Posted by Ted McGrath
One final shot to wrap up this streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) series.
This alley wall graffiti poses a valid question, “how do we end the drug crisis”?
A more pertinent question, “how did we get here”?
Vancouver, B.C. is consistently ranked at the top of the list for the world’s most liveable cities – but not for many in the DTES.
The city has a dirty little secret that it has been trying to suppress for decades. The historic four-block area near East Hastings and Main Street — the DTES — known as one of the “poorest postal codes” in Canada, has a combination of drug use, HIV, homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, and crime all making up this poor off neighbourhood.
To be successful as a drug lord you need a steady, reliable, cheap supply of product, a location where you can operate relatively free from prosecution and away you go. The prime location ingredients Vancouver offers is the DTES.
Over the decades continuing city administrations have built a community of “customers with no cash” by loading the DTES with blocks of not for profit social housing. Along with the myriad of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SRO’s) the area is prime territory for the drug trade.
Social housing should be spread throughout the city to provide a society of different financial means for common support – IMO.
Administrations over the years have been loath to attempt social housing in the rich city enclaves due to onerous push back. It was and still is more expedient to keep adding more social housing in the DTES where there is minimal opposition.
***** Today there are at least 6 City of Vancouver development permit applications on file for more social housing in the DTES.
The process is welcomed by the myriad of DTES support service groups who like their clientele close at hand and the clientele are fine with it as services are nearby.
DTES government and service support groups along with poverty pimp lawyers who have a hissy fit if anyone tries to change the dial, while also making money off the situation, has resulted in the perfect condition for drug dealers to flourish.
Social housing residents, many older, Asian and often mentally challenged are living in a hell hole neighbourhood with little individual voice.
In recent years, the area is seeing an east creeping gentrification. This is causing the DTES street population to be squeezed into a smaller footprint resulting in more confrontation and the appearance of a worsening situation even though overall the numbers of street people remains fairly constant.
The amount of taxpayer dollars spent in the area is staggering with little to show for the investment.
Vancouver has always had a drug problem. The opioids of choice — and the increasingly staggering death toll — have changed over the years.
In 2017 Fentanyl killed so many Canadians it caused the average life expectancy in B.C. to drop for the first time in decades. But for crime kingpins, it became a source of such astonishing wealth it disrupted the Vancouver-area real estate market.
SOME BACKGROUND:
Excerpt from the Province Newspaper by reporter Randy Shore 18 March, 2017.
When members of the Royal Commission to Investigate Chinese and Japanese Immigration came to Vancouver in 1901, they got an eyeful.
“There were whole rooms of Chinese lying stretched out on beds with the opium apparatus laid out before them — all unmindful that their attitudes and surrounding conditions are being taken note of to assist in keeping the remainder of their countrymen entirely out of Canada,” reported the Vancouver World newspaper.
The fringes of Vancouver’s Chinatown have always been the centre of Canada’s opiate trade. Ever more potent and easily smuggled versions emerged through the decades, culminating in the scourge of synthetic opiates — fentanyl and carfentanil — thousands of times more powerful and many times more deadly than opium.
Opium was a source of revenue for governments of the day. A federal duty imposed on importers fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars between 1874 and 1899. In B.C. ports, and cities charged hundreds of dollars to purveyors in the form of business licences.
Between 1923 and 1932, more than 700 Chinese men were deported for drug-related violations.
Under constant pressure from the police, opium users began to inject their hit, as the technique created no smoke or aroma and used smaller equipment, which could be easily hidden. In the 1920s and 1930s, white users tended to be young criminals, “racetrack hands, and circus and show people” who smoked opium or sniffed heroin.
By the mid-1930s, heroin was one of the most common drugs in circulation and white users were increasingly taking the drug intravenously, especially as prices rose due to scarcity brought about by vigorous law enforcement.
The outbreak of the Second World War put opiate addicts into a state of crisis, as opiate drugs were required in great quantities for the war wounded. The street price of a hit — whether heroin, morphine or codeine — shot up and crime along with it.
In the post-war period, right through to the mid-’60s, Vancouver was ground zero for Canada’s intravenous drug scene, made up mainly of petty criminals, troubled youths fed by drug lords.
Before the ’40s were over, highly refined white heroin had appeared and it was coming from overseas to satisfy a hungry market in Vancouver, home to half of the country’s drug users.
