[chemgear]

So basically, if you were the Downtown Eastside already, you wouldn't notice a difference.

If not, they'll turn you into it.


https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tri...f-emulating-it

Vancouver's drug strategy has been a disaster. Be very wary of emulating it

In recent decades, Vancouver has been concentrating more and more services in its Downtown Eastside. The result? Everything seems to be getting worse.

And honestly, it’s hard to see how the locals are wrong. While the strategy of harm reduction can indeed save the lives of addicts in the short term, it can destroy communities if used in isolation.

heft and violent crime in the Downtown Eastside have gone up since 2002. And as an overdose crisis sweeps Canada, Vancouver is its undisputed epicentre. Even with teams of naloxone-armed paramedics addressing a nightly rush of overdosed drug users, more than 100 people have died of overdoses in 2017 — with most of these occurring within the narrow borders of the Downtown Eastside.

And yet, all across the continent planners can be heard talking up Vancouver’s success on the addiction file.

They’re usually pointing to the success of Insite, which was established in 2003 as North America’s first safe injection site.

And Insite’s supporters are right; safe-injection sites are good at what they do. But they really only do one thing: prevent people from dying.

It does not seem to reduce crime. There is slim evidence to show that it reduces overall addiction rates. And it certainly doesn’t lead to livable neighbourhoods filled with healthy people.

Insite’s own website says that “supervised injection facilities can help people quit drugs” — but the data proving as much is slim. The two major studies that Insite references cover a limited time period, and only document an increase in admissions to detoxification. To date, there is no definitive, long-term data showing that Vancouver’s injection drug users are successfully getting clean and kicking drugs because of safe injection.

Meanwhile, a 2006 British Medical Journal study looked at the years before and after Insite’s opening and found “no substantial decrease in the rate of stopping injected drug use.” While Insite will provide referrals to drug treatment, they also aim to be “low barrier.” Site staff do not want to alienate patients by counselling or pressuring them to seek treatment.

Even for those who get into treatment, it is notoriously difficult to get clean on the Downtown Eastside. Anyone leaving detox steps back into a neighbourhood where are their friends are users, all their neighbours are users, and where the whole machinery of the community seems to be geared towards injection drug use. “Nobody can go through recovery here, for the most part, it’s just not possible,” Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, a drop-in centre for survival sex workers, told the National Post in 2014.

Vancouver’s error was to see Insite’s success, and to then allow the surrounding neighbourhood to be increasingly shaped by the philosophy of harm reduction. For example, there’s the whimsically decorated crack-pipe vending machine. The city also dropped the Hastings Street speed limit to 30 km/h, to protect addicts who are unable to demarcate the road from a sidewalk.

There’s also a city hall-funded “street market” that — despite organizers’ fervent claims to the contrary — is well-known by locals to be a brazen hotspot for stolen goods. There are now more than 170 non-profits clustered in an area of only a few blocks, all devoted towards supporting an increasingly dense community of addicts. In a 2015 interview, longtime Downtown Eastside organizer Scott Clark referred to the growth of “a pipeline for vulnerable populations” that has become a “magnet over the years.”

“These service providers, and the government managers that keep funding these agencies, they refuse to look at the evidence that says putting these many vulnerable people in one building, in one community, is simply not healthy for anyone,” said Clark, executive director of the Aboriginal Live in Vancouver Enhancement Society.

The people who want to prevent more Downtown Eastsides all say the same thing: Do not try to address a drug problem by concentrating all your services on skid row. “You can’t just focus on harm reduction, you also have to focus on prevention, education and enforcement,” said Tom Stamatkis, the president of the Vancouver Police Union, in 2016.