THE DEADLY STREETS

Seattle Warns Its Addicts To Stay Away From Vancouver

Blood Alley is a laneway in the gentrified Gastown area of Vancouver, just
half a block north of East Hastings Street. One of the saddest streets in
the Downtown Eastside, East Hastings is a ragged, unfettered market of
drugs, drink and despair. And considering its present use, Blood Alley is
aptly named. At one end is the Gastown Medical Clinic, where heroin and
cocaine addicts can seek help. At the other is Food For Thought, a dropin
centre where intravenous drug users who are HIVpositive can get a free cup
of coffee, a muffin and sensible advice. Food For Thought was started last
spring by two altruists, Norman Edwards, 38, and Russell Conley, 32, who
had been running a freelunch club in West End Vancouver for peoplemost
of them gay menwith HIV. But then "we began to notice a change in the
type of people who were coming for the lunch and how much they were
eating," says Conley. "People were coming back for fifth plates of food.
Many were from the Downtown Eastsidethey were spending their money on
drugs so they had nothing to buy food." Conley and Edwards decided to open
a space on the east side to provide food and information about HIV. "We had
no idea it was this desperate," says Edwards. "We thought it was badbut
oooh."

Bad is putting it mildly. The Downtown Eastside is being gutted by an AIDS
epidemic, spread by drug addicts who are shooting into every part of their
bodynecks, arms, legs, even groinsthen sharing their used hypodermics
with others. According to AIDS researchers, this area of Vancouver has the
highest rate of new HIV infection in North America. In the first six months
of 1997, it stood at 17 per cent, meaning that out of every 100 uninfected
intravenous drug users here, 17 will become infected with HIV every year.
The final, shattering statistic is this: over 40 per cent of the 8,000 or
so intravenous heroin and cocaine users in the Downtown Eastside are
HIVpositive. "HIV is becoming more and more a disease of the poor," says
Steffanie Strathdee, one of the scientists studying the spread of the
disease for the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The problem is so bad that in late October, the Vancouver/Richmond Health
Board declared the HIV and AIDS epidemic to be a public health emergency.
The B.C. situation has also sounded alarm bells south of the border. Health
authorities in Seattle, Wash., where the rate of infection among drug users
is only three per cent, have handed out 12,000 flyers to local addicts
warning about the dangers of visiting Vancouver. The federal and provincial
governments, meanwhile, have promised $4 million, topped off with $700,000
from the health board, to arrest the spread of the disease through outreach
programs, steppedup staff training and increased access to health services.

Doctors first noticed a big jump in the rate of infection in the Downtown
Eastside in early 1996but were initially at a loss to explain it. They
soon learned that drug users were beginning to inject cocaineexacerbating
the problem of shared needles. Heroin users generally need three hits a day
to maintain their stuporous high. Cocaine addicts, on the other hand, need
at least 20 daily fixes. That means that even with a wellestablished
needle exchange program in place, there can never be enough clean needles
to meet the incessant demand. In fact, according to Strathdee, about 10
million needles would be needed each year in the Downtown Eastside to stem
the widespread practice of sharing hypodermics.

That is the scenario that met Edwardswho is himself HIVpositiveand
Conley when they arrived on the Eastside. Food for Thought received
$100,000 in funding from the B.C. ministry of health. Starbucks provides
free coffee and dayold buns and muffins, furniture and equipment. Hemp
B.C., an organization that promotes the legalization of marijuana, provides
$1,000 a month for juice and fruit. "We wanted to open up a dialogue about
HIV and AIDS," says Conley, an artist who does not have HIV. "In the
drugusing community down here, if you identify yourself as being
HIVpositive you are seen as a threat, you could get beaten up." As a
result, he adds, few on the street tell others they are HIVpositiveor
take precautions to prevent the spread of their illness.

The Food For Thought space at 52 Blood Alleyin what was once an old
jailis tiny, enough for a desk and three tables, a coffeemaker and an
array of pastries. On the walls are posters promoting the use of condoms,
information about free lunches, advice about coping with AIDS. During one
recent morning, Royce Contois, Albert Sutton and Mel Evenson, all denizens
of the Downtown Eastside and all HIVpositive, had taken advantage of the
dropin centre, knowing they could sit for a while and be treated like
human beings. "This is a good place," said Sutton, who has been off heroin
for two years. "People here aren't afraid to talk."

Contois, a 36yearold aboriginal man from Manitoba, is homelessand says
he has been clean for two months. His wife, Esther, who is also
HIVpositive, is in the hospital, recovering from necrotizing
fasciitisthe socalled flesheating disease. Until he met Edwards and
Conley, Contois spent his time getting high on rice wine, $1 pops of
Valium, 50cent tabs of Tylenol 3, fixes of heroin and cocaine for $10
each. Sutton, 53, whose tattooed armscomplete with schooners and the
requisite naked ladybetray his years as a sailor, used to shoplift and
prostitute himself. "Anything to get a fix," says Sutton, who is now on
methadone, a prescription substitute for heroin. Evenson, 28, says:
"Sometimes, I don't want to talk about my diseasesometimes, I just want
to die." And sometimes, he can't stay away from the ubiquitous drugs. "I
see a syringe just lying there or people see me and hand it to me, saying
there's no strings attached, it's free," Evenson adds.

Edwards and Conley feed them and offer advice. "You drive down Hastings
Street and you want to lock your car and roll up your windows," says
Edwards, who is now on disability because he can no longer work as a
graphic artist. "But then you start hearing the stories and you want to
cry." And if people need medical help, they send them a few doors down to
Dr. Stanley de Vlaming at the Gastown Medical Centre.

De Vlaming is an intense young man, one of the few doctors who practises in
the Downtown Eastside and is licensed to dispense methadone. Outside his
office one day last week, Andrea, a darkhaired woman in her 20s, did what
is called the funky chicken walk, bobbing up and down, weaving like a
punchdrunk boxera sign that she was high on cocaine. Andrea had not
slept for four days; signs of her addiction were also evident in the bloody
track marks scarring her legs. Heroin and cocaine are so easy to get in the
area, says de Vlaming, that "you can get them delivered to your door faster
than Chinese food."

De Vlaming has 160 patients who are HIVpositive, most addicted to both
heroin and cocaine. His method of treating them is to try first to
stabilize them with methadone to ease their heroin addiction and then
tackle their cocaine addiction by putting them into recovery programs that
will get them off the street and teach them life skills, before turning to
their HIV. His practice is run on a dropin basisde Vlaming knows better
than to expect addicts to keep appointments. But, he says, "a lot of my
patients want out of their addiction. Most of them come to me seeking an
exit. They don't want to live like this anymoretheir drug use stopped
being fun a long time ago."

He believes Edwards and Conley "have been a godsend." Nobody, he explains,
"was talking here about AIDS openly. What Norman and Russell did was to
start dialoguing with the drugusing community." And, since Edwards is
HIVpositive himself, de Vlaming adds, "he has shown them you can live
positively with the disease. He has dispelled the myth that HIV means
instant death." Edwards believes the answer to the AIDS epidemic lies in
more education and addiction recovery programs. "What I see here keeps me
angry," he says. Angry enough that even though his doctor has told him he
is dying, he will stay here, handing out muffins, dispensing information
about AIDS, filling coffee cups until he can no longer even pour. Trying to
salvage a few lives.