Heroin use remained a constant undercurrent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside during the ’70s and ’80s, even as alcohol was the neighbourhood’s real drug of choice.
But a flood of a new and even more potent “China White” heroin arriving into the city reignited public outrage in the early ’90s. A spate of 331 overdose deaths in 1993 spurred B.C. coroner Vince Cain to call for the decriminalization of heroin and addicts be prescribed the drug to legally maintain their habit.
It would be nearly 15 years before the Study to Assess Long-term Opioid Maintenance Effectiveness (SALOME) began in Vancouver, just about the time a new threat emerged.
Up to 80 times as powerful as heroin, fentanyl hit the streets and reduced the risk for traffickers as it was so concentrated, transportation was easier.
The carnage wrought by fentanyl has been without precedent.
Heroin seized in drug busts is routinely cut with fentanyl and in recent months the presence of carfentanil.
SUMMARY:
Where will this go next, who knows ?
The richest of societies should be especially judged by how they treat their least fortunate, and Vancouver has its challenge set out for the foreseeable future.
UPDATE 23 May 2020 – VANCOUVER SUN
John Mackie:
The Downtown Eastside is a war zone disaster — stop ghettoizing it.
John Mackie, Vancouver Sun 23 May 2020
Twenty years ago local musician Kuba Oms was recording at the Miller Block, a now defunct Hastings Street recording studio near Save-On-Meats.
He jaywalked and was stopped by a cop, who handed him a ticket.
“I said ‘Are you kidding me?’” Oms recounts. “You know there’s a guy shooting up over there, and a crack dealer over there. And the cop said ‘That’s a health issue.’”
That story pretty much sums up the city’s attitude toward the Downtown Eastside over the past few decades.
In some ways the cop was right — it is a Vancouver health issue. But letting people openly do drugs in public and turn Hastings and the wider Downtown Eastside into a ghetto is political correctness gone mad.
Drive down Hastings Street between Abbott and Gore and you’ll see dozens, even hundreds of people hanging out on the street, in various states of sobriety. They are definitely not social distancing. It’s a miracle that COVID-19 hasn’t swept the entire area.
The height of this madness was the recent occupation of Oppenheimer Park. Vancouver has real issues of homelessness, but to some degree Oppenheimer was about a fringe group of politicos manipulating the homeless.
Many police resources were diverted to the park and there was a crime wave in nearby Chinatown — one business closed because they were being robbed a dozen times a day.
The province recently made hotel rooms available for the homeless people occupying Oppenheimer Park, so things have calmed down somewhat. But the big question is what happens in a few months? Is government going to find permanent homes for them?
Odds are if they do, it will be in highrises in the Downtown Eastside. For decades that’s where the city and province have been concentrating social housing, especially for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
Their argument is these residents feel comfortable there. But the reality is the more poverty is concentrated, the worse the area seems to become.
Maybe it’s time for the city of Vancouver to give its head a shake and realize that its much-ballyhooed Downtown Eastside Plan is actually part of the problem, not the solution.
Part of the plan decrees you can’t build condos on Hastings between Carrall Street in Gastown and Heatley Avenue in Strathcona, or in historic Japantown around Oppenheimer Park.
Development in those areas has to be rental only, with at least 60 per cent social housing. This pretty much ensures that no market housing is built in the poorest area of the city.
When the plan was unveiled in 2014, Vancouver’s former head planner Brian Jackson said the aim was to ensure that low-income people in the Downtown Eastside weren’t displaced.
“The plan is attempting to achieve balance,” he explained then.
In fact, the plan does the exact opposite. There is no balance in the Downtown Eastside: It’s been turned into a ghetto. A friend who’s worked there for two decades calls it a war zone.
The city desperately need some market housing, co-ops and development on Hastings and around Oppenheimer. The anti-poverty activists will scream blue murder that it’s gentrification, but it’s actually normalization. You don’t have to displace anybody, you just have add a different mix to make it safer.
I live in Strathcona, where about 6,500 people live in social housing and about 3,500 in market homes. It’s a close-knit neighbourhood that has the balance Brian Jackson was taking about — it’s diverse and features a variety of incomes.
Japantown and the Downtown Eastside could be a real neighbourhood again if the city retained its stock of handsome historic buildings but allowed some development of its many non-descript structures.
