'IT'S NOT A SCARY PLACE. IT'S NOT A DANGEROUS PLACE.'

Cure for Downtown Eastside involves more supported housing and
decriminalization, says author

The troubled but resilient Downtown Eastside neighbourhood is the
subject of a new book.

Titled A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and the Fight for
its Future,
the book was written by Senator Larry Campbell (a former RCMP officer,
chief coroner and
Vancouver mayor), Simon Fraser University criminologist Neil Boyd and the
Vancouver
Sun's Lori Culbert.

The 352-page book offers a history of the Downtown Eastside, once the
glamorous centre of Vancouver's nightlife, to today, when crime,
homelessness and the combination of mental illness and drug addiction
are thickly woven into the fabric of the neighbourhood.

Boyd said he not only wanted to point out where policy has failed the
people of the Downtown Eastside and what can be done about it, he also
wanted to celebrate the area for its humanity.

"The people there really do care about each other," said
Boyd.

"It's not a scary place. It's not a dangerous place. It might be a
depressing place at times, but it's not a forbidding place. It's not
like some parts of American cities where you couldn't walk safely."

Boyd spoke to The Province about what's involved in a fix for the
neighbourhood. Here are some of his comments:

Homelessness

"There needs to be a lot more supportive housing built. Not only in
the Downtown Eastside but in many different places across the country
. . . You have to build resources to support people who have a lot of
challenges.

"Regardless of where this kind of housing goes, it's important that it
be built and that people not just die on the streets or that we
continue to not provide adequately for people."

Boyd said homelessness spiked in the 1990s due to two things happening
at about the same time -- the deinstitutionalization of Riverview
Hospital patients into communities without adequate support, and the
federal government's abrupt halt on building social housing in 1993.

Drugs

Addicts should not be treated as criminals, Boyd said.

"It's a move going away from treating drug use as a moral issue to
treating it as a public-health issue," he said. "We could have heroin
maintenance or opiate maintenance for some people, through
prescription. You can handle that in a lot of different ways where
people have to go and use the drugs in a facility so there is no
leakage out onto the streets."

"[The supervised injection site] InSite is a part of that, but also
you might have opiate maintenance or heroin maintenance so people
could go and get these drugs and not commit crime and not engage in
prostitution in order to obtain the drugs.

"I think it makes good sense to try to stop the distribution of crack.
It's a very destructive drug. Policing is an important part of the
picture."

Decriminalization

"I think we could safely legalize cannabis and regulate it in much the
same way we do tobacco and alcohol. We've handed the whole business of
marijuana distribution to drug dealers and in some circumstances they
are thugs. With heroin, I think you can use maintenance as an option
basically to control the crime connected to it. A big part of this,
too, is prostitution and . . . recognizing that one of the reasons
women engage in street-level prostitution is because they are very
drug-addicted. If they could have those drug needs met, they are not
going to expose themselves to those kinds of dangers."

Crime

"A lot of the crime flows with drug use. People are committing crime
in order to obtain the drugs. [We should] provide them with the drugs
in a relatively safe and secure manner -- and not everybody would fall
into this category -- and make drugs less expensive, not more. When
you prohibit things it tends to make that commodity, if it is desired
by people, more expensive."

Mental illness

In the book, Larry Campbell says a case can be made for reopening
Riverview Hospital to get hundreds of people off the street and into
care.

He says: "When I was a Mountie if someone was mentally ill you
arrested them and took them to the hospital for assessment, then drove
straight to Riverview. I think there's still a need for a place like
that, for the people who are causing the most severe disorder."

Civil rights are an issue, Campbell says, "but as a society we should
be able to pick up people beyond help and take them to a safe place.
If that safe place is Riverview, so be it."

Campbell conceded only those willing to accept the help could be
helped and that "forced institutionalization will never work."

Prostitution

Both Boyd and Campbell say the sex trade should be decriminalized and
red-light districts created to ensure the safety of workers. In the
book, Boyd says prostitutes are often desperate women selling their
bodies to feed a drug habit.

How did we arrive at the current crisis?

"I think over the last 25 years or so we have become a much less
compassionate society," Boyd told The Province. "Governments have been
focused on deficit-cutting, budget-cutting and we know from
StatsCanada that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten
poorer.

"A couple big mistakes have been made and the big mistakes have been
deinstitutionalization without adequate resources and not keeping up
with the demand that deinstitutionalization created for supports.
Crack cocaine is something that has been dropped upon us and is a more
destructive drug than heroin, which it has replaced. That's a function
of the market; it's no one's fault. You want to figure out why it is
people are engaging in behaviours that are so self-destructive."

Who needs to hear your proposed solutions?

"I think federal politicians are the ones who have the most power to
act and the greatest resources. I would hope that they would hear some
of this and get involved in trying to reach out and help people who
need this help and to provide more targeted, more focused resources."