SPACED-OUT AND SEEDY WHAT'S HAPPENING TO VANCOUVER?

Re: City's drug culture unsettling to tourists, Sept. 8

This is all boringly familiar. Vancouver is the best planned, worst
governed and worst policed city on the continent. It is quite a
monumental achievement to turn a vibrant, safe and livable downtown
into a depressing stew of addicts, scavengers and beggars.

While city council likes to blame all other levels of government, it
is easily most responsible for this state of affairs. It is
unaccountably unable to eliminate the lawless open drug market that
fuels most of the misery. Zurich's similarly disastrous Needle Park
experiment (1986-92), in which the open sale of drugs was tolerated,
created all the same problems that the Hastings Street bazaar has. Ten
years later, spaced-out Vancouver is still searching for solutions.
Stop wasting time and lives, and give us our city back.

Sean Byrne

Vancouver