The Downtown Eastside - A Solution

  

Vancouver is frequently viewed as one of the most favorable places to live in the world and for good reason. It's a beautiful city with an outstanding 400-hectare forest park in the center of the city overlooking the Burrard Inlet. The Sea-to-Sky highway also is spectacular with views of the Georgia Straits the entire route to world-class skiing at Whistler, only an hour away from the city.  

In another part of the city, however, festers a cancerous growth, an urban blight that has been expanding exponentially over the last 40 years, a battered boardwalk of broken souls and a drug addiction crisis not matched in any other city in North America. This is the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, 12 square blocks of drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness and mental illness.

Originally the home of heroin addicts, bohemians and alcoholics, in the early 80's a confluence of problems occurred. Gentrification pushed the homeless and derelict out of some areas of the city and into the Downtown Eastside. Expo '87 pushed low income residents out of cheap hotels that were being renovated or torn down to make way for new infrastructure. In addition, a high number of mentally ill patients were released from psychiatric hospitals under policies for de-institutionalization. With the crack epidemic in the early 90's, the temperament of the addict changed - from a sleepy heroin addict nodding off, to a manic, scabby bunch of criminals dominated by coke, theft, and a freakish amount of hits per hour required to maintain a high. The result? More crime, more prostitution, more drugs, more homelessness and more despair.

From 2016 to 2017, there was a sharp rise in the number of overdoses and deaths as a result of two powerful opioids - fentanyl and carfentanil. In just two years, the downtown east side experienced 3,000 overdoses on East Hastings Street alone which 'accounted for seven percent of the entire province's 911 calls for a suspected drug overdose.' (Travis Lupick, Straight Talk, 2/7/18). Emergency and rescue staff can sometimes be called out to over 100 calls a day to the downtown east side with each call costing the city thousands of dollars. Once an addict is rescued and brought back to life, perhaps at the hospital, he then leaves to immediately score another hit on the street. The ambulance, the emergency crew, the resuscitation efforts, the resources used, all of it ineffectual.     

Millions of dollars have been spent trying to fix the Downtown Eastside, with a proliferation of social agencies assigned to help. According to Lori Culbert of the Vancouver Sun, 'in 2013, $360 million was spent by 260 agencies and housing sites to help roughly 6,500 people.'  Another estimate said approximately $1 million dollars a day is spent trying to improve the Downtown Eastside. So far, nothing has worked. 

The Downtown Eastside has the dubious reputation as having the biggest drug problem in North America. Now, with the introduction of the deadly corona virus into the area, what will happen? What drastic measures could be taken to help not only these residents who crowd the sidewalks daily hawking stolen goods, shooting up and selling dope, but others in the surrounding neighborhoods who will be affected if the virus gets out of control in this area? And it will. No one is socially isolating when they live in tents crowded together in local parks or bunk in at hostels or shoot up together on the street.

Perhaps try another solution, take a totally different approach in an attempt to solve a complex problem that 40 years of solutions hasn't solved. Throwing the proverbial money at this situation has not fixed one problem in this area, not for over 40 years.

Before I start, I can hear the criticisms. One could say my solution is inhumane, people have the right to destroy their lives if they want. You can't restrict people against their will if they haven't committed a crime. People have free will. This is all true. My opinions strengthened after years of hearing many drug addicts disclose that being locked up was the only way they could get straight. If it were not for the fact they were charged and imprisoned, they wouldn't be clean. They had to learn the hard way. Keep that in mind as you read further.

To start, military buses with armed guards would be deployed to the streets of the Downtown Eastside to sweep up anybody who is on drugs or seen taking drugs. It shouldn't be difficult  because people openly shoot up on the street and in every back alley. If an ambulance has been called to deal with an overdose, that person is recovered and put on the bus. Anyone sent to the hospital as a result of overdose is automatically on the bus. Anyone prone on the ground is taken, if there are needle marks, on the bus. A sweep around the blocks should cull quite a few. This activity will continue for weeks. Once the bus is full, they are sent to their new home in the country for detoxification. Where do these people go?  

The government would have already set up, in the interior of British Columbia, on hectares of crown land in the middle of the province, isolated, self-sufficient rehabilitation farms consisting of semi-permanent housing units along with emergency medical services where addicts are admitted and assigned bunks in locked-down housing for detox. There they will remain until stabilized. After detox, when the individual is back on his feet, he or she will be assigned a unit where they must stay for between one to two years. These restricted rehabilitation areas would include not only utilitarian areas for cooking and recreation and creative activities, but also educational facilities. Millions of dollars could be put aside for these basic supports to help with re-entry into society. 

Is this a bare bones outline, a start, the solution to the devastating problems plaguing the inner streets of Vancouver? Perhaps some would say it's a fascist solution that couldn't be tolerated, people would not accept their freedoms being intercepted. But then, if we continue with the same old, then we must continue with our same old solution - throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into the big, black, empty void of hopelessness that is the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.