Odd Squad: Filming Drug Hell
Drug addicts and cowboy cops shoot at the same target

Vancouver PD Constable Al Arsenault of Odd Squad Productions stands in a familar alley.

Al Arsenault
Odd Squad
Productions Society
arsenault@telus.net

The story of the Odd Squad is a highly unusual one, but the work that we have done is not – it’s just good cops doing good work. It is unique how we joined forces with some seemingly incorrigible drug addicts in order to create a video prevention tool regarding the scourge of drug abuse. You may never want to see art imitating life, especially if it’s anything like the Hell on earth where I used to police for many years – a place I now call the ‘Chemical Gulag’.

Filming Drug Hell
As a community-based policing initiative, Odd Squad video documented the seedy underbelly of our Skid Road and its denizen of drug-crazed misfits and exposed it as cinéma-vérité art for the purpose of educating kids about the perils of drug abuse.
We filmed the miserable and pathetic lives of six addicts in a drug-policy-gone-bad ghetto, where the HIV disease rate has been compared to Botswana (over 30%) recently by Dan Rather’s rather glossed-over view of the situation.

This blighted ten-block area reached the saturation rate (95%) for Hep C, over 30% have HIV, 40% of the residents have TB, with deep-seated drug-related illnesses, like endocarditis and osteomyelitis, on the rise. Indeed Canada’s poorest neighborhood is rife with poverty, homelessness, mental illness, violent crime, prostitution, and petty theft, most of which is fueled by the need for the estimated 7,000 drug addicts to get their next hoots off their crack pipes or their next fixes of cocaine or heroin at the end of one of the millions of needles handed out annually.

The resultant mess is touted as a ‘success’, all of which our past two Mayors, plus the incumbent one, want to export to other cities as a model for all to behold and emulate. We could even ship out a few hundred of our addicts your away as part of a Skid Road Starter Kit (don’t worry, we can easily make more). If you haven’t guessed it yet, I am talking about Vancouver, British Columbia, on the West (read as ‘Left’) Coast of Canada, also home of the world-renown ‘BC bud’. Perhaps you have visited our fair city and had you car tapped merely because you have out-of-town plates or maybe you were foolish enough to leave your sunglasses in plain view as an unintended contribution to our junkie economy. To hell with locking up our valuables, it’s time to lock up our thieves!

This mess was allowed to fester and grow because of idiotic drug policies that failed to address the desperate need for treatment and prevention programs. For example, a past Health Minister, Allan Rock, declared marijuana a ‘medicine’ (if you can believe it) almost a decade ago here in Canada. Who needs the Food and Drug Act for proof of the wonder weed’s medical merits and scientific studies regarding possible serious side-effects like addiction and mental illness, when you have positive anecdotes about the amazing healing properties of dope from ‘stoners’?

Vancouver can also boast that it opened the first Needle Exchange Program (NEP) in 1988 and the first Safe Injection Site (SIS) in North America in 2003. If you care to drive through this decrepit cesspool of wasted dreams and lost human potential, at say the speed limit, you might see a bit of what the Harm Reduction (HR) people have sustained and allowed rot in Canada’s longest-running series of failed social programs to date.

The rich get treatment and the poor get HR, like a box of needles and a place to shoot up. Now that’s what I call compassion. Not! You don’t give addicts what they want (free dope, needles and crack pipes) instead of what they desperately need, which is treatment, any more than you would continually give a whining child candy instead of a piece of nutritious fruit.

This is a bit of the background of our troubled beat made worse by drug legalizers who have hijacked the harm reduction pillar, and by ill-informed drug policy makers who jet off to Frankfurt, Germany instead of Stockholm, Sweden to find the answers they are looking for.

Sweden has but a third of the drug problems as the rest of Europe, so what does Germany have to offer us? Clearly the fix is in to legalize drugs in this country. Our Conservative government is trying to turn it around. So what did we do about it in the past decade?
In March 1998, my beat partner Toby Hinton and I recruited five other VPD members; all working the Downtown Eastside (DTES) beat who were also sick of seeing young people in particular getting hooked to these drugs. Any kind of ingestible poison is easily acquired in this ‘hood with an international reputation for its open drug scene and its renowned second-to-none facilitating, enabling, and condoning that goes with it, so we decided to create an anti-drug educational video. Odd Squad Productions was registered as a non-profit society and each member contributed money to help fund the purchase of a video camera. Camera in hand, we started filming initially without the permission from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), or even their knowledge.

So we snuck around with the camera but with the willing participation of the individuals profiled, and we began videotaping the disturbing lives of this core group of street-entrenched drug addicts on our beat. As the addicts themselves hated to see anyone, especially kids following in their footsteps, an usual (‘odd’ if you will) community-based policing project was born. With a common agreement that there was a paucity of reality-based educational videos available for youth, Odd Squad developed its Mission Statement: to ‘educate the public on issues affecting the community’.

