THE STREETS OF HARD KNOCKS

Meet Jeff, one of about a dozen addicted people living on downtown streets.
He's 25 and has HIV. He's also just out of jail and prohibited by the
courts from being in the core, but he's here anyway because it's got all
the services he needs.

Over there, that's Yakob. He's the odd duck in the funny hat, the one with
"Jesus the Light" written on the back of his jacket. Downtown police Sgt.
Darren Laur says there are about eight people like Yakob living on the
streets, some of them drug addicts as well.

That neatly dressed one pushing the shopping cart full of stuff? He's one
of a dozen or so who Laur describes as "homeless by default." Some of them
moved out here from other provinces hoping for work and didn't find it. Or
they did, but haven't quite saved enough money for a damage deposit.
They're generally not addicted to anything beyond the occasional beer.

"I don't have a hard-luck story," said one such man, lined up for a free
hotdog outside City Hall last week. "I'm just unemployed."

Then there are the kids like Alex Moreau, the 17-year-old who drifted into
town seven months ago from Montreal and now panhandles on Douglas Street.
He's got a loving family back home in Quebec, and calls his mom at least
once a month. Laur thinks of kids like Moreau as "urban nomads," and
figures there are probably 25 of them living on the streets now.

Sixty all told, then, and maybe another 40 or so drug dealers, sex-trade
workers and hangers-on thrown into the mix during working hours. A small
number in a region of more than 300,000, but living large enough to drive
downtown merchants and Victoria city councillors mad.

Some of the addicts leave their syringes lying around. Some inject where
people can see them. Others sleep in store-owners' doorways, or plop
themselves and their dogs nearby and spend the day begging. A few commit
crimes every day, either breaking into cars or selling drugs to support
their own habits.

It's no Downtown Eastside -- anyone who has been to Vancouver's desperate
drug ghetto always emphasizes that point. But Victoria's social problems
are definitely showing. And the one thing that all sides of the issue agree
on is that it's time to act.

Social agencies say the streets are meaner than ever: more people sleeping
on the streets, more working in the sex trade, more using drugs. The needle
exchange handed out a record 60,000 syringes in December, almost twice as
many as in past months.

The agencies blame cuts to income assistance, and caution that things can
only get worse next year when anyone on welfare for two years or more is
cut off. Much of the street community falls into that category.

Downtown merchants are alarmed, too, and not only about street issues. Some
play down the core's social problems but say they're increasingly worried
about the growing number of boarded-up store fronts at key properties on
Yates, Government and Johnson. Others, however, believe that's the result
of the street scene, which they say is driving customers away.

"We need to be able to say to the tourists who are coming in here, 'Look,
our streets are clean. Nobody's going to try to sell you drugs or sex. You
aren't going to have to explain to your five-year-old what a needle is,' "
says Denyce Burrows, a florist in the downtown for 20 years.

"You really have to nip these things in the bud. And this is way beyond the
bud stage."

The city has a new plan. It's working with the regional health authority to
put more outreach workers on the street and build a sobering centre, which
was lost two years ago with the closure of Gateway due to funding cuts.

Police will also boost their presence downtown and target drug dealers, not
only downtown but in any neighbourhood the displaced dealers move to.
Victoria police Chief Paul Battershill says that kind of one-two punch has
been proven in other cities to at least reduce the visibility of
trafficking, if not the actual incidence.

But the events that put people on the streets and drug dealers on the
corner are complex. And figuring out how to set them right is not quick,
simple or certain, as has been demonstrated by various failed attempts in
the past to curb the street scene.

The creation in the 1970s of the Red Zone, initially limited to Bastion
Square, was one of the earliest measures. The quiet square was the hot spot
for trafficking back in those days (which speaks to another problem for
anyone trying to get a handle on the vice trade -- it moves) and the
law-makers thought they could fix the problem by banning chronic offenders
from the area.

The zone has since expanded to a one-square-kilometre section of downtown,
bounded by Chatham, Cook, Belleville and Wharf/Store. Traffickers are
routinely "red-zoned" when sentenced, and risk going back to jail if caught
in the prohibited area. But the sale of sex and drugs in the Red Zone has
carried on regardless, maintained by a steady stream of new suppliers.

Throughout the last two decades, there have been any number of police task
forces, citizens' coalitions, business associations and merchants' groups
examining the problems of the downtown. The most recent was the Downtown
Crunch in 1998, which, among other things, established a code of etiquette
for panhandlers. Unfortunately, polite panhandling hasn't been enough.

