JUNKIES COULD PUT END TO EXPERIMENT

The Post's Brian Hutchinson is embedded for a month in Vancouver's
notorious Downtown Eastside. The Woodward's Project is an online and
print series that chronicles his experiences as part of a unique urban
experiment to bring together rich and poor in the most derelict,
subsidized and politicized neighbourhood in Canada.

People are using Woodward's as a shooting gallery. Addicts are walking
off the street and into the Woodward's public atrium, sitting down on
public seating, and injecting illegal drugs. I took this photo just
before 9 a.m. yesterday morning. The two women seated are in their
early twenties, if that. They were fiddling with their dope and their
dope paraphernalia when I walked into the atrium; the place was almost
deserted as the shops hadn't opened yet. A man stood in front of the
two women, trying to provide cover. Great. Just great.

Maybe public drug use inside Woodward's shouldn't surprise. The
development is the gateway to a dope-infested neighbourhood where open
crack smoking and heroin and cocaine injection are so common, people
don't even bat an eye. But I wonder: How will folks who are really
invested in Woodward's -- the condo owners and renters, the
shopkeepers, the university faculty and the office workers -- react
when they walk into something like I did yesterday morning?

I don't think anyone can -- or should feel they have to -- "get over"
the sight of a gaunt, scarred addict plunging a needle into her arm
and fishing about for a vein. The scene I recorded could make a good
argument for the continued operation of Insite, the supervised
injection site two blocks to the east.

While I'm still not completely sold on Insite, area residents
including the working poor tell me it's had a positive impact on the
neighbourhood. But only a fraction of daily injections in the DTES are
done there, and Insite isn't open at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday.

"You can't take my picture," the blonde woman yelled at me, once she'd
finished her business. "I'm an aspiring model."

She might once have been. But her eyes are sunken and her face is
covered with scabs, which she tries to hide with a heavy application
of makeup. She looks ill. She is poisoning herself.

"Yeah, I'm using dope right now," she continued, "but that doesn't
mean you can take my picture."

Actually, I can, and I will. Using discretion with a camera elsewhere
in the Downtown Eastside is just common sense; walking into an alley
and taking a picture of a junkie fixing, without his permission, is
dangerous. But I don't think the same rule applies inside the
Woodward's atrium. If it does, and junkies are to rule the roost, then
I'm sorry, but this $400-million experiment is going to fail.