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. One man repeatedly hurled a hatchet at the pavement. Some were sprawled on the sidewalk, motionless and unconscious.
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.Īround 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.