It could be like Strathcona, even the West End. But I fear it could get even worse, if the planners and politicians continue to concentrate all the Lower Mainland’s poverty and social ills in one small area.
John Mackie is a veteran Postmedia reporter who has written several stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Plan.
UPDATE: 12 JUNE, 2020
When the encampment in Oppenheimer park was cleared out, another one to replace it sorung up on Port of Vancouver lands.
FROM THE VANCOUVER SUN:
A judge on Wednesday granted an injunction to shut down an encampment of largely homeless people near CRAB Park on Vancouver’s waterfront.
11 June, 2020 Vancouver Sun reporter Keith Fraser
The order of B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson came following an injunction application filed by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, the federal agency that operates the parking lot where the camp was set up in May. The camp has grown to upwards of 130 to 150 people living in dozens of tents and other structures.
A judge on Wednesday granted an injunction to shut down an encampment of largely homeless people near CRAB Park on Vancouver’s waterfront.
The order of B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson came following an injunction application filed by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, the federal agency that operates the parking lot where the camp was set up in May. The camp has grown to upwards of 130 to 150 people living in dozens of tents and other structures.
The judge gave the encampment three days in which to cease occupation of the parking lot, removing all tents, shelters, personal items, rubbish and other things on the site.
He said the injunction was good for 15 days, meaning that the port will have to come back to court in 15 days if everyone in the encampment is not gone and police haven’t dealt with it.
The port had sought an enforcement order giving police the power to arrest and remove anyone remaining on the site but the judge, noting that the police had agreed to carry out the injunction without an enforcement order frequently granted in such injunction cases, declined to make that order.
During two days of submissions in court, the port argued that the same COVID-19 concerns that had closed down a tent city at nearby Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside following an order issued by the B.C. government also applied to the homeless at CRAB Park.
Lawyers for the port also cited complaints from nearby residents about lack of social distancing within the encampment, near continuous burning of an open-flame bonfire and smoke entering apartments, trash within the encampment and an increase in garbage and needles in the area.
People were seen urinating and defecating in the bushes and ocean and loud music and noise was heard, according to the port, which also argued that there was housing available to accommodate the homeless.
Lawyers for the homeless questioned whether there was in fact alternative accommodation available and argued that their clients felt safer being in the tents at CRAB Park than on the streets.
They claimed that the liberty rights of their clients would be violated if they were made to close down the encampment.
But the judge sided with the port, concluding that there would be irreparable harm to the port should the encampment remain in place and the balance of convenience favoured the injunction being granted.
Outside court, Doug Ehret, a homeless man who has been staying at the site, said he was “greatly disappointed” in the judge’s decision.
“He has a home to go to tonight. I don’t. He’ll sit in a million-dollar home in a sauna. I’ll sit beside a fire, but you know what — I’ll be better off because I have people who love me and actually give a crap.”
Michael Costley, a Gastown resident who has had concerns about the site, said as excited as he is about the ruling seemingly going in their favour, he’s hopeful the campers will respect the decision just as residents in the area have respected the campers’ right to protest.
“Our fear as a local resident is that they’re just going to move over into CRAB Park. That’s what I would do if I was them, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t.”
Fiona York, who identified herself as an advocate for the encampment, said there would be a meeting on Wednesday night to decide what their next steps are.
“It’s going to be up to the residents. Everybody is well aware about what’s been happening, how they feel about it.”
twitter.com/keithrfraser
UPDATE: 13 JULY, 2020
Vancouver can’t catch up to its housing crisis
ADRIENNE TANNER
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED 13 JULY 2020
It is obvious now the cheers that erupted when Vancouver’s longest running tent city was dismantled were wildly premature. Fearing a COVID-19 outbreak would take hold in the overcrowded inner-city camp, the provincial government in April acquired emergency housing in hotels for homeless people living there and cleared the site.
Many camp residents embraced the offer of a clean room. Some refused and relocated outdoors. The camp shifted, first to some empty Port of Vancouver land, and when a court order quickly shut it down, finally landed in Strathcona Park. With each move, it grew.
