A CONSENSUS ON CAUSE BUT NOT CURE

An epidemic of heroin and cocaine on the Downtown Eastside is the overriding
factor behind a host of social ills, but solutions to the area's problems
require leadership at all levels.

In July city planners delivered six reports on the Downtown Eastside to the
mayor, city council and media. By late August, when they met with The
Vancouver Sun's editorial board, they had singled out the principal cause of
the community's accelerating deterioration: drugs.

The Downtown Eastside has historically been a low-income neighbourhood
filled with the elderly, ill, disabled or chronically unemployed and the
simply unlucky. Originally an entertainment centre, Hastings on either side
of Main, along with adjacent blocks, are still rife with hotels,
long-converted to single occupant residences. Most had beer parlours then,
and the strip still has the highest ratio of bar seats to population in the
Lower Mainland, which helped account for the area's earlier troubles.

Those crimes of passion, bar fights and muggings are now fondly recalled by
police as something like a golden age, manageable with a firm grip on the
arm, a spacious drunk tank and charity work. Days recalled with warm
nostalgia now that crack cocaine and heroin have moved in.

The arrival of high-grade, low-cost heroin had been deadly for the area and
its citizens, crime rising throughout the city as addicts were forced
farther away to steal to feed their habits. Overdoses rose, frighteningly,
but even that period holds quaint charm next to the current epidemic of
crack and injection cocaine, whose users are even more violent and
desperate. The great majority of addicts share needles with others and, of
an estimated 6,000 addicts in the neighbourhood, a study estimated 40 per
cent are HIV positive, the highest rate in the developed world.

Drugs are sold and used on the street with nonchalance, and non-resident
criminals and addicts flock to the area; the reports show more than half the
crimes committed there are by non-residents. Legitimate businesses are
driven out. Many female junkies who become prostitutes to finance their
addiction spread disease further afield.

The rot grows. City hall calls it the single most important issue facing the
city, and believes solving the area's other problems -- housing, new
business, personal safety -- depends on solving this one first.

It's one they can do little about alone. Money is not the whole solution.
More police and a pawnshop crackdown have done little; the courts release
addicted criminals almost immediately.

The answer is for leadership to reach consensus on remedies, both within the
community where a variety of advocacy and interest groups are at
loggerheads, and at higher political levels. But there is more concern in
Ottawa, where MP Libby Davies has raised the issue, than in Victoria,
although Premier Glen Clark lives on the east side and Municipal Affairs
Minister Jenny Kwan is the area MLA. Other members of cabinet represent
neighbouring ridings. Until they see the urgency in the Downtown Eastside,
the situation, if it can be believed, will get worse.

Checked-by: Don Beck