VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA – Vancouver has been called the jewel of the Pacific Northwest. But the largest city in British Columbia, Canada, has a darker side. More than 4,000 intravenous drug users live in its downtown Eastside area, turning alleys around Hastings Street into open-drug markets and shooting galleries.
“This alley has a lot of memories,” says Richard Teague, a former heroin addict, gesturing at the garbage-strewn space as he leads a VOA camera crew around his old haunts.
“When you’re an addict and you wanna get your hit in you, you go to the closest spot. And this is it, this alley right here,” he remembers. “… You wouldn’t wait to try and find a room. You went to the nearest place where you could be kinda out of sight, you know, and do your fix and get your high.”
Amid the hazy camaraderie and desperation in such places, people share drugs, needles, diseases and sometimes death. Vancouver reported the world’s highest HIV infection rate among drug users in the 1990s. Teague was one of them, diagnosed with HIV more than 20 years ago.
The community responded to the crisis by opening Insite, North America’s first supervised injection facility, in 2003.
Beth Mendelson
VOA News
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