With each waxing and waning of interest, various shelters and treatment
centres and drop-ins have opened and closed and opened again. In time they
began to be seen as part of the problem in their own right as storeowners
lamented the concentration of social services downtown. Still, the kids
kept coming downtown with their bongo drums and dogs, and the drugs kept
flowing.

Compounding the problem is the fact that any win for the downtown always
comes at the expense of some other neighbourhood. Squeeze the drug trade
out of Holiday Court or from the corner of Pandora and Douglas, and it
relocates to Speed Avenue, and then Fernwood. Squeeze the sex trade out of
lower Government Street, and it moves to the Gorge industrial zone, or
Hillside and Quadra.

Why so little progress? The conflict could turn out to be the nature of the
city, says AIDS Vancouver Island executive director Miki Hansen.

"You can go back to the cities where they were first opening methadone
clinics in the 1970s because there were problems -- Prince George,
Kamloops, Victoria, Vancouver -- and those communities are still struggling
with these kinds of issues," says Hansen.

Hansen wonders whether Victorians are really worrying about the fundamental
issues at the root of drug addiction, prostitution and poverty, or are just
sick of having to acknowledge their existence.

The storm over the Johnson Street Parkade last month underscores that
point. The parkade's former security guard, who retired in the summer, used
to let people inject inside as long as they cleaned up their mess and moved
on quickly, recalls one injection-drug user.

The guard who replaced the retiree didn't have the same tolerance. Tensions
culminated in a fight between the new guard and a young female drug addict.
She brandished a dirty needle when he yelled at her about being in the
parkade, and he hit her in the head with a flashlight hard enough to cause
a brain hemorrhage.

And suddenly, everybody was talking about the problem downtown.

"The big question is how a society handles folks who don't fit in," says
Hansen. "Are we compassionate and try to help them remain part of the
community? Or do we get mad and lock them up?"

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and there are few
places where that's more evident than on the streets.

There's a direct correlation, for instance, between the province's decision
to phase out Riverview psychiatric hospital in the 1980s and the number of
mentally ill people now living on B.C. streets. Abandoned to the fates,
they ended up homeless -- and from there, often drug-addicted.

There's also a direct link between the foster system and the people who end
up on the street. Not all foster kids fall to the streets and not all kids
on the street grew up in foster homes, but even the most cursory of surveys
downtown turns up a disproportionate number of former foster children with
no family support. They, too, often end up drug-addicted.

Over in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, there's a direct
connection between a political decision to back off on policing in the area
a few years ago and the subsequent boom in the open drug market. The
displacement of hundreds of low-income earners in the "cleanup" of
Vancouver for Expo 86 was directly linked to a surge in the homeless
population. The crackdown on prostitution around Granville Street was
directly responsible for a new prostitution stroll around Mount Pleasant.

Victoria's current problems are a little of all of those things,
intensified by some of the best winter weather in Canada. The mild winters
make living on the streets possible, and even draw young panhandlers from
elsewhere in the country.

"My mom says I'm her missionary," says panhandler Benoit Hallis, a Montreal
transplant who likes to considers himself a de-facto street outreach
worker. He used to be an addict, but that was seven years ago; now, he's
just a young man who likes living on Victoria's streets.

Panhandlers are an ongoing annoyance for merchants downtown, as are the
young graffiti "artists" who deface buildings and leave owners to foot the
bill for the mandatory cleanup.

"I have compassion," downtown building owner Gerald Hartwig said at a
chamber of commerce meeting last week on problems downtown. "I would be
more than happy to help the homeless, but we're at the point where the
other 99 per cent need help. This problem is not going to be addressed by
tolerance, but by respect."

But Battershill says there's little that can be done about loitering and
begging on public property.

And now that the B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that begging is a legitimate
form of expression under the Charter of Rights, shopkeepers may have little
choice but to give up on police intervention and adopt a practice that's
already working well for some of their peers: Asking panhandlers to move
along when it starts to affect business.

Addiction is another matter.

If you live, work or play in the downtown with any kind of regularity, you
worry about stumbling across discarded syringes, somebody injecting, or
finding your car broken into. There may be just 12 hard-core addicts living
on downtown streets, but some of them inject 25 or more times a day and
have to raise several hundred dollars for their drugs.

And regardless of where you live in the region, you'll also have to worry
about your own children's access to drugs. Any child can easily buy a wide
range of drugs at several well-known corners downtown.

"Santa, please give me a baseball bat so I can take care of the
crystal-meth dealer," muttered one panhandler tired of seeing teenagers
lured onto the amphetamine.

