“Move along! We are not a side show!” the woman yelled from her crouched position.
I only realized then that I had been staring. I hadn’t even tried to pretend I wasn’t looking – it was like I was removed from my body, trying to take in the scene I never thought I’d see: people crowded on the street smoking and shooting up drugs in plain sight.
I thought I was prepared for the open drug use present in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after a lengthy orientation by Odd Squad Productions. Heck, I had even seen all of Breaking Bad. But I wasn’t prepared for the sick feeling I’d have in my stomach as we walked down East Hastings Street on a cool night in November.
So I was staring, while the police officers with us were yelled at and confronted by angry residents with slurred speech and incoherent complaints. I was shocked into speechlessness (not an easy thing to do to a journalist) by some of the testimony and accounts people gave us of the path they took, which brought them here – quite literally, to the end of the road, the bottom of the barrel, in either homelessness or something that quite closely resembled it. Videographer Clayton nudged me several times. I looked down at my hand hanging by my side with the microphone in it. I forgot at some point during the tour to get audio.
“It’s like playing Russian roulette,” one woman told us. “When you do heroin, you really should think, ‘Am I ready to die right now or not?’”
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Only moments earlier we had watched another woman help her shoot heroin into a vein in her neck. They both agreed to be filmed when approached by members of the Regina Pats hockey team. I was accompanying them as part of “Project First Goal,” a program which has brought Canadian junior hockey players to the Downtown Eastside for over 15 years. The athletes in turn do school presentations to show the video of the stories from the addicts they met.
Clayton nudged me harder and I became aware of what I was supposed to be doing during this exchange between the woman and the Pats. But it wasn’t about the audio anymore – or the story in general. For me, it was about this woman’s life, precariously hanging in the balance of her addiction.
All the same, there was a sense of excitement. ‘People actually live like this?’ was a refrain I thought more than once. So when the woman on the sidewalk, hunched over from her high or withdrawal – or embarrassment, told us to move on, I winced. This tour wasn’t supposed to be voyeuristic in nature; it was supposed to be frighteningly real to serve as a warning to youth to choose school over drugs. The people who we asked to deliver that message were not two-dimensional extras in a TV show, but real people with real back stories that were complicated and realistic.
For example, one man told us how his battle with alcoholism led to an addiction to crystal meth: “I hooked up with a woman at first and she already had experience with hardcore using and we’d party a lot. I guess I was 18 or 19; I did my first shot of IV use and that was it.”
It made me think of the old adage “be careful who your friends are.” He spelled out so simply a choice that could so easily happen. How we aren’t influenced by others, right? I realized we weren’t touring a world out of nowhere. We were touring someone’s reality – and a situation that could one day become someone’s reality.
Some of the people we talked to I liked; some of them I didn’t. Some of them grew up in Regina and knew the same people. We could have crossed paths before. They were more than their addictions, but they were choosing to live with them.
Some of their stories I could relate to: the concept of curiosity, for example. And that feeling of invincibility you have when you’re young. But then I remembered a list I have hanging at my desk that in no particular order reads:
- Create a magazine
- Use go pros to make awesome videos!
- Get married
- Travel
- Learn to play guitar
I feel a sense of compassion for people whose lives have strayed so far from creating these types of lists and can no longer imagine the excitement that accompanies the thought of accomplishing these goals. I can’t imagine a life where those goals aren’t attainable anymore. So although I feel guilty for staring, I’m also comforted by the fact I was staring out of disbelief. I really don’t understand and the message from those we spoke with? They hope young people will never understand either.
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