Vancouver’s safe drug-use sites are wrenching to see. California should open them anyway | Los Angeles Times

Medics with the Vancouver Fire Rescue Services attend to a man who overdosed on drugs in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Medics with the Vancouver Fire Rescue Services attend to a man who overdosed on drugs in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

 In the coastal cold of a Vancouver morning, nine people crowded at the door of the Insite safe injection center, itching for it to open so they could shoot heroin and fentanyl inside.

Around their huddle on this two-block stretch of East Hastings Street, hundreds of people, the majority habitual drug users, were crushed together in tents and chairs, on discarded rugs and under wet tarps. Some were sprawled on the sidewalk, motionless and unconscious. One man repeatedly hurled a hatchet at the pavement.

Open-use drug havens such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin and L.A.’s skid row have become notorious and contentious, but those places have nothing on East Hastings, part of a neighborhood called Downtown Eastside. In every direction, there were needles in arms and butane lighters melting chunks of fentanyl, heroin and meth — the stench of burning chemicals was unavoidable. For many residents and business owners in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, only a block away, East Hastings means theft, garbage, graffiti and a near-constant blare of sirens.

I came to Vancouver to see what can be learned as we debate safe consumption in California, where more than 6,000 people die each year from overdoses. Think about that. Six thousand is the roughly number of Californians who die each year from traffic accidents and firearms combined. Across the U.S., one person dies every five minutes from an overdose. In California, on average, 16 perish daily.

Los Angeles Times

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