Peter M. German, Q.C., Ph.D. Deputy Commissioner (ret’d.), Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Life and death on the streets of Vancouver parallel what occurs in every large city within North America as a result of the scourge of hard drugs, be they heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, other opioids, or any combination or permutation thereof. Norm Boucher devoted his policing career to working as a drug cop. He witnessed the ongoing drug crisis from a vantage point that few, other than the victims themselves and a cadre of dedicated social workers, ever see up close and personal.
Norm Boucher was a Mountie, a member of Canada’s federal police force, the fabled Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But his task was not to ride horses while wearing a scarlet tunic, to drive sled dogs across the frozen tundra, or to drive code three to 911 calls. His chosen occupation within the Force and the reason he joined, was to “work drugs,” as both an undercover operator and a member of the drug section.
The RCMP first began policing the drug dens and drug houses of downtown Vancouver one hundred years ago, when it was renamed from the Royal North West Mounted Police and became Canada’s national police force, responsible for federal statute enforcement, including the opium legislation of the day. In Vancouver, the drug section grew over time to become a large division, composed of multiple units that pursued heroin, cocaine, and marijuana investigations, and engaged in cross-border operations. Specialized units sprouted up to better investigate these crimes. Among those was an undercover unit, composed of select members, each given a unique number, and allowed to undertake oftentimes dangerous assignments.
As an undercover operator, Boucher was highly trained to integrate within a milieu, in which addicts and traffickers live much of their adult lives. Criminality is like wallpaper in this world. It is everywhere. There is no road map for undercover officers. Developing a fine-tuned sense of survival, Boucher worked a particularly difficult beat in downtown Vancouver, a city once believed to house more heroin addicts per square mile than any other in North America. With supplies entering the country by land and ship, his job was to combat the deadly trade using his intellect, his senses, and a keen awareness of his surroundings.
Horseplay describes a moment in time in the history of Vancouver. The redevelopment of a wide swath of old tenements, hotels, and factories in preparation for Expo 86 had not begun. Vancouver had yet to be discovered by the world. In similar fashion, society was closer in time to the past than to the future. The downtown Granville Street Strip had fallen from its earlier neon heights to becoming a sleazy den of stripper bars, adult film stores, and bars. The early 1980s were heady times in downtown Vancouver and even more so in the drug scene. Hard and soft drugs were flowing through corridors of the city. Hardened police units worked the Strip in plainclothes, throttling suspected users and traffickers carrying packets of heroin in their mouths. The legalization of drugs was the furthest thing from the minds of most persons. Furthermore, as Boucher notes, going after the money generated by drug sales was an approach still in its infancy. Parliament did not outlaw money laundering until years after he worked the Granville Strip. In Boucher’s time, it was all about the drugs and getting it and the traffickers off the streets.
Horseplay represents eight months in the life of a microcosm of society who spend their lives in or near a strip of seedy, rundown bars waiting for their next fix of heroin. Most had experienced run-ins with the law and were hypervigilant to the presence of cops from the drug squad as well as undercover operators. The author was already an experienced operator before taking on this assignment, which finds him starting from scratch to ingratiate himself with the addict milieu. He has no other police officers or agents to assist him, and his cover team remains at a discreet distance.
Careful not to divulge the tactics of a police officer turned hype, Boucher does provide insights into the life of an undercover officer. His role was particularly complicated during the eight months of Horseplay because he was dropping in and out of two worlds. Unlike deep cover officers who live away from family for a prolonged period, Boucher lived with his wife in the suburbs of Vancouver, at least on those days or weekends when he could escape the job. He also dropped in on his cover team of officers at their safe house and completed his notes and expense forms, before returning to his adopted life.
Observing that all undercover operators transition from feeling like an outsider in their undercover role, to accepting it as their new reality, Boucher acknowledges that the highs and lows of the heroin scene became his new persona and one in which he felt comfortable. He likens it to a bar. Everyone is either an outsider or a local. He made that transition at the Blackstone Hotel bar and in the drug trade operating in and around its environs. The author describes the ravages of hard drugs on a civilian population, heavily addicted and desperate for the next fix. As a police officer, his role was to arrest the traffickers and hope thereby to reduce or stem the illicit trade. It would be easy to throw one’s hands in the air and ask why. It almost seems like a never-ending task, and in some ways it is. That is the life of a police officer. As one senior sergeant told me when I began my career, your first day will mimic your last. In many ways it is a thankless job in a world composed of humans, with all the frailties that we know so well.
Boucher was not immune to what was occurring around him. In fact, from the time that he first enters the Blackstone Hotel bar, it is obvious that he sees real people and not police targets. He develops a rapport with street people, hookers, addicts, those with mental health issues, and traffickers. He must duck and cover like a boxer and sometimes even take the first jab. Not only does he see real people, but he sees humans stuck in a rut fuelled by drugs. Despite this, it was his job to develop criminal cases against them and get them off the streets for at least a short while and hopefully have them undergo treatment programs.