Today there are about 150 tents Strathcona Park, roughly double the number there were in Oppenheimer Park. How many inhabitants are truly homeless is anyone’s guess. Some of the tents were erected by activists with homes. Others belong to people living in single room occupancy hotels, the worst of which are noisy, bug-infested and so hot that some residents prefer to spend summer outside.
There is already an air of permanence to the camp; the city has installed porta-potties, fresh drinking water and handwashing stations. Park rangers drop by a few times daily. The area is reasonably clean, but these are early days.
Strathcona residents are largely sympathetic to homeless people, but are understandably unhappy about losing a large chunk of park space. They fear the same violence and social disorder that cropped up at Oppenheimer is inevitable; there has already been a small fire and there appears to be a bike chop shop on site. There are cries for the city to sanction a permanent tent city location – elsewhere, of course.
So how exactly did the province’s efforts to shut down a tent city and house homeless people backfire so badly? The city and provincial officials have been out-manoeuvered and out-organized by anti-poverty activists who seized a COVID-19 opportunity when they saw it.
The pandemic raised fears the Oppenheimer tent city would turn into a reservoir of disease that could overwhelm the health system. The activists know that’s why the government cleared the camp and purchased hotels for social housing. They understand this is the moment to highlight society’s failure to solve homelessness, even if their end goals seem to differ. Some are calling for permanent housing – others prefer the idea of a permanent, free-wheeling tent city.
The sorry truth is, even with the addition of 600 units of temporary modular housing and, more recently, the purchase of three downtown hotels, there are still more homeless people than homes. Successions of governments at all levels have allowed this crisis to grow. They’ve failed to build enough social housing. Failed to provide adequate mental health services. Failed to fund enough drug rehabilitation programs for those who want to quit and provide a safe drug supply for those who can’t.
So, now here we are with the largest homeless camp the city has ever seen and another stressed-out neighbourhood. Legally, the new tent city may prove more difficult to dismantle – it’s a large park and the tents are well spaced so the pandemic may not wash as a valid reason. And unless housing is available for everyone who is homeless, it is unlikely the courts would grant an injunction.
Solving problems associated with homelessness is a huge challenge. We can start with housing, but that alone is not nearly enough. Many of the people living in the hotels and park are drug users. Many are mentally ill. Some are both. It takes money – and lots of it – to provide decent housing and supports for this segment of society.
But to cave to demands for a permanent tent city is an American-style admission of defeat. The park board seems resigned to tent cities in parks and is considering a bylaw seeking to control locations. City council has resisted sanctioning a permanent spot, instead offering up land for new social housing. The province has stepped up with money for temporary modular housing and purchases of hotels.
It will be tough to keep neighbourhoods onside if more parks are rendered unusable for recreation. There is only one palatable solution; the provincial government must stay the course and keep adding decent, affordable housing. It won’t be cheap or easy. Catchup never is.
UPDATE: 17 July 2020 – BC Coroners Service:
This report summarizes all unintentional illicit drug toxicity deaths in British Columbia (accidental and undetermined) that occurred between January 1, 2010, and June 30, 2020, inclusive. It includes confirmed and suspected illicit toxicity deaths (inclusion criteria below).
Illicit Drug Toxicity Deaths in BC January 1, 2010 – June 30, 2020
• In June 2020, there were 175 suspected illicit drug toxicity deaths. This represent a 130% increase over the number of deaths seen in June 2019 (76) and a 2% increase over the number of deaths in May 2020 (171).
• The June 2020 total represents the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths ever recorded in a month in B.C to date.
• The number of deaths in each health authority is at or near the highest monthly total ever recorded.
• The number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in June 2020 equates to about 5.8 deaths per day. The number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in 2020 equates to 4 deaths per day for the year.
• In 2020, 68% of those dying were aged 19 to 49. In 2019 and 2018, 67% were in this age range. Males accounted for 80% of deaths in 2020 to date, slightly higher than in 2019 (76%) and consistent with 2018 (80%).
• The townships experiencing the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in 2020 are Vancouver, Surrey, and Victoria.
• Fraser and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority have had the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths (228 and 205 deaths, respectively) in 2020, making up 59% of all such deaths during this period.
No deaths have been reported at supervised consumption or drug overdose prevention (2) sites.
