Historicizing Vancouver’s Liquor License Moratorium for the Downtown Eastside as Dispossessory Public Health Practice

Drug users have organized in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) for decades to change public health policy. People who use non-beverage alcohols and people who are criminalized for drinking in public, or “illicit drinkers' ', have been excluded from the harm reduction movement. Meanwhile, policies that limit access to alcohol in the DTES drive people living with dependencies towards unsafe substitutes One such policy is a 1988 moratorium on liquor licenses in the DTES, identified through historical research I completed with the Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education (EIDGE). Working with EIDGE over 3 years, I used archival research to investigate the political history of the moratorium to support EIDGEs alcohol harm reduction work. Simultaneously, EIDGE and I wrote the Vancouver Alcohol Strategy (VAS), a policy document informed by drinkers' experiences and historical research. I argue that the 1988 moratorium is best understood as a continuation of alcohol policy’s colonial history in B.C. The idea for the policy emerged from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA), an activist group that mostly excluded drinkers, around 1980. Around this time, more Indigenous people were moving into the DTES, likely changing the demographics of illicit drinking. Council passed the moratorium after being granted new powers in 1987. DERA worked with the City of Vancouver, who sought to upgrade “problematic” Single Room Occupancy Hotels (SROs) that house DTES pubs, to implement the policy between 1982 and 1990. Around 1000 licensed “seats'' left the DTES between 1988 and 2021, likely making affordable alcohol harder to find. I suggest that the moratorium and its antecedents contribute to the construction of a contemporary alcohol-specific cordon therapeutique in Vancouver’s DTES - An ostensibly public health-informed and regime of liquor control that frames DTES drinkers as pathological, therefore warranting the creation selective prohibition around them while neoliberal logics of individual risk management dominate health promotion discourses elsewhere.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.