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One of the more controversial protests that occurred in Vancouver during the "long Sixties" was the Gastown SmokeIn and Street Jamboree. Organized by the Yippies - the Youth International Party - the jamboree took place on Saturday, 7 August 1971, in Vancouver's Gastown district. The smoke-in was intended to be a public display of civil disobedience by Vancouver's "hippies" and disaffected youth against Canada's drug laws and a forum within which to denounce the police department's crackdown on "soft" drugs. As Bryan D. Palmer contends, the "social explosion over drugs is perhaps best indicated" in the smoke-in.1 But, as a result of the intervention by the police to break up the demonstration, this largely peaceful gathering quickly became a riot, leaving in its wake several people severely hurt, dozens arrested, and thousands of dollars in property damage. An inquiry was convened to investigate the cause of the riot and allegations of police brutality. In the end, the Gastown riot further eroded the already limited trust that many young residents of Vancouver had in their police force. It also exposed the growing chasm between a segment of the city's population, primarily the young, who demanded social change, and those who wished to preserve the existing social order.
The significance of the Gastown riot is twofold. First, it represents the ongoing efforts of the state, through police brutality and a public inquiry, to quell protests and public debate over social and political issues in an attempt to preserve law and order; second, it illustrates that the social and political dissent of the i960 s in Canada, in addition to the spirit and discourse that underpinned that dissent, did not end with the conclusion of the decade. As Lara Campbell and Dominique Clement assert, ideas and trends from the i960 s transcended this decade. Indeed, the "struggle for a different world" in the "angry seventies" indicates that the fight for social change, which was one of the hallmarks of the 1960s, continued into the early 1970 s.2
Gastown, or "Grasstown," as it had become widely known, was considered by some politicians and the police to be the "soft-drug capital" of Canada. In order to remove the blight of Gastown from the city's image, and to address the apparent...