During Overdose Awareness Week, KPIX is highlighting the opioid crisis through the shared experiences of San Francisco and Vancouver, another city hit particularly hard over the past 10 years.
Although they may be two cities with different approaches, there is a very similar debate in every city on what the emergency response should look like.
“It’s too easy to get trapped here,” explained Jeffrey Brocklesby, a drug user in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “Once you’re in this five-by-two-block radius, you have everything you need to sustain an addiction without having to do much.”
Whether it’s the streets and alleys of Vancouver or San Francisco’s Tenderloin, one obstacle to escaping the opioid crisis is that drugs are everywhere. Brocklesby said he’s tried the treatment program offered at the safe-use site downtown.
“That didn’t work for me,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t ready for it, or maybe the environment in the middle of the neighborhood was too much of a strain for me.”
And that’s one of the reasons why help often comes from outside the city.
“So this is a place where your mother and your children can come and feel safe and comfortable,” said Giuseppe Ganci of the Last Door Recovery Society. “It’s helped this community as well. Our neighbors love us. We take care of the lawns.”
About 30 minutes from downtown, you’ll find Ganci’s group and a list of other organizations based in New Westminster, now known as the recovery capital of Canada.
“We’ve become the voice for recovery in Canada,” Ganci explained. “And there’s a responsibility that comes with that. And there’s a negativity that comes with that. Everyone has an opinion.”
Like 90 percent of the staff here, Giuseppe Ganci himself is in recovery. He believes that the recovery process, which focuses on overcoming opioid addiction, has been overshadowed by efforts to reduce the risks of drug use.
“Yes, there is a place for harm reduction,” Ganci said. “There is a place for harm reduction. But what now? You know, I’m going to save your life today with a shot of naloxone. That’s great. But we have to do more than that.”
For anyone who followed the debate in San Francisco over how to respond to this emergency, this argument about recovery versus damage control will sound familiar.
“I keep saying that harm reduction doesn’t enable people to continue their addiction,” said drug reform advocate Guy Felicella. “It enables people to continue living.”
Felicella also battled addiction for years on Hastings Street. He said recovery requires survival and that being receptive to treatment often takes patience.
“It’s not built on, like, businesses, where we want to see immediate results,” he explained. “Those results are going to take time and you have to build these relationships with people. And that’s why harm production is so important.”
The division over what aid should look like has fueled debates in both cities for years, despite their different approaches.
“There’s a lot of infighting,” Ganci said of the conflicts. “And a lot of it is about dollars, grant money. Health Canada obviously supports more money in the reduction model.”
It’s a similar story in San Francisco, where the recovery community is pushing for a share of public funding, much of it for designated sober housing. So both cities are having a debate about where the money should go and how best to get people into treatment.
“Detox is not going to help anybody unless it’s done when they need it, at the time they need it,” Brocklesby said of what would be most helpful. “Right there. You can’t tell someone to wait to detox because the next day they could kill themselves.”
And that’s one point where even people who disagree with each other can find common ground: the idea that there should be many more options for help, available on demand, whether that’s recovery in a sober environment or something else.
“And we need to scale them up to support people who are struggling with substance abuse, addiction, mental health issues, and so on,” Felicella said.
“I really believe there should be multiple paths to recovery,” Ganci added. “And let people decide for themselves where they want to go.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, call the National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It’s free, confidential, and open 24/7, 365 days a year.
Wilson Walker
