Active History

Undercover Vancouver police officers arresting a “long hair.” Vancouver Police Museum & Archives P00881.

Michael Boudreau

Fifty years ago, on Saturday, 7 August 1971, Vancouver’s Gastown district erupted into chaos as police, some on horse-back and many wielding batons, waded into a throng of “hippies” who had gathered for the Gastown Smoke-In & Street Jamboree. Approximately 2000 people attended the Smoke-In to call for the legalization of marijuana. According to the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s first “underground” newspaper, the Smoke-In was intended to be a “peaceful…, and joyous high-energy event aimed at making the marijuana laws irrelevant.”[i] Many of the young people who had attended the Jamboree also did so to publicly denounce “Operation Dustpan” which the Vancouver police had launched in July. The focus of Operation Dustpan was Gastown, the so-called “soft-drug capital” of Canada, and the “long hairs” (hippies) who called it home. This was an effort by the police to clean up the city’s drug and hippie problem. But critics argued that Operation Dustpan, and the arrests for drug possession and loitering that resulted from it, amounted to police harassment and intimidation. While the Smoke-In did not immediately lead to a reform of Canada’s drug laws (that would have to wait until 2018, when cannabis was legalized), it was an important moment in the debate over the efficacy of criminalizing weed. Moreover, some of the police tactics that were used to suppress this “riot” are still utilized by some police forces, despite calls, then and now, for their curtailment, if not elimination.

Gastown was named after Gassy Jack Deighton who opened Vancouver’s first saloon in the late 1860s. It is located in the city’s downtown core (bordered by Water, Alexander, Powell, and Carrall streets) and in the late 1960s and early 1970s Gastown was home to an eclectic mix of restaurants and bars that catered to middle-class residents and tourists, alongside “freak bars” (the Alcazar) and groovy stores like Junior Jelly Beans for Jeans. Gastown attracted some of Canada’s “disaffected” youth who had travelled to the west coast in search of new experiences and employment. While some may have found Gastown to be culturally vibrant, many soon joined the ranks of the unemployed, homeless, and marginalized (including Indigenous peoples) who struggled to eke out a living in Gastown. The area remains a trendy tourism destination, while still grappling with poverty, which is most evident a few blocks away in the Downtown Eastside.

In the years immediately prior to the Gastown riot, young people had staged demonstrations against what they believed to be the “growing power of Fascism” in Vancouver. Continue reading →