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It's midnight at the corner of Dunlevy and Powell Streets, by Oppenheimer Park, and I am approached by an eager youth coming toward me with his hands up in front of him. He is holding two brown-stained crack pipes. "Try it before you buy--try it free," he says, waiting hopefully. I guess that's how it can start. A little further on, the local grocer is doing business behind iron bars. I hand a loonie through the bars and ask for a pack of gum. A slouching Vietnamese drug dealer a few feet away casually asks if I want up or down. This is a commonplace of life in the poorest neighbourhood in Vancouver. Is Vancouver City Hall's Four Pillar Approach to Vancouver's drug problem doing well in the nearly two years since it was first instituted? At Main and Hastings Streets, a redesign of the streetscape is trumpeted as a beginning for the Four Pillars Approach. In the meantime, drug activity is already shifting toward Oppenheimer Park. This is Constable Dave Dickson's beat. He says that over the past year the open drug scene at Dunlevy and Powell has been growing. "I think the concentration right here is a result of a couple of hotels in the area . . . allowing people to use them as bases of operation," he says. One such hotel may be the New Wings on the northwest corner of Dunlevy and Powell, whose doors are continually seeing users and dealers--sometimes hard to distinguish from one another--leaving and entering the building. To many in the area it's just a "crack shack." But the increase of drug trafficking has turned the area into a minefield for local residents going about their daily routines. Beyond the toll that drug activity has taken on the community here, individual lives are at risk. "It's a health issue," says Dickson. Addicts, the mentally ill, and the desperate get preyed on. "We've got no place to take them. There's virtually no beds and treatment centres." Such is the view from the street. If one thinks of the thousands of addicts in the Downtown Eastside, and the grab-bag of forty or so agencies in the entire Lower Mainland they can be referred to after detox, (with only a few of those being residential treatment centres), Dickson's frustration is understandable. And again, one wonders when, or if, the full implementation of the Four Pillars Approach will ever become real. At the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, Hardeep Dhaliwal agrees that the drug scene is primarily a health issue. When the Four Pillars Approach refers to "treatment for addicts," it is the Health Authority that is expected to come through. Dhaliwal says there are gaps in the system, but points to some of the latest initiatives of the Health Authority, in which, she says, "the idea is to not just get them [the addicts] off drugs but to keep them off drugs." And so, she refers to a "continuum of care" which may begin at a detox centre and move through a residential treatment centre, and then on to a recovery house. To this end, the Health Authority has set up Access 1, a central intake service for the treatment of drug addictions. Dhaliwal notes that a major determinant of successful recovery is having a safe place to live. As a better way to integrate services, says Dhaliwal, the Health Authority has also initiated something known as "Daytox." The program is for those not needing full-blown residential services and who have other supports in place, such as family, work, or school. The program is touted as being responsive to people's schedules and includes alcohol and drug counselors, group sessions, and acupuncture. The question remains whether this is enough, and whether the City's response to the drug problem in Vancouver is moving fast enough or far enough. To Constable Dickson it is not. As he says, "I see very little prevention and very little treatment at this point." The Four Pillars Approach has put other initiatives on the table, including medical detox beds at St Paul's Hospital, treatment beds specifically for youth, the inclusion of detox services at BC Women's Hospital, and the creation of drug courts that provide the option of treatment for users in sentencing. For those deeply involved in the drug scene in the Downtown Eastside, these efforts and more are desperately needed to prevent the ruin of people's lives and, in more than a few cases, a grisly death. Front Page » Archive » Vol 2 No 47 » here |
