Insite: A Visit to Vancouver’s Safe Drug Injection Facility
There are some strong opinions about Insite, Canada’s only supervised site for substance abuse victims to inject themselves with illegal narcotics.
The enforcement pillar of the drug industry, the police department, lobbies the governments to shut down the facility. The whole project has survived on six-month exemptions to Canada’s drug laws, leaving staff and clients not knowing how long the site will last. Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan makes statements on both sides of the fence and has stated that Insite might make the transition to distributing legal drugs.
I decided to see for myself what the center is like from the clients’ view, so on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, I head down Hastings Street from Main and enter Insite’s frosted door bedecked with stylized needle logo and window, all with dark green trim. Sickened people sway back and forth, leaning on shopping carts. It smells like industrial cleaner. The room inside the door is like a coat check room for shopping carts—all the worldly possessions of perhaps a dozen people. A man at a desk asks my name. “Ever been here before?” “No.” A lady with a clipboard is assigned to give me an orientation. She makes it very clear that nothing must exchange hands in the building. Also, no one can help me inject drugs into myself. They give me a syringe, alcohol swabs, a little metal bowl, and water in tiny blue plastic containers.
The next room is like a collaboration between William S. Burroughs and H. R. Geiger. Seats face into stainless steel cubicles built out of the mirrored wall. It’s very bright. A lady at the end spurts blood out of her arm all over her cubicle. There is a big man there whose job it is to watch the injection room, and he wipes up the blood and gives the lady a band-aid. The glare is so strong it makes you blink at your reflection, which distorts as the drugs take effect or wear off or not work.
Research on the cocaine in Downtown Eastside (the DTES) shows the drugs to be as low as 10% cocaine and the rest amphetamine or other chemicals that produce a rush similar to inhalants. The people doing this sort of drug twitch and fiddle with their needles. They are in agony. Once one has been trapped into slavery to this drug there is often nothing left but an all-consuming need for more. These addicts clearly hate the substances they crave. The spastic fidgeting is like poisoned bugs.
Two chairs over from me is an old man, presentably dressed. He’s on heroin, the other drug. He nods slowly, slouching down in the relief of fixing. Heroin hurts when you don’t have it, but now that the old man has had it, he seems almost okay. His eyes rolls up slightly and he says something about not being allowed to shake hands. We are ushered out into the next room, a “chill-out room.” A man behind a counter hands out styrofoam cups of what looks like soup.
On the street outside the green door, a police car pulls up next to a cluster of people sheltering from the rain. The police squawk their siren and the crowd quickly disperses. Around the corner, in Blood Alley, people sprawl out in the muck. A woman fills her syringe from a puddle. Others sift through the sludgy buildup everywhere in hopes of finding lost drugs. One woman is particularly spastic, and a tall Jamaican man walking past says to her, “You have to slow down! You’re going to kill yourself if you don’t slow down. Or go to Insite!” “Go to Insite!” echoes someone else. It’s impossible to tell if the woman hears them.
In the National Post story “Four Blocks of Hell,” and in nearly all the coverage of DTES drug epidemics, the dealers are mentioned to be plying their wares in plain sight, but this is not the reality. It is true that you can see drugs being sold, but this is an industry where the retail level customers serve themselves and the real dealers drive Mercedes.
The drug industries, both the illicit one and Big Pharma, are trillion-dollar industries. We are meant to believe that an industry this size can be conducted by bike gangs and a few dirty businessmen?
This is macroeconomics and at this level all industries are inextricably linked, from tourism to energy to security. How many degrees away are the real dealers from our elected officials; both Vancouver and British Columbia have been purchasing rooming houses at way over the assessed value, contributing to real estate hysteria, and giving millions of tax dollars to several companies known to be associated with narcotics distribution. Crystal meth labs are found in $10 million homes in Jericho Beach. Maybe we should look to the Four Seasons Hotel for the real dealers, listen to MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) Lorne Mayencourt presenting his plan to build forced labor camps for substance abuse victims to detox in rural environments.
The higher we go, the closer to reality we seem to get, until it starts making more sense to believe what the police originally said when they raided the BC Legislature Building: that they were investigating a drug trafficking ring. Police later said that they covered up information because it, “made the government look bad.”
Perhaps we’d be best off in the National Film Board film Citizen Sam, in which Sullivan defends his having bought crack for a kid to smoke in Sullivan’s van so the concerned leader could watch the effects. “Give out free drugs,” Sam jokes in the film, “that’s how to get the homeless vote.”
Is this reality—state and capital conspiring to suck profits out of a plague whose victims litter the streets? If this is the case, then what can anyone do beyond damage control, or harm God damn the pusher man.
Tavis W. Dodds