Part 2

ON THE STREET, SUBTLE CHANGES

Reform Is Coming To The Downtown Eastside. You Just Can't See It

So much of what happens in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside can happen in a
second, and so often it does. But other parts of life here take a while longer.

If you took a stroll through the neighbourhood this time last year, you
would have found hundreds of drug users and been offered everything from
T3's to Valium. You might have seen an overdose, or maybe an arrest.

And if you take the same walk now, you probably won't notice a difference.

In the year since the City of Vancouver released its bold Framework for
Action to begin to deal with the drug problem around the Lower Mainland,
there are a few new overhead video cameras and a more conspicuous police
presence.

That has spread out users and dealers around the area.

One year later, some of the resources here, most notably detox facilities,
are easier to find, thanks in part to better cooperation between
organizations that provide services to drug users.

One year later, there is better housing here for addicts, and the people
planning the city's drug strategy say much more is on the way.

But for now at least, community workers, city planners, beat cops,
neighbourhood activists and drug users alike agree that Vancouver's drug
situation is still a mess.

"Are things any different from a year ago?" asks Donald MacPherson, the
City of Vancouver's drug policy coordinator. "I was afraid you would ask me
that."

The most notable change in the neighbourhood is where people hang out. The
drug trade used to flourish outside the Carnegie Centre at Main and
Hastings and in the alley across the street, along Abbott Street. Those
areas are often quiet now. At Main and Hastings, city engineers removed the
bus stops and a bus shelter from the corner and installed parking meters
instead.

With fewer people now waiting for the bus, users and dealers are more
obvious than before.

The police have also made their presence felt on the corner.

While last year police cars would often drive by or beat officers would
sometimes walk through, they often park their cars there now.

One day last week gave a good example.

Two Vancouver police officers parked their cars at the corner and leaned
over the roof of one car to have a chat. They stood there for ten minutes,
but they hardly looked at anyone.

They did not need to.

As soon as they pulled up, the drug crowd put out the warning -- "six in
cruisers" -- and everyone holding drugs left instantly.

Many of the other corners are quieter now as well, likely because of
cameras businesses in the area have installed.

Some of the cameras perch overhead like street lights, housed in round
black domes.

Others are pointed down alleys or along once-busy streets.

The dealers are wary of the surveillance. They have moved elsewhere.

But most people in the neighbourhood say these changes have not reduced
drug activity.

They have only made it less visible.

The Carnegie Association's Muggs Sigurgeirson, a long-time community
worker, says she knows what's happening at Main and Hastings from several
blocks away.

"When I hit Pender and Jackson, I know whether the police are at Carnegie
or not," she says.

That's because many of the dealers head that way when the police come to
Carnegie.

There are other changes, too. A yellow plastic biohazard box has been
installed on the corner to keep injection users from leaving their used
needles on the street.

There is also a security guard outside Carnegie now to keep the crowd in
check -- a tall slender man with a greying goatee, army pants and a
demeanour that suggests a familiarity with martial arts.

Many of the old faces are still here. Some of them, like clean-cut, pro
dealers, look the same as a year ago. Some of the people have aged a bit,
become a bit sicker and lost a little more of themselves. Some seem to have
given up all hope, their faces a map of unmitigated misery.

Some -- like Hershel, a lifetime user who used to sell crack from his
wheelchair -- have simply vanished.

This time last year, Stephen O'Sullivan would hold court against a low
concrete wall at Main and Hastings, most often with a thimble-sized rock of
crack tucked in his cheek and a tidy wad of bills in his pocket.

O'Sullivan had been a junkie for years, he had a wife, also an addict, and
a child who did not live with them. He had long hair and dirt-ringed
fingers and a pair of oversized glasses that were falling apart.

This year, O'Sullivan has moved northeast a few blocks, to Oppenheimer
Park. His hair is neater now, and he has new glasses.

Unlike so many of his compatriots, though, O'Sullivan's face and his body
seem immune to his habit; somehow his face is brighter, his speech clearer,
he looks better now, after another year of dope.

