In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kitsilano was a haven for young hippies from across Canada—along with many U.S. draft dodgers—who wanted to stop nuclear testing and bring an end to the Vietnam War. But some of those folks weren’t under the B.C. Medical Plan, which meant they might not get treatment if they showed up at Vancouver General Hospital.

Vancouver Coastal Health’s former chief medical health officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, was a resident in internal medicine at VGH at the time.

“It wasn’t like today, when you could transport your services across provinces,” he said in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight. “So we were getting all of these kids coming in from back east who had no medical coverage.”

Blatherwick approached the city’s then–chief medical officer, Dr. Gerry Bonham, about creating a clinic to serve them.

“He said, ‘Yup, we do need one of those. I’ve applied for a federal grant and you’re hired,’ ” Blatherwick recalled. “I said, ‘No, no no, I’m doing a residency.’ He said, ‘I need somebody with passion. You have passion for this.’ ”

Thus launched the public-health career of Blatherwick, who later played an instrumental role in Vancouver having the first government-funded needle exchange and the first supervised-injection site in North America.

In January of 1972, Blatherwick became the first director of the Pine Street Clinic, which provided services out of a trailer at the corner of Pine and West 7th Avenue. Among those he hired was Dr. Art Hister, who later went on to local fame as a broadcaster on CKNW Radio, and they provided general medical services to young people. Many didn’t want their parents to know that they were seeking birth control or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

“I remember a lot of doctors saying, ‘We think it’s wrong what you’re doing. You’re supposed to contact their parents,’ ” Blatherwick said. “And we sort of looked at them and said: ‘You practise medicine your way and we’ll practise medicine our way.’ ”

He recalled some young people showing up with sunburns in “areas of their bodies that should be covered”. Steroid treatments usually resolved the issue.

He also encountered many drug addicts, who revealed how they financed their habits by stealing purses from beneath the passenger seats in cars and by shoplifting expensive sweaters from Woodward’s and selling them to well-to-do women. According to Blatherwick, the most important lesson he learned at the clinic was that drug addicts care about their health. He had grown up in a military family and, prior to that point, he had been under the impression that addicts were “bad people”.

“It’s a fortunate thing that I learned that,” he added, “because I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to go through life with the attitude I had before.”

To this day, Blatherwick wonders if he would have been as supportive of Vancouver’s first needle exchange and supervised-injection site had he not worked at the Pine Street Clinic.

Soon after Blatherwick moved to Toronto (three years later, to obtain a diploma in public heath), the facility moved to its permanent location on West 4th Avenue, where it became known as the Pine Free Clinic. Now known as the Pine Community Health Clinic, it still has a mandate to serve youth and young adults 24 years old and younger, and it offers birth control and pregnancy counselling as well as treatment for sexually transmitted infections.

Those who are not on the Medical Services Plan are welcome in the mornings, regardless of their age, and there are also harm-reduction and needle-exchange services available at this location.