Looking back on his career, in particular, the eight months of Horseplay, Boucher does not provide glib solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Instead he carefully analyzes the various approaches to the “drug problem,” and recognizes that enforcement is just one aspect of a much larger societal response required to stem the daily deaths.
The RCMP has remained Canada’s national police force for one hundred years, precisely because of members like Norm Boucher, who were prepared to make great personal sacrifices, risking their health and home life, in the hopes of making a difference. Working on a drug unit is not easy. It has its highs and lows and you deal with persons in every walk of life, but mostly with those who are addicted or who feed off addicts. It is dirty work. It often appears that you will never make a difference. All of these facts and sentiments are magnified in an undercover role. Very few police officers ever make this commitment and of those who do, only a few can continue in the work for long without “burning out” in one fashion or another.
Vancouver and its drug scene have changed dramatically through the years. Today, it is estimated that over 1,000 addicts die on Vancouver’s streets every year due to overdoses, with no end in sight, a shocking indictment of a society in which the average standard of living is among the highest in the world.
The urgency of the problem is not lost on anyone who travels down Hastings Street as it meets Main. The response to the ongoing drug crisis, an epidemic in some communities, has largely moved away from enforcement and reducing supply to finding medical alternatives to drug addiction—harm reduction. Boucher acknowledges that this approach has its place, although it is not lost on him that reducing harm implies that harm continues. The RCMP no longer has a drug squad in Vancouver, choosing instead to direct its resources to high-end organized crime, which may or may not include drug trafficking, and to anti-terrorism priorities.
Horseplay is an honest book by a police officer turned author who seeks not to tell his story, but the story of a community and a country’s response to the illegal traffic in drugs during the early 1980s. Despite the gap in time between then and now, there is one constant. Hard drugs continue to kill and continue to do untold damage to individuals and families. The conversations recorded in Horseplay are taking place tonight in seedy hotels and bars throughout Vancouver and every other large North American city. Seldom however have these firsthand accounts found their way into print. Quite simply, addicts and traffickers do not write books. Here however we have a firsthand account told by a person who moved seamlessly from one world into another and, with the aid of contemporaneous notes, gives us a play-by-play of life on the Strip. His account does not represent vainglory, but that of nitty-gritty life in the underworld, a world that few care much about and fewer yet will visit. Boucher has done himself and the RCMP proud.
Heroin. They used to call it “Horse,” and it has been a part of Vancouver’s history ever since someone learned to produce it for the street market. In 1983, the Granville Strip was where you went if you were looking for it. The eight months I spent with the heroin users of the Blackstone Hotel, living their life, changed the way I looked at drugs, and I knew as soon as the undercover operation was over that I needed to tell their story someday. Once past the violence, the hustle for a bigger deal, the “rips,” and the search for a bigger “connection,” addiction revealed itself to me in its many forms, each as different as the person it was attached to.
While I knew that this slice of Vancouver’s history with heroin was important, it was never more important than it is today. To understand today’s drug crisis, it may be useful to look back to where we were then, before needle exchange programs, supervised injection sites, and before AIDS decimated the drug user population. The heroin users of the Blackstone were not the down-and-out heroin addicts we see in the back alleys of Vancouver’s Eastside. They were capable and resourceful individuals, some good, and some bad, caught in a world of violence and prejudice, who lived with, and often accepted, their addiction. Living with them opened my eyes to the world of the opiate addict before the back alleys and the overdoses, a world that still exists today, but is closed to the public. The path to addiction is a lonely one, and my time on the Granville Strip gave me a window into that path.
Today’s opioid drug crisis obliges us to take action in one form or another, but, to see clearly, we need to step back from the back alleys and overdoses. Addiction is a mental health condition that affects everyone in one form or another, and this is where we need to begin. I spent many years in the RCMP working on national and international drug issues, dealing principally with supply and harm reduction. But when someone asks me what I think of the current drug crisis, wondering how, despite all efforts to make it better, we find ourselves back where we began, I am compelled to look back to my time undercover, hustling the streets with the heroin users of the Granville Strip.
In writing this story, I have tried to remain faithful to the language of the period. Some of the terms used, including references to ethnicity, may exceed the boundaries of what is now deemed acceptable, but they reflect the location and the time of the narrative.
The story was recreated with the help of notes made at the time. Many of the events were also etched in my mind, being tied to feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and wonderment. I also changed the names of the people I dealt with to preserve their reputation, good or bad. Since many of the events took place in a bar, I also met a multitude of characters over this eight-month period. Minor characters, some of whom came across my path on a daily basis, were recreated to best convey the collective impact they had on me, and to provide a faithful reconstruction of my experiences on the street. My role undercover was to observe and capture criminal events as they occurred, but my aim with this story is to bring readers along the human side of this journey, with the expectation that they will come out of it with their own experiences.
Finally, I am proud of my thirty-five years of service as a member of the RCMP. I value the work we did during my career, and have great respect for the organization. While my story aims to portray accurately the events and atmosphere of the time, it in no way compromises any techniques of investigation.
