Part 1

Downtown Eastside: A fix at last?

Part One Of Our Progress Report Finds Change Is Slow, But Moving Ahead

Three hundred and sixty-three days ago, Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen
announced the Vancouver version of the War on Drugs.

Surrounded by a large crowd of curious but skeptical journalists in the
standard-issue glitter of a hotel meeting room, Owen said the city had
developed its own plan for what has become an international drug crisis --
a crisis that, locally, has created an open drug market along one of
Vancouver's main downtown streets and spawned an epidemic of drug-overdose
deaths and drug-related disease, along with the highest property-crime rate
in the country.

Instead of an American military-style offensive, Owen said, it would be
pursued more like a peacekeeping mission on drugs -- fought with nurses and
doctors, counsellors and teachers, treatment beds and education programs.
There would be four pillars: law enforcement, yes, but also prevention,
treatment and harm reduction.

The police would concentrate on dealers and distributors, but the addicts
themselves would be treated like sick people, not criminals. The plan even
gingerly introduced the idea of supervised consumption sites for addicts
and of support for a medically supervised trial of giving heroin to addicts
- -- two items that attracted the most attention and controversy.

A year of lengthy public debate followed over the merits of particular
pieces of the plan. For one group, the owners of businesses on the
boundaries of the city's drug zone, that debate became a lawsuit to try to
prevent the opening of a new "contact centre" for addicts near Main and
Hastings -- a first-of-its-kind facility in the country that is a drop-in
centre, complete with medical staff and counsellors, specifically geared to
addicts.

But behind the considerable torrent of words and policies and pieces of
paper, has anything really changed in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside?

To the naked eye, not really.

The visible changes are exceedingly small.

Portable toilets are put out on the sidewalk on Hastings near Main at
night, an attempt to persuade people to stop using the alleys.

The dental clinic at the Sunrise Hotel has opened, a significant difference
for people who need dental care in the Downtown Eastside, but meaningless
to most others.

The most significant changes are hidden and just beginning to take effect.

The Vancouver/Richmond health board set up a single telephone line for
access to detox services in September. That has boosted occupancy in the
city's two detox facilities to 99 per cent from 73 in the past couple of
months, and reduced the waiting period from between four and six weeks to a
mere four days.

The board has also begun introducing needle exchanges, methadone treatment,
and alcohol and drug counselling to all seven of the city's health areas.
(The health centre in Kerrisdale already has a needle exchange in place and
the methadone program is about to arrive.)

The province's education ministry has, in record time, created and approved
a new drug-education curriculum as part of the prevention pillar of the
drug strategy.

And on the law-enforcement front, police recently appointed Ken Frail as an
inspector in the Downtown Eastside. Again, meaningless to outsiders, but a
hugely symbolic move for those in the community to have a police officer in
charge who supports and understands the philosophy behind the city's drug
strategy and who has spent several years building contacts in the community.

But the provincial and federal governments, the main agents responsible for
putting the city's plan into place, have been dormant for months, one
preoccupied by new government and budget-cutting, the other by security and
terrorism.

And down at the street level, the dealers and their customers still cluster
at Main and Hastings or the alleys nearby, scattering when police park
themselves at the corners and regrouping when police are gone.

The infection rate for HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C among drug users is steady.

And, for one particular group, the past year has brought only a single
change: death.

Around 80 people have died of drug-related causes in Vancouver during the
debates, the consultations, the development-permit applications, the
lawsuits, and the policy adjustments.

They are people such as this -- from the files of coroner Stephen Fonseca,
one of the Vancouver region's five coroners:

- - A 34-year-old man who left the apartment he and his girlfriend shared in
Kitsilano around midnight May 3 to withdraw money from a paycheque just
deposited electronically. He'd been on a cocaine binge for about two weeks.
Around 6 the next morning, the young man, originally from Harrison Hot
Springs, fell backwards out of a third-floor window in a notorious rooming
house in the 300-block of Columbia Street. A crack pipe was found beside
him. He died of head injuries, with crack cocaine listed in Fonseca's
report as a contributing factor.

- - A 36-year-old Caucasian woman who had been working the streets since she
was about 13 was found March 17, at the same rooming house on Columbia. She
had booked into the hotel earlier that day with a "date" who disappeared.
It isn't known if the man left before she died or after. Fonseca spent
considerable time talking to her family, whom he described as "lovely,"
during his investigation. She had been using both cocaine and heroin, had
traces of both methadone and valium in her system, and had a number of
tracks on her arm. Like most people in drug-overdose cases, she had died of
"respiratory compromise" -- she stopped breathing.

- - A 40-year-old native man who died July 13 after a drug binge in a
Hastings Street hotel. He had checked into the hotel a week earlier. The
day he died, he was doing drugs with a group of friends in his room, one of
whom told Fonseca that he "got greedy." He did four hits of crack and
heroin and then fell asleep, as did the rest of the group. They woke up. He
didn't.

Life and death as usual in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

For the city's mayor and political champion of the drug strategy, that lack
of progress is disturbing.

"I've been told 'Don't go too fast,'" he said in a recent interview. "But I
don't think we've gone fast enough."

"I'm convinced that we're right."

Tomorrow: Part Two: Life on the street