of DEYAS, sent an e-mail to health officials and politicians claiming "research" by the VIDUS project showing that there was already an adequate supply of needles in the area. A key local researcher, whose work was based on results from the VIDUS project, Evan Wood, denied the assertion. The limited operating hours of the DEYAS exchange and the erratic nature of the DEYAS distribution vans were cited as factors contributing to the sharing of needles.

While other groups like VANDU, the Carnegie Centre and DERA have a democratic structure, DEYAS has not. As recently as 2001, VANDU activist Anne Livingston pointed out the anti-democratic structure to some of the biggest organizations on the downtown eastside. She said that the board at Native Health, another of the big organizations on the downtwon eastside, "is elected secretly," and she went on, "the DEYAS board isn't elected at all, it is appointed by John Turvey."

DEYAS is a typical Vancouver downtown eastside non-governmental organization, based on social service clientelism, and organized around a strong leader, with little if any input from the "clients" whom the organization theoretically "serves." In summary, the top-down anti-democratic structure of DEYAS was the source of its weakness, and ultimately seriously handicapped its work. Funding concerns preclude a progressive political agenda, and fosters a culture of political timidity. Ultimately, many organizations contribute more to the status quo than to change.

It's little wonder DEYAS became more and more dissociated from the ongoing crisis on the dowtown eastside and found itself working together with the reactionary side of the Non-Partisan Association civic party, the police, and the right-wing Community Alliance, arguing against the safe-fixing site until near the end. And that is the tragedy of DEYAS, and of John Turvey.

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