Watching “FIX: The Story of an Addicted City”

I recently watched Fix: The Story of an Addicted City, a documentary about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It follows the fight for safe injection sites and the people who pushed for them, especially Ann Livingston and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU).

What struck me most is how much of the debate back then feels familiar today. The question of “why not just put people in treatment?” comes up in the film, and Livingston explains why it’s not that simple. For many heroin users, traditional treatment just didn’t work — the relapse rates were incredibly high. Harm reduction wasn’t about giving up on recovery. It was about keeping people alive long enough for recovery to even be possible.

The film also shows how bad things had gotten in the Downtown Eastside. At one point, it had the highest HIV infection rate in the developed world, driven by shared needles and unsafe injecting. Ambulance calls and overdose deaths were constant. Harm reduction — clean supplies, supervised spaces, and user-led organizing — was a direct response to that reality.

Another thing I took away was how surprising VANDU’s role was. The idea of drug users organizing for their own rights challenged every stereotype, but it worked. The meetings shown in the film are raw and chaotic, but they’re also proof that people most affected by the crisis could come together and push for change.

More than 20 years later, Fix doesn’t feel outdated. If anything, it shows how long these conversations have been going on and how slowly progress moves. Supervised consumption sites exist now, but the same arguments against them are still around.

The film doesn’t offer easy answers, but maybe that’s the point. Addiction, harm reduction, and recovery are complicated. What Fix does well is remind us that the first priority has to be keeping people alive.