What I saw in a day on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside shocked me

How have we let things go so wrong for Canada’s roughest neighbourhood?

Marcus Gee, GLOBE AND MAIL


Trey Helten, frontline worker for the Overdose Prevention Society, opens the door for a user at the facility on East Hastings Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

It’s just another day on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

A young man sits on the wet sidewalk, his legs spread wide, sucking the smoke from a burning fragment of dope with a plastic tube. A man with lank black hair is slumped against a wall, bent over double like a limp marionette, his dangling arm twitching at his side. A woman in skinny jeans, leaning on a storefront, pulls the plunger of a syringe carefully up and down, getting ready to give herself a hit. An open package of dainty cookies lies by her side.

Canada’s opioids crisis has swept like a wildfire from the West Coast to the cities and towns of the East. But in the place where the match first dropped, the fire is still burning hard.n an alleyway, a toilet stall or a lonely room. Eleven people died of overdoses in Vancouver in the space of just one awful week this past summer. On a single day, July 24, paramedics responded to 130 suspected-overdose calls. Of the nearly 8,000 such calls last year, about 5,000 were from the Downtown Eastside.

To get a sense for what the crisis looks like at ground zero, I spent a day there last week. This was a rough neighbourhood when I worked briefly at the local courthouse for a Vancouver newspaper in the 1970s, with alcoholics spilling out of the seedy bars, drug-dealing in the alleyways and hundreds of hard-up men living in flophouses. It is far, far worse now.

In the heart of one of the world’s most “livable” cities, just next to the boutiques and bistros of Gastown, shocking scenes of human degradation unfold every day. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it – not in Mumbai or Manila, not in inner-city Detroit or the South Side of Chicago.

On the morning that I arrived, throngs of weathered, wounded people were out on the rain-soaked sidewalks of East Hastings Street, the neighbourhood’s broad central avenue. Some sold pathetic trinkets on the sidewalk. Others huddled in doorways to stay dry. Still others pushed overflowing carts full of belongings. Many were taking their drugs openly on the street.

Mr. Helten was a former addict before helping to run the Overdose Prevention Society. RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Trey Helten helped show me around. A towering 35-year-old wearing a biker jacket over a hoodie, he was an addict himself for seven years. He lived the last stretch on the street, homeless, scrounging for the next hit. Now he helps run the Overdose Prevention Society on Hastings.

Users come there to take their drugs under the watchful eyes of OPS staff, who hand out clean syringes and stand ready to intervene with oxygen and the emergency drug naloxone. Mr. Helten wears an oximeter on a lanyard around his neck so he can measure the pulse and oxygen level of visitors who show signs of going under.

The place opens at 8 in the morning, is full by 10 and stays busy till closing at 9. It gets 300 to 400 visitors a day and there are several others like it, including the pioneering Insite just across the street. Are you smokin’ or pokin’? – inhaling or injecting – the staff ask visitors who come to use the lighted cubicles in the society’s outdoor tent. Some do both.

At a second set of cubicles inside, a burly French-Canadian with tattoos up and down his thick arms asked a pal to insert the needle straight into the jugular vein in his neck for a better rush. Before he used, he tested his supply at a new device that uses infrared light to search drugs for additives. It often detects powdered caffeine, sweetener and even drywall dust, used by dealers to bulk up their product. medication used to counter the effects of opioid overdoses.

The site does its best to keep people safe, but many are still succumbing to drugs laced with fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid. Despite its risks – a few grains can be deadly – fentanyl remains a popular drug because it’s so strong. Mr. Helten says some are ecstatic when tests find it in their dose. “It’s what they’re looking for.”

He took me out into the back alley, known as a favourite place to smoke crack-cocaine. A new wall mural shows a weeping angel carrying the Christ-like body of an overdose victim. On it, people have scrawled the names and nicknames of their dead pals: Russian Bobby, Sideshow, Buster, Tito, Fatal, Yaya. Just about everyone down here has lost a friend.

Yet the band plays on. At Hastings and Main, the neighbourhood’s historic heart, a corner man called out “drugs, hard drugs.” A few steps away in “Piss Alley,” named for its notorious stench, a couple of dozen men stood in the rain among the dumpsters and litter – buying, selling, using.

Next door to the OPS, a wall mural is dedicated to “the loved ones we have lost” to drug overdoses. RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Graffiti artist Smokey D, who has lost many friends and a girlfriend to the opioid crisis, has drawn several tribute walls in the neighbourhood. RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

My visit left me reeling. How can it be that, instead of improving in the four decades since I first saw it, this neighbourhood has declined so dramatically? How have so many people come to live in such desolation? How can such a place exist in a country such as Canada?

It’s easy to despair of the Downtown Eastside. It has been so wretched for so long that it is tempting to think it will never change. Before the overdose crisis came the murder of local prostitutes by pig farmer Robert Pickton and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, many of whom ended up vulnerable and homeless on local streets.