Sharon Baptiste, a plains Indian from Alberta, does not seem much different
either.

Her jack-o-lantern teeth look a little more jagged, and her eyes bear the
ochre tinge of jaundice.

She has diabetes, now, too, she says in an alley off Hastings. She has
cleaned up again, and broken down again, and says she's been back on the
street only a few days. But Baptiste still seems optimistic and she still
laughs at herself, much as she did before.

This time last year, Deanna Wilvers was a young addict who had spent time
in Burnaby Correctional. She sold dope and rock cocaine at Main and
Hastings, most often in a baseball jacket and a pair of too-tight pants.

Even last fall she looked a mess. She was often hungry or dopesick and had
begun to pick at her eyes. Bob Moss of the Carnegie Street Program nagged
her then to stop her picking.

A year later -- at a mere 20 years old-- she a walking display of the
street's cruel power.

One day last week, Deanna had no voice and spoke in a feeble, phlegmatic
whisper.

She is no longer able to inject drugs into the veins of her arms, or legs
or ankles, she says, so she has turned to the veins in her neck, which is
bruised yellow and dotted with 28-gauge holes.

She seems hardly able to carry herself.

And she still picks her eyes. Her teary eyes are rimmed with a fleshy red.
Her left eye barely opens now. There's a scab in the outside corner, and a
cataract has marbled over her iris, leaving it useless, dull and gray.

Twenty-seven-year-old Kathryn Grant, with her shiny auburn hair and fine
skin, looks like Penelope Cruz and must be one of Vancouver's most
beautiful women.

She spends most of her time around Oppenheimer Park, feeding her crack habit.

She smiles often, explaining how she left her father and her brothers and
her young marriage in Quesnel, how she is manic-depressive and diabetic and
used to take lithium, laughing a bit between each slowly formed thought.

She does not belong here, yet she says this place has been her home for
three years.

Grant walks toward Hastings Street to stop in at a Chinese restaurant. All
the tables are full, so she sits with a woman she knows.

This one says her name is Cat. She is one of the new ones, one of the
recent arrivals who show up here -- refugees from suburbia, or the north,
or the reserve, or points east. She wears a low-cut top and bobbed hair and
heavy eyeliner and a tangle of chokers at her neck. She is sniffling, and
giggling, and she does not try to dispel our notion that she just turned a
trick in the bathroom.

Kathryn and Cat talk for a few minutes over their french fries.

I ask Cat how old she is. She motions that I should come closer, then she
whispers. "I'm almost 17."

There are people like Rob Clark, too, a relative newcomer with a recurring
crack habit.

He's getting his hair cut under the Carnegie Centre tent at Main and
Hastings when he says just ten weeks ago he weighed 243 pounds and had
19-inch arms. He is not so big now, though he could hold his own in any
altercation. He wears heavy work pants and work boots.

Ten weeks ago, he moved here from Langley, where he was a labourer, he
says. He did drywall, swamping, roofing, landscaping, he says, and just the
day before he had gone out on a job. Before that, he spent 12 years in jail
in Matsqui. But he says the crack is starting to take over his life. He's
hoping his new girlfriend, a Christian woman, he says, can help him
straighten out.

There's a Musqueam kid, too, who cooks up ersatz crack from candlewax and
baking soda in the dimple of an upturned aluminum pop can. He stirs the
wax, hold a candle underneath and slowly adds baking soda, stirring it
until it looks right.

He lets it harden, then he cuts it into squares.

It's how he's made his living since he blew an inheritance, he says. He
can't be more than 19. He sells the stuff to tourists.

The city's MacPherson says much of the work in the past year has been
discussion, gaining approval, seeking input, drawing plans.

Much of that work will come to fruition in the coming months, he says, as a
couple resource centres open, as a special drug court begins operation, as
new housing comes on line.

"A lot of the evidence of the work that's been done in the past year,
you're not going to see it for a few months yet," says MacPherson.