Decriminalization without safe supply = dead bodies in doorways.

So basically anywhere you go in downtown Vancouver these days, you'll see people in doorways who seem dead.

There was a time when I checked in with people who seemed like they might be: "Are you okay?" Sometimes I'd get a groggy answer, occasionally I would just annoy someone who was sleeping rough. Once I called 911 on someone lying facedown in a puddle of piss and saliva on a freezing night at the Skytrain, when I found I could not rouse him; he didn't seem dead, but seemed like he would be if something weren't done. That was around Christmas. While people walked by, I texted a friend to say I would be late and waited at the station and watched as eventually the EMTs revived the guy (maybe they gave him Narcan, or maybe just woke him up more intrusively than I'd felt comfortable with). They gave him directions to a shelter and encouraged him to go. He didn't seem particularly grateful or even all that interested in or aware of what was happening, but he shuffled off, maybe thinking to himself it would have been simpler if people had just let him die. 

Truth is, in such situations, it increasingly starts to seem like I am interfering in a lifestyle choice. I haven't really attempted much along those lines since that episode -- there was one guy helping his buddy and I asked if he wanted me to call 911, but he said he knew what to do (then went on a rant about how people treat drug users that made me kind of move away from him; he wasn't mad at me, but he was plenty mad). It's become normal to just walk on by, minding my own business, which seems preferable to asking people, every day I'm downtown, if they're still alive, which is sort of what it could turn into if I committed to getting involved: daily wellness checks on people who might not actually appreciate them, for whom it may in fact be too late.  

It's just not inviting, you know? I do not have the skillset or life experience to help in such cases, and don't really relish the idea of interacting with people in such dire straits. The other week, one person I walked by had his pants down, his ass fully bare to the world. He was lying on his side on a sidewalk on Homer Street, I think, unconscious, butt facing the road. It wasn't warm, but he was in no danger from the cold (assuming he was still alive; if he wasn't, my intervention wasn't going to accomplish much). I contemplated him for a minute; what do you say in such a case? "Excuse me, sir, do you know your ass is hanging out?" I considered snapping a picture (for a Welcome to Vancouver calendar, say, to be given out free at the airport as a corollary to Hope in the Shadows: the subtitle could read Despair in Broad Daylight). In the end I did nothing, walked back to my job. Parents ushered their children by him. I wonder what they told them, when asked, for example, "Daddy, why does that man have his bum hanging out?" 

And just yesterday, on a short walk during a break at work, I passed a couple slouched in a doorway. They had some sort of gear in their hands (I didn't look closely; it feels impolite -- but one of them had a square of tinfoil next to him, so I guess he'd been smoking something?). They both seemed completely lifeless; living people just don't succumb to gravity so completely. One of them was folded over in that unnatural way that seems the hallmark of opioids of late, their head resting on their legs. 

I guess part of not wanting to check in is the very real possibility that eventually, if I kept it up, someone WOULD be dead; it seems inevitable. I wonder how many corpses I've walked past since that attempt to intervene that I made around Christmas?

Anyhow, those two -- the folded woman and the tinfoil man  were there as I walked out on my break, and still there, in the same position, as I walked back half an hour later (in-between, I saw someone getting ready to light a meth pipe, staggering along Hamilton, looking deranged). Maybe Vancouver will become like the end of Cronenberg's Rabid, with garbage trucks roaming the streets and people in hazmat suits chucking bodies in? 

I mean, I'm not sure what the right thing to do is, in these circumstances, but I can say this: I wasn't the only person just walking by them. 

...So here's a conclusion we can draw: harm reduction, in its current manifestation, is not working. I'm not sure exactly where it's failing, but it is clear that what we have is a mess, here. If you don't think so, you probably do not spend much time downtown. David Eby seems to prefer the idea of people dying on the street to people dying in a bathroom or SRO or crouched behind a dumpster, but I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference, if people are still dying. 

He also says, quote, "I don’t believe the answer is that the government opens up distribution centres for these drugs... I just think that's not right." 

Neither is having people stepping over overdoses on their way to work, or people in doorways smoking meth or crack or shooting up (even saw someone shoot up at a Starbucks awhile back). Decriminalizing leads to open usage -- it's practically the point, that people will be more public about their drug use. But it makes downtown -- practically dependent on international students for survival, most of whom come from countries where such things are unheard of, arriving here with no realization that this will be a feature of life -- very, very sad, very unhospitable, even frightening. No matter  how good we get at closing our eyes, it's everywhere, and it's only going to get more visible and more widespread.  

That's about the only good that decriminalization will do, that I can see: it will make clear how big a problem this city has. Can't see it doing much to solve it, though.   

A friend suggests that underlying all this is corruption: not wanting to piss off the drug dealers and gangs whose income is contingent on the current state of things. I suspect it's more a fear of pissing off the voter base: who wants to be the guy who gives free clean heroin away? The Conservatives would have a field day, and the working class Joes who resent every perk given people poorer than they would fume to no end: "Give them free heroin?! Why not just let them die, if that's what they want to do? Why do they deserve that, when I have to go to work?"

That is, to be clear, NOT my position. 

But if the problem is toxic drugs, the solution is simply and obviously not just having people doing toxic drugs in public. You also have to do something about the drugs themselves. Decriminalization without safe supply = dead bodies in doorways. Do we have to wait until it starts to affect real estate prices before anyone will take action?

Personally, my own unlikely solution is having specially run buildings, maintained by the government, where people with serious addictions can live rent free, with clean dope provided, and no expectation of tenants doing anything to earn their keep. Call it a version of a safety social net: if you fall through the cracks far enough, society foots the bill -- you're absolved, given housing, given food, given dope, and given some opportunity for dignity. The only catch would be you had to give up certain freedoms -- that you'd be separated from the general population to some extent. No shooting up in doorways, no lying bare-assed on the sidewalks: don't scare the tourists, don't die in the Starbucks bathroom, don't make your problem the problem of every non-addict who works and lives downtown. But that's it -- you follow the rules, and you're taken care of, period. Addiction Maintenance Centers, Dignity Centres -- not quite prisons, not quite hospitals, not quite social housing -- where addicts can live safely and comfortably, with safe, free dope at the taxpayer's expense... but separated from the mainstream of life in the city.   

I would rather that than feel guilt and shame at walking by the possibly dead (to say nothing of the naked and deranged). I'd argue for making such places as comfortable and obliging as possible, if it meant people not dropping dead on the streets (and people not having to be afraid FOR them or OF them or having to live with the daily shame that this is what our city has come to).  

Oh, and it would put the criminal element out of business, for the most part (I don't want to believe that corruption is really the main issue here, but I can understand my friend's point). 

It's about the only thing that makes sense to me as a solution. I'm not sure why we don't go there. Does the government fear that they would be creating an incentive for non-addicts to just drop out of society and move into such an institution? I don't think many people who are not already desperate would find the prospect of life at a Dignity Centre or such very appealing. And somehow I don't think the guy lying butt-ass naked in a doorway (or slumped over with his works in his lap, three-quarters dead) would really care about loss of personal freedoms if it meant free drugs for life. It sounds fascist, but I can't see any other way out: Give addicts safe, legal drugs, look after them, and warehouse them out of sight for everyone's good. If there's a better idea, I'm all ears, but it sure is not decriminalization without safe supply. That's just a recipe for corpses.