Hell on Earth

The truth of the matter is this is a place where; if you have ever lived here, you could very easily understand where it is I get my self-diagnosis from. Sure, I may have only lived in the area for two years at the time of writing this, and no I have not by any degree seen the very worst of what the Downtown Eastside has to offer. I do thank my lucky stars every day for that little gift. I have seen some extremely disturbing things within those two years mind you; drug use, of course, because it is rampant- overdoses, yes because they are very common, death, another thing that until I came to the downtown Eastside I had a small experience with and absolutely never, this kind of death. This is a form of death that is slow, very slow for the majority. This comes from killing oneself from within. Sure, there is always the drug overdoses that the paramedics (God bless them for the things they do down here) cannot reverse. Sometimes they just cannot get there quick enough or the drug itself was just too damn lethal in the first place. People get shot and stabbed, and they have the living hell beat out of them. There are rapes and murders and the entire gamut of the things you would see in the likes of places such as New York city or South Central Los Angeles. I know this is Vancouver, supposedly a safe and beautiful city where this kind of thing does not occur—wrong, wrong on so many levels.

The question is why here? What is the draw of this relatively small part of this beautiful city that creates such a hideous maelstrom on its streets? This is something I have chosen to explore in great detail—for no other reason than the knowledge of why. My mind leads me to need answers, and choosing to do so may or may not have been the best idea I have ever had, yet there could be a way to stop the insanity I see that is so disturbing to me. Who knows, I may just be digging my own grave at this point—but we shall see.

Truthfully there are so many factors at play here it is difficult to know exactly where to begin. Statistically the downtown eastside is regarded as one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada, or should I say its residents are some of the poorest people in the country—that is a much better description. So again, I need to ask—why this is, why here? This is not a poor city at all, yet for some reason the downtown Eastside, a part of Vancouver—the population is, and has been for a long time. There is no defining factor that does illicit this of its residents, I mean I live here, and that is really just a matter of circumstance, for the moment. I make decent money yet at present I need to be here and that is all there is to that. I am not so sure there are many others with the same prerequisite for their choice of a home-base. If in fact I had not needed to be here to get my own life in order than never in a million years would I have known about the situations surrounding this region of Vancouver. So much pain, literally you can see this in the eyes of the people on the streets, it truly is heartbreaking to me sometimes. It seemingly at first is a place where people are just completely forgotten about and left to their own devices, basically just to exist and that is all, nobody cares any longer. How could this happen? And here in Canada I ask myself.

I do know there is an addiction issue; and everything related to addiction and all its intricacies, this of course does play a role here. People were not shunned to the downtown Eastside when they became addicts though, being an addict is not a prerequisite for living here either. I am an addict, I live here, yet the reason I came here to begin with was to learn how to live without the substance of my choice, not to use. So this does beg the question again, why here? My reasons for staying are tenfold so I will not get into that but suffice it say there are things here, that in my early recovery are located here in this area alone, at least in my circumstance, therefore I have chosen to stay, for now. The problem is so many others do not appear to have the choices that I do, and this is in my eyes where the issues begin. This is not a horrible place- it does have many positives though the usual perception is one of poverty and homelessness. This is not untrue, yet I believe it to be over-inflated somewhat. People do not usually openly live on the street down here. There are some yes, as with any larger populated city, yet it is not rampant homelessness as the media sometimes leads us to believe. There are tent cities from time to time, that is from a whole other set of circumstances on their own, a protest or uprising against 'the man' if you will. Disrespect for government does seem to foreshadow life here. On the same token, the addictions rehabilitation facility I resided in is one of the few in the country that is government sponsored for the most part, usually again due to circumstance. There is also an in-site safe injection site location here, which again is the only one at the time of this writing in this country, even in North America as a matter of fact. That is another entire can of worms to get into, in and of itself. At the present time I have not been able to find any other legal safe-injection sites anywhere in North America.

There are other Canadian cities trying to follow this example, but have yet to establish all the necessary criteria to do so. One more time, I need to ask, why here, why Vancouver. As it turns out there is now a second safe-injection site located in Canada, in Vancouver also, that has nothing to do with in-site, but it is in this city. Why?

The draw does seem to be Vancouver.

(This is a part of the prologue from my yet unpublished book of the same name, release date still up in the air).