'SKIDS' SEEK A WAY OUT OF THE MIRE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

VANCOUVER - A Wednesday Morning, Just Like Any Other in Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside. I'm Walking the Streets With a Pair of Drug
Addicts. We Step into an Alleyway Near the Busy Intersection of
Hastings and Main.

The entrance is littered with dirty needles. This is a public
shooting gallery, one of many here. Men and women huddle together,
injecting themselves with heroin, cocaine, crystal methamphetamine,
codeine. In the neck, the arms, the legs. Their faces are twisted, distorted.

Others mill around, selling and buying. We stop to chat with some
dealers. Five dollars will get us half a gram of heroin or a small
pebble of crack or enough crystal meth to keep one of us awake for
days. There are discounts for volume purchases. "Up, down, up, down,"
the dealers croak. Meth is up; down is smack.

My two new acquaintances live in the Downtown Eastside; both are
active in the drug trade. Dwayne Fiddler and Jacob Rikley each
consume up to $100 worth of drugs each day. They make ends meet by
collecting welfare and by retrieving food and clothing from dumpsters.

Mr. Fiddler also peddles crack. He used heroin and morphine before
meeting up with me. Mr. Rikley has resisted the urge to inject
himself this morning with heroin and crystal meth; the latter is his
drug of choice.

The two men are part of an expanding social services industry that
serves this wretched neighbourhood. They both volunteer with
Vancouver Network of Drug Users, one of many publicly funded agencies
meant to assist the area's 12,000 residents, one-third of whom are
injection drug addicts. For a $3 stipend, the two men will spend an
hour or so scouring the alleys, picking up dirty syringes, handing
out clean injection kits.

Most Canadians have heard of the Downtown Eastside. Surrounded by
spectacular natural scenery, it lies in the shadow of Vancouver's
central business district, a 10-minute walk from upscale shops such
as Hermes and Chanel.

Few of us will venture here; even local residents avoid these five
city blocks. Those who do stumble into the area express amazement
that such a blighted place could exist in such an affluent,
progressive country, and in a city hailed again and again as the
world's "most livable."

Millions of tax dollars are spent on the Downtown Eastside each year
in an effort to improve the lives of men and women using illegal
drugs, suffering from mental illness, and running from abuse.

But the effort seems wasted; no one living or working here suggests
the area has improved. There is no consensus on what to do, how to
solve the Downtown Eastside's problems.

Every marginalized group has its own advocates, fighting on its
behalf, lobbying for more funding. Many are well intentioned. Some
are ruthlessly self-serving.

Vancouver's Mayor worries all these ugly truths will spoil
Vancouver's Olympic party in 2010. But he doesn't seem willing to get
tough with the Downtown Eastside.

Walking these streets, Mr. Rikley talks about his crystal meth
addiction the way someone else might discuss a minor weight problem:
Unattractive but manageable. He injects himself regularly, which is
better than smoking the drug, he says. He has "neurological problems,
petit mal epilepsy." Meth, he adds, "gives me balance."

We meet a woman in a pale blue hoodie. Her name is Quiamiyah. "It
means Medicine Woman," she says. The irony is not lost. Her skin is
pallid; most of her front teeth are missing. A free breakfast sits on
a window ledge: A liquid protein shake and a small container of
yogourt, unopened, ignored.

Quiamiyah has just injected heroin, which she prepared herself, on
the same window ledge, using equipment sourced from the Vancouver
Network of Drug Users or some other agency; she can't remember which.
In the Downtown Eastside, needles are more easily acquired than Aspirin.

Water, spoon, a flame, a syringe. The heroin goes into Quiamiyah's
right arm. It is not enough. She lights up a rock of crack cocaine
and exhales a cloud of sour, yellow smoke. I ask her why she doesn't
fix at InSite, the government-funded safe injection facility located
just across the street. Quiamiyah scoffs. "I feel safer out here than
I do in there," she says. "The staff plays favourites, and they don't
care for some of us. They make your stone worse by making you
paranoid. They're all trying to control an uncontrollable state."

A blonde woman, perhaps 20 years old, shuffles past, her mouth open.
You can see in her face faint traces of beauty, although her cheeks
and forehead are speckled with scabs, the result of constant picking
and scratching. She is obviously ill and needs medical and
psychiatric attention.

Mental illness is endemic here. Disease is rampant. More than 90% of
the 4,000 injection drug users living here have Hepatitis C; 30% have
HIV, 38 times the provincial average. The mortality rate is 14 times
the provincial average. Death arrives daily, and the situation is
getting worse.