Ottawa, Ontario
December, 2019
I pull the heavy door open and see them for the first time, sitting with their backs against the wall, exactly where I was told they would be. They throw a short glance at me as I walk past them to a table near the bar. I order two drafts. I am nervous as hell, but I have worked for weeks to prepare for this, poking needles into the veins of my arms, and building a story to go with it. And it finally has meaning.
It will take time before I get anywhere close to them, so I take a sip of the cold beer, and try to decide who is dirty. Rick Crowley is sitting alone and, like the other hypes, no longer pays attention to me. I can’t really tell if he or the others are dealing, but it really doesn’t matter because I’m not going to score heroin tonight. I’m here for the long run, and I only want to be seen, get a feel for the place, and give them an idea of who I am before I become a threat to them. It also feels good just to see their faces.
In his late twenties, Crowley is the youngest. His ice-blue eyes are wide open and dart toward any movement, like the eyes of a cat. I know that he is violent and sneaky. I also know that Captain Kangaroo, sitting alone at the next table, has over forty years of criminal record under his belt; that Kitty Baker, chatting with a group of as yet nameless hypes, is streetwise and has been around for a while; and that Cindy, her small frame hopping from table to table, is violent. There are a few stories of knifings for fifty bucks and of undercover officers being beaten up. Everybody’s record says they know the game: robbery, drug trafficking, theft, fraud, and violence all centred on heroin trafficking. To a cop, it’s a world to dive into where the line between good and bad is as clear as the surface of a dead pool of water. No ambiguity. They hate you for what you represent and you hate them for what they are. The Granville Strip is full of people who would rob and kill for fifty bucks, and finding myself in this greasy hole, inside the big pulsating city, makes me feel good and scared.
I watch everything they do, how they sit, and how they talk to each other. It isn’t enough to understand them. I want to be like them because this is going to be my home for the next couple of months. It has been two years since my last operation, two years of shirt and tie work in an office full of cops, and I know that it will take me a while to feel like I belong.
The heroin users stare nonchalantly at the scene in front of them. They don’t pay attention to each other except for a few words here and there. Each has a glass of beer on the table. The beer has lost its foam, but it allows them to stick around for a while.
For my first day in the Blackstone we picked Welfare Wednesday, the day people get their welfare cheques, and the place is filling quickly. Bartenders in white shirts work behind large jars of pickled sausages and eggs, to pour draft beer from frosty taps into trays of empty glasses. The music is getting loud and the crowd louder, as waiters begin to hustle briskly from tables to bar and then back to tables. Ninety-five cents a draft, and when a buck is given, they keep the nickel.
An ashtray sits on Crowley’s table and he taps his cigarette against it. I walk by his table to go to the pay phone and he looks at me square. I’m the intruder and this is his place, but I know who he is, and he doesn’t know me. That counts for something.
Picking up the receiver, I take a deep breath and begin to relax. I look around me and let it all soak in.
People come in through the front doors and from the alley through the back door, some of them after smoking a joint. All over the bar, small round tables are covered in red terry cloth to soak up the spilled beer, the same terry cloth I have seen in every bar of every small town I have been in, working undercover from Kamloops to Fort St. John. Months of work going from small town to small town, from lumber towns nested in thick forests amid the dark Pacific mountains, to the dusty towns of the cold plains of the northern interior, with their pumpjacks looking like strange, dark birds stubbornly stabbing the ground. There is toughness about the people in these bars. Not the kind of superficial and rehearsed toughness you see in fist fights, but a higher level of self-sufficiency. You have a feeling that they do not rely on their town to keep them going, but that they are what keeps the town alive. Vancouver is different. Like most big cities, people come to it because they want a piece of it.
At the far end, near the small dancing area, you must climb a few steps to get to the pool tables. A few people sit, sipping their beer while waiting for their turn to play. As in most bars, the patrons surrounding the pool tables keep their attention on the game as they await their turn, their quarters lining up on one of the edges of the tables. Playing pool is always a good way to get into a bar crowd. I like the game and, being a little shy, I often use it to get into the local scene. Nothing like sinking the eight ball, taking a sip of beer, and then waiting for the next in line to come and play. And when you lose, you sit and talk, and it goes on from there. I am tempted to go over and lay a quarter on the table, but it would take me too far away from the heroin dealers, so I decide to go at it cold somewhere else.
In the middle of the floor, thick cigarette smoke rises above a number of tables pulled together to accommodate a large group. Partiers who appear to know each other well, couples coming down to the Blackstone to blow off some steam, hear the music, and have some beers. They don’t interact with anyone else so I’ll probably not see them again. I figure it best to stay away from the centre of the room. I need regulars, people who will remember me, and with whom I can connect tomorrow or the next day. Regulars usually have a favourite table in a corner of the bar. They don’t hang out somewhere in the middle. I look at the older couple sitting at a table next to mine. I didn’t think much about them when I came in and they don’t seem to have anything to do with the heroin dealers, but they are having a good time, and they seem to know a few of the regulars.
Looks to me like a good place to start.