To the drug legalizers, this earned us reputations as ‘renegades’ and ‘cowboys’, to such a degree that a previous Mayor wanted (now-Sgt.) Toby Hinton and I (now retired) fired. Little did they know that we actually appreciated the monikers, a lawsuit, numerous Internal Complaints, and snot-a-grams to the Chiefs, as well as being blasphemed in the highly liberal press. It meant that we were on target and were garnering a lot of publicity. We were even assailed on many fronts for, get ready for this, being involved in the production of an anti-drug conference. Can you imagine cops helping to host an anti-drug conference? The DTES is a minefield of social activism that few dare to trod upon. But we did, and we stepped boldly.

Fame From Misfortune
The Odd Squad became legendary in anti-drug circles world-wide and we now have fantastic support from the rank and file in doing our film work. A made for TV movie, The Life (2003), with Bruce Greenwood playing yours truly, was based on Odd Squad’s story. When writers Chris Haddock and Alan DeFiore (Davinci’s Inquest and City Hall, Intelligence) pitched the script to the CTV head office in Toronto, they liked the unique story of cops with cameras but they criticized the writers’ artistic license about having the police walk in a junkies’ funeral (for April Reoch). Well it did happen in real life.

The Odd Squad guys (and a few other police officers) got into their dress uniforms to walk behind the VPD-sanctioned piper Tim Fanning (who played himself in the movie of the week) to the site of the church hosting the memorial.

Little did anyone know, but from our year and a half of filming, we assisted the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) in creating its most successful documentary since its inception in 1939: Through a Blue Lens (1999). Not bad for a bunch of police hacks with a camera.

What made the story richly compelling was the compassionate relationship that we had with the half a dozen addicts that we filmed. We gave them what they needed, which was support to get off of the street and away from drugs, rather than to cave in to what they wanted, drugs, needles, crack pipes and a place to shoot up.

For opening their lives to the viewing public, we opened doors for them where there were limited opportunities to get clean. There is simply a paucity of decent treatment beds available. There no sexy, stainless steel, softly lit spot like the SIS existing in the world of treatment. The shine of recovery is something difficult to achieve within the shadow of Harm Reduction.

Through a Blue Lens was broadcast nationally on CBC in December 1999. This video is still the number one drug education film in Canadian public schools and many other institutions use it in their programs worldwide. It has won national and international awards; it has been profiled by ABC’s 20/20 and Australia’s 60 Minutes programs, and the project was featured in the New York Times, MacLean’s Magazine and a multitude of other printed media. Odd Squad Productions then assisted the NFB in producing another award-winning made-for-school video, Flipping the World: Drugs Through a Blue Lens (2000).
This video was also broadcast nationally, and has gone on to become an integral part of drug education programs in schools throughout British Columbia and across Canada. We have also done a number of other smaller documentaries and public service ads while presenting our anti-drug message in schools across the country. Henderson Development donated office space in the Tinseltown Mall on the fringe of the Skids, which has allowed us to do our important work.

But none of this could have been possible if we had not won over the support of the VPD. What Odd Squad did was to outlast a few brass who had small brain stem syndrome and we endeared ourselves to the VPD membership through a long series of internally-created videos, dealing with retirements en masse, centennial celebrations, memorial services for man and beast alike, as well as feeding the media mini-stories dealing with important projects (which would not have made leading story status otherwise).

Odd Squad members and our many volunteers could now film at will with full VPD support, while retaining our autonomy, and with much of the community support as well. Occasionally an SIS staff member will ask us not to film near their premises (like they own the block) and we politely point out that their own cameras are facing out onto the street so they filming us without our permission (another ‘verbal beat down’ complete).

Another great Odd Squad initiative is the Junior Hockey Mentoring Drug Awareness and Prevention Program headed by Det./Cst. Chris Graham, which showcases Odd Squad Productions’ innovative approach to educating youth about the perils of drug abuse by using sports role models within the community. Odd Squad, along with assistance from members of the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP, have developed a two-day interactive program designed to equip Junior Hockey Players with the tools necessary for them to relay the harsh message of the reality of drug abuse, as seen from their personal lectures and walkabout experiences in the Skids, to students in their communities across Canada. This unique method of educating youth using Odd Squad-created, reality-based videos through hockey mentors is effective. It is non–invasive, exciting to witness, and packed with unforgettable visual aids that stimulate discussion, while impacting kids to make positive decisions about drug use.

Last year was a banner year for Odd Squad with the completion of the award-winning films “Stolen Lives” (great bait car footage), “Scathed” (teens and crystal meth), “Not a Game” (explaining ‘drug roulette’ to pre-teens), and our amazing feature-length documentary “Tears For April: Beyond the Blue Lens”. In this latter film, the lives and deaths of the six addicts from the parent documentary were filmed with unfettered access by us cops on the street, in hospitals, recovery houses, jails, and even in the morgue, all done over a ten-year period for the most part with a complete absence of a budget. As far as we know, we are the only police documentarians in the world.

So out perform them we will. Tears For April (Reoch) is being made into a three-part educational resource, complete with a teachers’ guide and curriculum, for schools around the world.

Read this and all the other stories by subscribing now to get your personal copy
click here to subscribe