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."
1 comment:
Thanks for this piece,Allan.It needs to be forwarded to those in power,pronto! I for one share your mixed feelings regarding the current mess ,Our addicted city is resembling lemmings without a cliff.I still recall Mark Burgess taking the Rickshaw stage in October 2019: “Is this really allowed to happen-in CANADA?” He was aghast.So am I.I might add your housing solution is indeed a sane alternative to essentially public despair.The harder questions remain:why are we such a self-destructive species? When did housing become a privilege? Whatever happened to creative loafing ? Cue Spoiled by Sebadoh.
Also caught yr reference to a Pere Ubu/John Cale show at Club Soda.1988? Shared experience! I said hi to Zappa (who denied his identity til I thanked him for his voter registration drive (anti-PMRC) ,at which point he shook my hand; and I even saw Marianne Faithfull in that audience.Weird.Great show too.
Ah,memories.
Post a Comment