700 SIGN UP TO SPEAK AGAINST CENTRES FOR DRUG USERS

Chinatown Merchants Vow To Fight Health Board Initiatives For The
Downtown Eastside

In what promises to be the biggest battle Vancouver city hall has
seen in 25 years, more than 700 people have signed up to give city
bureaucrats an earful next week about a new health centre for drug
users in the Downtown Eastside.

And that will be only the beginning of what promises to be a lengthy war.

"If the health board wins here, we're not going to lay down and play
dead," said Charles Lee, vice-president of the Chinatown Merchants
Association. "This decision will be appealed."

At issue is a Vancouver/Richmond health board initiative to start
improving health services for drug users in the Downtown Eastside.
It's an initiative that is meant to fit in with an overall drug
strategy the city is developing for the area, which proposes to
improve treatment, enforcement and harm-reduction services in order
to start controlling the anarchic drug market and to reduce the
deaths and diseases that are a byproduct. (It's being backed by the
Vancouver Agreement team, a collection of city, provincial, and
federal people who are working together to improve the area.)

The board has asked the city for development permits for four sites
in the Downtown Eastside: a health centre on Powell to replace an
existing one on Cordova, a new life-skills training centre on
Cordova, an addiction-treatment centre on Pender Street, and a
"contact centre" on the main floor of the Roosevelt Hotel near Main
and Hastings.

The contact centre and the Pender Street clinic are causing the most
alarm among nearby Chinatown and Gastown residents and businesses.

While city and health board officials say their objective is to start
reducing the crowds of dealers and users on the street by
establishing the new contact centre, opponents say they fear it will
simply attract even more dealers and users to an already beleaguered
area.

Lee said a city like Portland, which has established a good continuum
of services for drug treatment, has never tried something like a
contact centre. That makes him dubious that it could work here.

Lee said there are also concerns, especially from businesses and
agencies along Pender, about the health clinic there, since it will
include a methadone clinic. "Then there will be dealers waiting
outside to sell something to the methadone clients to top up."

The first development-permit board meeting begins at 3 p.m. Monday in
the Plaza 500 Hotel at 12th and Cambie.