I came to Vancouver to see what can be learned as we debate safe consumption in California, where more than 6,000 people die each year from overdoses. For many residents and business owners in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, only a block away, East Hastings means theft, garbage, graffiti and a near-constant blare of sirens. In every direction, there were needles in arms and butane lighters melting chunks of fentanyl, heroin and meth - the stench of burning chemicals was unavoidable. Open-use drug havens such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin and L.A.'s skid row have become notorious and contentious, but those places have nothing on East Hastings, part of a neighborhood called Downtown Eastside. One man repeatedly hurled a hatchet at the pavement. Some were sprawled on the sidewalk, motionless and unconscious. In the coastal cold of a Vancouver morning, nine people crowded at the door of the Insite safe injection center, itching for it to open so they could shoot heroin and fentanyl inside.Īround their huddle on this two-block stretch of East Hastings Street, hundreds of people, the majority habitual drug users, were crushed together in tents and chairs, on discarded rugs and under wet tarps.