UPDATE: 07 August 2020:
Ian Mulgrew: Vancouver Sun 07 August, 2020
Drug decriminalization a half-baked proposal
Opinion: ‘We have to find a different paradigm here,’ says Dr. Richard Mathias of the University of B.C. faculty of medicine. ‘The paradigm we have is killing Canadians’.
Four years after the authorities declared opioid deaths a public health emergency in B.C., the crisis rolls along like a Monty Python plague skit: Bring out your dead!
While there are daily briefings about COVID-19, which has killed fewer than 200 people in B.C., overdoses that have killed more than 700 so far this year receive little more than a monthly mortality update.
The number of drug deaths in each health authority is at or near the highest on record, without a cure, vaccine or solution in sight.
Instead of truly confronting the crisis, governments seem to be continually finding reasons to stall and shy away from discussing what is needed.
There is little evidence our political leaders want to talk about the issue beyond wringing their hands and mouthing anodyne concern.
The B.C. government won’t even provide the costs associated with the more than 30,000 people weaned off illegal drugs and now on Big Pharma substitutes.
“As this matter is before the courts (because users have launched a class-action lawsuit) it is not appropriate for us to share any information that is not publicly available at this time,” said Tracey Robertson, senior public affairs officer.
“This includes the costing associated with Methadone, Methadose and Metadol-D treatment. That said, we are able to provide you with the number of patients on Methadone (15,459), Methadose (12,026), and Metadol-D (3,589), as of April 2020.”
Believe it or not, it was 15 years ago that B.C.’s public health officers demanded the government decriminalize drug offences.
In a strident, progressive paper, they said it was time to address the harmful effects of the criminal prohibition against substances such as heroin and (at the time) marijuana.
They emphasized that anti-drug laws were based on racism and cultural biases, not evidence of harm, and the prohibition was causing far more damage to health and to society.
Titled “A Public Health Approach To Drug Control in Canada”, that 38-page paper recommended reform of federal and provincial laws and international agreements that deal with illegal drugs, development of national public health strategies to manage all psychoactive drugs, including alcohol and prescription drugs, improved monitoring, and more education.
Governments ignored it, and the echoes that followed over the years.
By 2019, even before her fame, Dr. Bonnie Henry was still trying to get that 2005 message heard.
In May, federal Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was asked to introduce a nationwide exemption for drug possession so no one would have to fear arrest and jail, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, even the nation’s chiefs of police — who fought drug reform to protect their budgets — have joined the bandwagon, saying we should decriminalize drug possession.
The chiefs say it would improve the health and safety outcomes for drug users while reducing property crime, repeat offences and the demand for drugs in communities.
Really? After all these years of filling our jails with drug users while gangs prospered and proliferated, the cops have finally figured that out?
Heck, even Premier John Horgan, who recently sounded like he didn’t have a clue about addiction, is apparently all for decriminalization.
It’s about time.
Banning opiates, cocaine and other substances has proven to be as stupid as trying to ban alcohol.
Our drug laws are an abject failure. Still, decriminalization is not the answer to the opioid crisis any more than it was for marijuana.
It’s a halfway house of pain. Which is why we need a discussion.
Decriminalization allows the user to consume without risk of arrest, but does nothing to address the illegal black market, with its tainted products, violence and indiscriminate sales to kids.
Criminal drug laws protect traffickers from taxation, regulation and quality control. They maintain artificially high prices for drugs that cost pennies, and they produce an underground economy where disputes get settled not in court, but with guns.
There are better ways to control drug use.
It’s time to adopt a new legal regime to regulate drugs — their potency, retail sales, warning labels, age limits and other restrictions such as prescriptions.
Decriminalization won’t do that. Legalization will.
We need an integrated strategy of prevention, research, education and social programs to address poverty and the homelessness that has far too many people sleeping in parks.
We have to start discussing that aid package and dealing with addiction as seriously as we have attacked the coronavirus.
Legalization is not a panacea. It does not end drug use or violence.
But it will stop people with a medical issue being turned into criminals, and help us reduce the overdose deaths, the black market and the violence.
The 2005 anti-drug strategy called for a national dialogue, and Dr. Richard Mathias, of the University of B.C. faculty of medicine, emphasized: “We have to find a different paradigm here. The paradigm we have is killing Canadians.”
It didn’t happen.
Today, more than ever are dying. That 15 years have passed isn’t a joke, it’s an indictment.
twitter.com/ianmulgrew
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