The Gastown riot, known also in the plural as Gastown riots, also known as "the Battle of Maple Tree Square", occurred in

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

, British Columbia, Canada, on August 7, 1971. Following weeks of arrests by undercover drug squad members in Vancouver as part of a special police operation directed by City hall, police broke up a protest

smoke-in A smoke-in is a protest in favor of cannabis rights or more specifically legalization of cannabis. The Youth International Party (YIP) organized "smoke-ins" across North America through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The first YIP smoke-in was a ...

in the

Gastown Gastown is the original settlement that became the core of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and a national historic site and a neighbourhood in the northwest section of the Downtown Eastside, adjacent to Downtown Vancouver. Its ...

neighbourhood. The smoke-in was organized by the

Youth International Party The Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on D ...

(Vancouver Yippies) against the use of undercover agents and in favour of the legalization of

marijuana Cannabis (), commonly known as marijuana (), weed, pot, and ganja, List of slang names for cannabis, among other names, is a non-chemically uniform psychoactive drug from the ''Cannabis'' plant. Native to Central or South Asia, cannabis has ...

. Of around two thousand protesters, 79 were arrested and 38 were charged. Police were accused of heavy-handed tactics including indiscriminate beatings with their newly-issued riot batons. They also used horseback charges on crowds of onlookers and tourists. A commission of inquiry into the incident was headed by Supreme Court Justice Thomas Dohm. The Inquiry cited the Yippies as instigators of the Smoke-In, calling them "intelligent and dangerous individuals", but was highly critical of the police's conduct and described the incident as a police riot. The Gastown riots are commemorated in a two-story-high 2009 photo mural called ''Abbott & Cordova, August 7, 1971'' by local artist

Stan Douglas Stan Douglas (born October 11, 1960) is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since the late 1980s, he has created works in film and photography as well as theatre productions and other multidisciplinary projects that invest ...

, installed in the atrium of the redeveloped

Woodward's Woodward's Stores Ltd. was a department store chain that operated in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, for 101 years, before its sale to the Hudson's Bay Company. History Charles Woodward established the first Woodward store at the corner o ...

complex in the

Downtown Eastside The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a list of neighbourhoods in Vancouver, neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. One of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, the DTES is the site of a complex set of social issues, including disproportio ...

neighbourhood.

References

{{Vancouver 1971 riots 1971 in Canada 1971 crimes in Canada 1971 in British Columbia Cannabis culture Yippies Riots and civil disorder in Canada History of Vancouver