Governments have spent hundreds of millions trying to “fix” the area. Vancouver’s new mayor, Kennedy Stewart, has promised to set up an emergency task force, a gesture that makes those who know the place roll their eyes. The problems here are as complex as they get. The proffered answers – more money for social housing, better education about drugs and their dangers – often seem simplistic.

And yet, giving up on the Downtown Eastside would be an awful mistake. All of the failures of this fortunate, thriving, caring country are on display on these streets: its failure to grapple with the crisis of mental health, its failure to tame the epidemic of drug overdoses, its failure to improve the condition of many Indigenous people, its failure to put a roof over the heads of its neediest citizens.

The suffering of this neighbourhood and its people should weigh on us all.

November 10, 2018 | 11 Comments »

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11 Comments / 11 Comments

  4. @ Michael S:

    “I sometimes feel like I’m living in a Communist country.”.

    Obviously you never have. I’m an expat Torontonian who moved to China more than 12 years ago to teach English. I’m now retired and living in a middle class neighbourhood of a city that has a population almost that of all of Canada. One does not see homeless people, drug usage, guns, mass shootings here. There is virtually NO anti-Semitism, and in fact Jews are not just respected but admired. The Chinese people are not belligerent, and in fact are mostly quite docile. I witnessed an auto accident and the argument between the drivers ended up in a shouting match rather than a fistfight. The Chinese government knows how to deal with Muslim insurgence, and it deals quite harshly with major crime, and everybody knows it. Murderers don’t get 12 years of appeals, they get a bullet in the back of the head in a month. Although Americans are critical of “commies” because they don’t have the freedom to criticize their government and get away with it, I mind my own business and have made friends with both police and government officials and I am very safe and live quite comfortably on a meagre Canadian pension – much more comfortably than I could in Canada on that same income. Jews have always been treated well here, from the time the Kaifeng Jews travelled the Silk Road from the Middle East 1000 years ago to the Jews of Harbin who fled Russia during the revolution and the pogroms to the Shanghai Jews who fled Europe during WW2 since visas were not required and even when the Japanese invaded Shanghai they refused to follow Hitler’s orders to kill the Jews. China is not so bad a place as you have been led to believe.

  5. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the Canadian government’s failure to deal effectively with its Opiod crisis has much relevance to Israel’s problems. By indulging the addicts and the drug-peddlers, the Canadian government has made the crisis get steadily worse. Israel makes the same mistake when it indulges the Arab terrorists and the Jews who help them , directly or indirectly–not only the leftists, but the haredim who refuse to serve in the army, refuse to get steady jobs, etc. Israel should firmly repress the terrorists and their supporters, and give “tough love” to the many Israeli Jews who have in one way or another gone astray. This includes the leftists who collaborate in one way or another with the enemy, those involved in pimping, human trafficking, drug trafficking, abuse and neglect of their own children, participation organized crime, white-collar corruption, etc. These people are out Jewish brothers and sisters. Yet they need to be corrected. Tolerance of evil only makes it worse.

  6. I posted about what Vancouver was like, when I lived there, nearly 60 years ago, and passed down Main and East (and West) Hastings 3-4 times a week…..? It seems to have disappeared.

  7. @ Edgar G.:

    Later, I saw Gastown being rehabilitated into a “tourist attraction” from a collection of a mixture of horrific junk stores and derelict and broken down buildings. They were going to completely tear everything down, but then got this “wonderful” idea. I never cared for it. In the Dublin I left, I often took shortcuts to downtown across seedy areas as like as a mirror image.,

    Around this time, Vancouver, especially the Port area was often referred to as “the sinkhole of the Pacific”….

  8. @ Ted Belman:
    Thanks, Ted

    I live much closer to Vancouver, BC than do most Canadians. Gastown’s a lovely place. It’s a shame, to see this happening to its people.

    One recent article on Israpundit notes that US Jews seem to be losing interest in Israel. Can you blame them? The US is beset with problems of its own — like the opioid crisis, record-breaking wildfires, mass killings, and neighbors being played against one another by political agitators. With so much fake news being reported by nearly all our major news outlets, moreover, I sometimes feel like I’m living in a Communist country.

    When I read President Trump’t tweets, I’m amazed to see that the one person on the internet who seems to be interested in the things that concern ME is my president! Everyone else seems out to lunch to some degree.

    I am very glad, that God has allowed the Jewish people to once again live in their homeland, after centuries of absence; and of course, I am against those who seem to want to begrudge them this — including, it seems, even many strange-thinking Jews. This isn’t the center of my life, though.

    Thank you, again, for posting the OP.

  10. David,Maybe the connection is that Canada has no business lecturing Israel about morality when they permit such terrible evil in their own country. Also, in order to solve problems you have to get tough with people who are doing wrong. Canada, the U.S. and Israel have all failed to get tough with evil-doers and self-destructive people.