Demarking a Cordon therapeutique through Vancouver’s Liquor License Moratorium for the Downtown Eastside
1973–1988
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12970506 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron O Bailey (0000-0001-8063-3032, Tinker Air Force Base, corresponding author), Aaron Bailey, Jeff Masuda (0000-0002-9681-3932, Tinker Air Force Base), Jeffrey R Masuda |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 237-278 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-25 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Social History of Alcohol Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0887-2783 • E-ISSN: 2640-7329 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/731664 |
| OpenAlex | W4400018504 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Policies that limit access to beverage alcohol are likely to drive people living with severe dependencies toward unsafe substitutes in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). One such policy was a 1988 moratorium on liquor license issuance, expansion, and relocation applied to a specific area of Vancouver’s downtown core termed the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District. Drawing from community-engaged archival research conducted over a four-year period, we ground our analysis in a critical assessment of public health’s contribution to settler colonial projects to argue that Vancouver’s spatially unique and highly restrictive ban on liquor licenses in the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District is appropriately understood as a continuation of a much longer history of racializing alcohol policy in British Columbia. Further, we suggest that the moratorium and its antecedents contributed to a cordon therapeutique established through neoliberal public health interventions introduced in Vancouver’s DTES after the 1970s. The idea for the policy first emerged around 1980 from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, an accomplished activist group that had an ambiguous relationship with precariously housed illicit drinkers and an active role in regulating neighborhood drinking spaces since the early 1970s. A shift in the Downtown Eastside Residents Association organizing strategy toward the removal of drinking spaces deemed problematic coincided with the City of Vancouver’s efforts to secure increased control over liquor licensing decisions, allowing for the moratorium’s passage in 1988. As a result of the moratorium, nearly 1,000 licensed seats were removed from the central area of the DTES between 1988 and 2021, even while the population of the surrounding neighborhood grew by approximately 3,500 people. We conclude by assessing the present DTES regime of liquor control as one that frames area drinkers as pathological, warranting the spatial prohibition of alcohol, and community resistance to the resulting health risks to acutely marginalized illicit drinkers
Archaeology · Downtown · Geography · License · Political science · Canadian Identity and History · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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