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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Vancouver hopes to save hundreds of lives by opening street clinics where heroin addicts can shoot up safely. But the White House is accusing Canada of going AWOL from its war on drugs.
Sep 8, 2003 | It's 11 o'clock on a busy Wednesday night inside 327 Carrall St. A dozen junkies nod on ragged couches and chairs lining the downtown storefront's cluttered front room, where one handwritten sign on the wall declares: "End the war on the poor." The Clash rattles through a pair of stereo speakers ancient-sounding enough to be an AM radio. The occasional flare of rubbing alcohol spikes through the haze of cigarette smoke and smell of hot coffee -- in the smaller back room, two or three junkies at a time inject heroin or cocaine into their veins using sterile swabs and fresh needles under the watchful eye of a registered nurse. In here they can also receive advice on vein care, skin infections and detox programs, or just temporarily escape the hustle of one of the bleakest city blocks in all of Canada.
"I can do my fix in here without getting jacked for it," says Shelley, a young woman with dark, tired eyes. Bruised holes dot the crooks of her arms. She wears a tight white blouse, fishnets and black boots -- one of the 80 percent of women who work in the sex trade among the neighborhood's nearly 5,000 drug addicts. "People are pretty nice to each other here," she says with a slight smile.
The 327 Carrall St. operation is illegal, but the mayor's office has looked the other way since it opened on April 7. The guerrilla safe-injection site running here every night from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. ensures junkies have sterile gear to shoot up with, and discourages them from fixing alone -- a main contributing cause of overdose -- in the festering alleys and decrepit residency motels of the neighborhood. The site is the de facto vanguard of an evolving "harm-reduction" strategy that the city of Vancouver hopes will help clean up the streets and halt a decade-long illicit-drug catastrophe that's killed more than 2,000 via overdose and infectious disease.
Essentially, the situation here has been so bad for so long that the government is willing to help addicts plunge illegal drugs into their veins if it means stemming the greater tide of destruction. If the city's official plan stays on track, by mid-September street junkies will be able to walk into a storefront at nearby 135 East Hastings St. almost any time of day and get high in a safe, clean facility administered by the provincial Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. It's a prospect that's angered conservatives from Ottawa to Washington.
For now, this makeshift site operating in privately donated space is about all the street addicts have. The slogan "Solidarity, Resistance, Liberation" is painted on a sign above the front entrance; inside the front room I'm greeted by the revolution's unlikely leader: a 26-year-old activist wearing a baseball cap on her shaved head. Megan Oleson is a registered nurse who works in critical care at Vancouver General Hospital by day; every night she comes here to provide clean needles and advice to junkies (who must supply their own drugs), with the help of volunteers including current and ex-users. Friendly and mild-mannered, Oleson is modest about her role. She emphasizes that staffing a safe-injection site with addicts' peers is vital to promoting its use. "They really run the site," she says. But it's quickly clear from the way everyone greets her that Oleson is revered by the dozens of patrons, up to 30 per night who inject drugs and another 70 to 100 who come in just for a little sanctuary. Other activists in the neighborhood say Oleson rarely sleeps, but she looks relaxed and focused -- a petite Florence Nightingale with a pierced nose, red tank top and combat boots.
To Canadian conservatives, however -- and to an agitated Bush administration keeping a glaring eye on ever-liberalizing Canadian social policy -- Megan Oleson is more akin to Public Enemy No. 1. She's a renegade promoting criminal behavior and the decriminalization of hard drugs -- the patron saint of a policy that would nurture chronic abuse, the further decay of city neighborhoods, and capitulation in the long, hard-fought war on drugs. And Washington may have good reason to fear what's happening in Vancouver: If the new policy, planned and fought for at the local level, indeed proves effective, other North American cities troubled by throngs of drug addicts -- Seattle, San Francisco and New York -- may be eager to follow.
Vancouver's bold strategy has further provoked the Bush administration, which recently has watched Canada sanction gay marriage and close in on federal decriminalization of marijuana. The prospect of government-backed hard-drug use next door has the White House palpably unsettled: As soon as Vancouver's planned site gained Canadian federal approval in late June, U.S. drug czar John Walters went off. "It's immoral to allow people to suffer and die from a disease we know how to treat," he told the Associated Press. "There are no safe-injection sites," he added, calling the policy "a lie" and "state-sponsored personal suicide." David Murray, special assistant in the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Vancouver Sun on May 2 that likely "unintended consequences" of the safe-injection site could force the U.S. to tighten border controls to prevent increased drug trafficking. That could, of course, negatively impact trade of all sorts.
All of which bounces off Megan Oleson. "There's really nothing radical about this place," she says, once things slow down and we're able to go into the less-crowded back room to talk. "It's highly practical. Safe-injection sites are first-contact work at the ground level. I do about two or three referrals every night to shelters, to places that offer detox and prevention, and to recovery homes." At a nearby table partially curtained off with a sheet, a young woman licks her lips as she cooks a shot of heroin, her face knotted with anticipation. "The reality of it," Oleson continues, "is that for those who want to break away from the hustle of the street, and many of them do, this gives them time to think about it, and to have someone to talk to."
She keeps a nonchalant eye on the junkie, who now has a skinny rubber tube cranked around her left bicep. The woman finds the swollen vein on her forearm, slides the needle in and presses the plunger down. Oleson quietly notes her good technique; uninformed junkies often jab needles into their arms, legs or neck, causing abscesses and other skin problems. The woman tilts her head back against the wall, eyes closed, her face dropping. "Drug users and people in poverty deserve dignity and help," Oleson says.
