A West Broadway community organization says its staff and volunteers have little choice but to work around sleeping meth addicts who crash during the day after being awake all night.
“When you have no place to sleep and you have to walk all night to stay warm or avoid assault, meth helps,” said Lynda Trono of West Broadway Community Ministry.
“Homelessness and poverty are the primary contributors to the crisis we are now experiencing.”
Trono said the ministry received a number of sleeping mats a couple of months ago, and since then, the Furby Street facility has been packed every day with vulnerable people looking for a place to sleep.
They’re not all meth users, but she said addicts make up a significant percentage of the 100 or so daily visitors to the facility, which offers food and resources to those in need.
As the ministry doesn’t have a separate room for the mats, its staff and volunteers are forced to work around the sleeping bodies.
“It’s not easy to have people sleeping around. There’s no room… it’s sort of around the edge of the wall,” said Trono.
“We had this because we knew people were tired, and all of a sudden there were all these people here.”
Trono admits any solution to the meth crisis will be a complicated one, but as someone on the front lines, she said she’d like to see the city play a larger role in advocating for the poor and tackling the issue head-on.
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“I think the city needs to take it on as a priority,” she said. “I’ve talked to different people who have been in other cities, and when the mayor becomes the champion for the poor, things change really quickly. The mayor of Calgary has taken it on as his project and change is happening.
“Why can’t we do that here?”