Relocation is the simple, obvious answer, but the word is seldom
heard in the Downtown Eastside, or, for that matter, inside Vancouver
City Hall.

Neither is "redevelopment," although the neighbourhood cries out for
it. There is no shortage of real estate developers who would like to
gut portions of the "skids" and replace its derelict, bug-infested
rooming houses with market-based housing.

A few have started. Two new condominium towers are being built on
land once occupied by an abandoned department store that was claimed
by squatters. Turn-of-the-century buildings are being restored to
their original grandeur. It is a tricky process, however, and
developers know they won't pass with city officials unless their
plans include a social housing or public service component.

Homeless advocates constantly demand that Vancouver and the province
build more subsidized residences in the neighbourhood; inevitably,
however, many will be filled by addicts and by the mentally ill.

Local housing lobbyists have accused Vancouver's Mayor, Sam Sullivan,
of ignoring the plight of residents. He points out that the city is
buying and renovating old hotels, which are then turned over to
social agencies.

It is a slow, expensive process, he admits. He agrees that more
social housing might further entrench the drug industry; inevitably,
drug users will occupy new public units.

"We already tend to locate facilities where these people are, and
that has the effect of attracting even more people, from all over the
country," says the Mayor. "I go on tours of the neighbourhood and
it's very difficult for me to find anyone who is from Vancouver."

The city's attractive image is at stake, he says. In another 38
months, Vancouver will host the Olympic Winter Games: "Fifteen
thousand reporters will be here, looking for stories," says the
Mayor. What if they find the Downtown Eastside in the same condition
as now? The results, he says, "will not be pretty."

Yet instead of a more dramatic relocation program, he favours still
more social programs. Mayor Sullivan would like to see public
agencies granted permission to experiment with "maintenance programs"
and "alternative drugs" for injection substance users: In other
words, free fixes. "It has worked in Europe," he insists.

He is taking the proposal to Ottawa when he meets with members of the
federal Cabinet including Tony Clement, the Health Minister. Some
Conservatives are already fighting against the idea of maintenance
programs. This upsets the mayor: "They are trying to prevent us from
being innovative with these people."

Seen-it-all front-line workers counter that there has been too much
innovation. It hasn't helped.

A uniformed beat cop turns into the alley near the corner of Hastings
and Main. A five-year veteran of the Downtown Eastside squad,
Constable Shane Aitken moves towards a cluster of people smoking
crack. They don't scatter. They just saunter off. I join the officer
on his patrol and we walk down another alley. People caught using
drugs in what he calls the skids do not face automatic arrest.

The Vancouver Police Department has allocated 50 full-time officers
to the neighbourhood. Const. Aitken suggests the department needs to
double that number. There's not much hope of that, he admits.

For now, he and his colleagues struggle to maintain some semblance of
public order. They are losing the battle.

"We lack the resources to police the area effectively," says Const.
Aitken, 36. "People would rather see their tax dollars spent on
health care, instead of cleaning up what is basically a ghetto. Well,
you get what you pay for."

Officers are forced to prioritize. "We don't turn a blind eye to
anything," he says. "But our focus is on the non-user drug dealers.
We want to get the ones who are poisoning the population down here."

We round a corner and head west, towards another knot of users.
"Control of this particular alley is under dispute," says Const.
Aitken. "Persian and Kurdish dealers are fighting over it with native
youth gangs."

The police know that drugs are shuttled into the neighbourhood early
each morning when the beat patrols are less frequent; shipments wind
up in the municipally regulated hotels and rooming houses, their beds
reserved for the unemployed and the mentally ill. The drugs are then
packaged and distributed to dealers who work the street.

Const. Aitken has more than just a professional interest in this
area. It's personal. His cousin wound up in the skids, addicted to
drugs. "To start, he's mentally ill," says the officer. "He got
shunted around and came here, like so many other people, and there
were all these cheap drugs right at his doorstep." It was like an
alcoholic moving into a bar, he adds.

If the city could just remove the thousands of neighbourhood
residents with mental health issues, and move them to new, proper
facilities in different parts of the city, "we would eliminate three
quarters of the problems, overnight....

"I spend half my life down here," Const. Aitken says as we resume our
walk through the skids. "I'm all over this community. And I'm not
happy with it. I mean, look at it ... It's an experiment that's gone
completely awry. This is a social experiment that has been a failure,
plain and simple. It's unacceptable. I don't care what anyone says.
It's been a failure. And it has to change."

We pause under a street lamp. A drug deal goes down across the street.

It's a day like any other.

The river I step in is not the river I stand in.