If you're an addict yourself, you'll be worrying about diseases ranging
from hepatitis-C (outreach workers say an addict typically contracts the
virus within six months of starting to inject) to life-threatening
abscesses caused by contaminated drugs and poor injection habits. You'll be
at risk of contracting AIDS, going to jail, dying of an overdose, or just
plain collapsing from lack of good food and sufficient sleep.

The city is pondering a safe-injection site, which would at least get rid
of some of the discarded syringes and public drug use while also improving
addicts' access to health services. But such a facility is meant to go hand
in hand with treatment -- something that's in scarce supply in Victoria or
anywhere on Vancouver Island.

There's a detox facility in Victoria to serve the Island and 10 rehab beds
for longer stays, and a constant waiting list for both. The lack of
services is even more critical for youth. Funding has been cut to the point
that the handful of detox beds set aside for them are available for just 17
days a month.

Compare that to Switzerland, about the same size as Vancouver Island and
with a similar drug-dependent population. The country has 5,000 detox beds
and 1,300 residential treatment beds. B.C. all told has no more than 100 of
each.

It's like the system is always finding new ways to complicate the problem,
says Dave Stewart, of the Upper Room shelter and soup kitchen.

Guys like him and Rev. Al Tysick, of the Open Door, used to be able to put
in the word and get people into treatment, says Stewart. But now there's a
requirement that they be referred by a doctor.

That would be fine if addicts would go to a doctor, he says. But fearful of
being judged -- or caught in the common dilemma of not being able to afford
the identification they need to qualify for a Care card -- they won't. The
profoundly ill young woman who was hit in the head in the Johnson Street
Parkade desperately needs detox, says Stewart, but he can't convince her to
see a doctor.

There are answers to the problems downtown, or at least some strategies to
mitigate the worst of them, says MaryKay MacVicar. But the acting
co-ordinator of street outreach at AIDS Vancouver Island says it's going to
take time and effort, and nobody wants to hear that.

"It seems to me that there was a time there when we went into social
problems with a long-term view, with an eye to fixing the underlying
cause," says MacVicar. "These days, everything just seems to be going into
crisis mode."

Police have borne much of the criticism for the situation in the downtown.
Merchants can't understand why panhandlers aren't being arrested, or why
police can't simply haul away all the drug dealers.

But the persistence of addiction and trafficking worldwide, even while
increasing enforcement has been directed at the problem in the past two
decades, speaks to more complex factors at work. Chief among them is that
addiction and homelessness are typically all tangled up in how people feel
about themselves, and that's not an easy thing to fix.

Not that anyone seems to be trying that hard, notes Victoria police Sgt.
Darren Laur, who oversees the downtown beat. "We can only do so much," says
Laur. "As long as we have addicts, we'll have traffickers. As long as we
have no care for these people, we'll have problems downtown.

"We can put them into jail, but I'll tell you what will happen to them.
They'll come out 40 or 50 pounds heavier and all cleaned up, and then in no
time they'll be back to their old ways because there's nothing out here for
them."

Even if there was, not everyone will choose to be helped.

More shelters, while a very good first step, will not automatically end all
homelessness. Yakob has lived on the streets of various Canadian cities for
almost 30 years, and likes it that way. Several people living on the
streets say they'd rather sleep outside than share a room in a shelter with
strangers.

Recovering addicts have a particularly difficult time staying in any
shelter where drug use is quietly condoned. (On the other side of that
issue, addicts would be out on the streets if shelters got too stringent.)

"Right now, I'm choosing to be homeless," says Little Red Riding Hood, a
prostitute who works on the fringes of the downtown. "I found that my drug
addiction was leading to too many people around me, and that led me to a
lot of noise. And that led me to problems with police."

Finding work would help people off the streets as well. But it's no
guarantee. The rental market is tight even for the middle-class, notes
former Victoria mayor David Turner. Substance-abuse problems are also a
poor fit with steady work and happy landlords, and just saving up for the
damage deposit can be a major stumbling block when people are starting from
the point of zero income.

"The only place I could afford was one of those apartments where the drugs
are everywhere, and I just couldn't live in that," says Frank, who admits
to being weary of living on the streets at age 50. "For me to get a
one-bedroom, I'm going to need $600 a month. How am I going to get that?"

And even dozens of additional treatment beds and the daily arrest of drug
traffickers wouldn't be enough to eliminate addiction, says sex-trade
outreach worker Melissa Macaulay, clean for 18 months now.

