Vancouver’s skid row blocks from Olympics site

VANCOUVER, British Columbia | Five blocks away from the venue for Vancouver’s Olympic opening ceremonies on Friday, four grizzled addicts huddle in the rain, injecting themselves with heroin behind a trash bin.

This is the Downtown Eastside, where life is volatile and the slightest misstep can invite brutal retaliation.

“It’s a jungle,” said Glen, a 49-year-old heroin addict who goes by the street name Trouble. “You want to get out of here.”

As Vancouver prepares for the Feb. 12-28 Olympics and the descent of the world’s media, the Downtown Eastside remains a huge problem — 15 square blocks of despair, squalid rooming houses and alleys populated by thousands of addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug dealers who prey on them.

This neighborhood is the most concentrated drug and poverty ghetto in North America, with high use of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, according to criminologist Benedikt Fischer of Simon Fraser University. It’s also the only place in North America where drug addicts can shoot heroin into their veins at an officially sanctioned injection site.

At the center of the neighborhood is a neoclassical building endowed by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1903. Behind it, dealers and pimps hawk drugs and women in a filthy alley. And on its front steps is Vancouver’s largest open-air drug market, at the intersection of Main and Hastings streets — dubbed “Pain and Wastings” by locals.

Across the street is Vancouver’s biggest police station. Police Constable Lindsey Houghton said officers often find themselves in the role of social workers while continuing to target the drug trade. About 49 percent of Downtown Eastside calls are related to mental health, according to the Vancouver Police Department.

“It’s a tremendous challenge that goes beyond the traditional scope of policing,” Constable Houghton said.

The International Olympic Committee’s bid evaluation team didn’t see the Downtown Eastside when it assessed Vancouver’s bid in 2003. When it came time to tour Vancouver venues, the IOC’s bus took a wide detour around the neighborhood.

The bid evaluation team did see the scenic but treacherous highway from Vancouver to Whistler, host of alpine and sliding events. While about $500 million has been spent on the road, the Downtown Eastside remains much the same.

As they did in 2003, welfare recipients still line up once a month to receive their welfare checks. Welfare Wednesday is known as Mardi Gras in the area, the recipients called “two-day millionaires.” Needle-exchange staff work on the welfare lines.

The area gained international attention when pig farmer Robert Pickton was arrested in 2002 and charged with the deaths of 26 prostitutes and addicts from the Downtown Eastside, in what police say is Canada’s worst serial murder case. He killed and butchered them at his suburban farm. Some remains he fed to pigs. The rest went to a rendering plant.

Mona Wilson’s head, hands and feet were found in a bucket at Pickton’s farm. Her brother, Jason Fleury, called the Downtown Eastside a time bomb and accused officials of doing nothing to defuse it while spending millions on the Olympics.

“It’s crazy. It’s insane,” Mr. Fleury said.

Prostitution rights activist Jamie Lee Hamilton said little has been done to curb violence against prostitutes since Pickton’s arrest.

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