"There's so much to recovery," she says. "It's not just about getting off
the drugs and you're cured, or I would have been fine years ago. Addicted
people on the streets have usually grown up so used to abuse that they
think it's normal to keep on hurting themselves."

As for panhandling, that just may end up being Victoria's permanent
trademark. Short of telling panhandlers to be nice and confiscating their
packs every once in a while, police say they're unable to do much more than
that. Begging is a constitutional right, and the current trend toward
window signs threatening prosecution hasn't held up in court.

Besides, who wouldn't pick Victoria?

"You can't beat the weather," says Benoit Hallis, the panhandler from
Quebec. "It's minus-35 in Montreal right now."

Who They Are:

There are a million stories in the big city, as the saying goes. So here
are a few, a handful of thumbnail sketches of people living and working on
Victoria's streets. Some names have been changed:

Randy -- He moved here from Galiano Island in November thinking he had
found a job. But he says he worked for two weeks doing masonry and then his
boss stiffed him for his paycheque. He has high hopes of being off the
street within the next week, as soon as he can find more work.

Janine -- She's a drug addict from Edmonton who has been living on and off
the streets of Victoria and Vancouver for the past 13 years. She's homeless
now; her landlord threw her out two weeks ago for making too much noise.
That's a problem, as she's under house arrest for trafficking and is
supposed to remain at home every night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

She hopes to move to Courtenay soon. Her friend has cancer, and they've got
plans to start growing medicinal marijuana.

Jeff -- Fresh out of jail on a trafficking conviction, he's a 25-year-old
heroin addict from Alberta. His dad has been in the penitentiary for as
long as Jeff can remember, and his mother is a drug addict. When Jeff told
her six months ago that he was HIV-positive, she cried.

He and his girlfriend get by on $185 a month in income assistance and
whatever else they can come up with. They mostly sleep in her car. His
biggest beef is the litter his fellow addicts leave behind after they inject.

Aaron -- Age 41, he has a taste for cocaine and alcohol but says his
addiction is "under control." He has been living on and off the streets for
a year now. It's not great, but it's better than dealing with the "slum
landlords" at the places he has been able to afford.

He gets regular work as a construction labourer, but herniated a disc in
his back several months ago and hasn't worked since.

"I understand now how people end up homeless," he says. "A lot of people
look down on addicts and the homeless, but I don't any more."

Wayne -- He grew up in Nanaimo and moved to Vancouver at age 19, relocating
to Victoria six years ago after "growing up and deciding it was time to
come home."

He isn't homeless or unemployed, but he spends much of his spare time on
downtown streets. On this particular night, he was lined up outside City
Hall for a free hotdog from Christian outreach worker Cliff Doerksen.

He has sympathy for police and city business leaders trying to grapple with
the problems of the downtown: "You don't want the city to be gross and
disgusting for tourists."

Susan -- She moved to B.C. from Alberta with her parents when she was
small, and lived on the streets and in the shelters of Victoria and
Vancouver from ages 13 to 17. "Abusive family," she explains.

She's 20 now and has recently found a place to live, but still comes
downtown every night to sell drugs. She's doing well on the methadone
program and no longer uses heroin.

Yakob -- He's a 55-year-old schizophrenic from Manitoba, and by his own
estimation has lived on one Canadian street or another since the early
1970s. He settled in Victoria three years ago.

He has no income and won't stay in the shelters. He survives by eating
garbage and grabbing sleep "wherever I am -- I

couldn't care less what happens to my body."

When he was living on the streets in Manitoba and Ontario, police would
arrest him two or three times a year and put him in jail or a mental
hospital. He's grateful that no one has arrested him since his arrival in
Victoria.

William -- Age 19 and Victoria-born, he's a panhandler who says anyone
going hungry in the city "must be stupid." By his tally there are 53
different street agencies that give out food regularly, and he sometimes
worries that all that free food is cutting into the panhandling donations.

"One of the reasons people won't give you money is because they know
there's so much free food here," he says.

He's got a long, long criminal record for crimes including break-ins,
assault, trafficking and carrying concealed weapons. That and a lack of
clean clothes are going to make it tough to find work, he figures, which
will in turn make it tough to get off the streets.

Craig -- He's got a place to live, but has spent the past 13 years hanging
around downtown. On this day, he's seated outside Blenz coffee shop at the
corner of Johnson and Douglas. "This is my community," he says.

He doesn't deal drugs, nor does he like it that the police often suspect
that he does. Just because he hangs around on the corner doesn't mean he's
up to anything bad, he says.

"The police say to me: 'We see you downtown all the time.' Yeah? Well, I
see them downtown all the time, too."