When "passing" isn't an option

Pixabay - Roninmd

The concept of “passing” has presumably been around since whenever the first person on the outside of the dominant social group of the day figured out they could hide in plain sight because they had the good fortune of looking like they belonged.

You’re a black person in the pre-Civil Rights era, but your genetics gave you light skin and straight hair. You’re Jewish in Hitler’s Germany, but with an acceptably Aryan bone structure as to draw no negative attention. You’re a trans woman using a women’s washroom, but your physical appearance is sufficiently “feminine” that nobody has a thought about that.

You’re a sex worker in a hostile room of those mean kind of feminists who hate sex work, but everybody treats you respectfully because you look like them and they have no idea what you do for a living. You’re LGBTQ in a land that will have none of it, living out your secrets from inside a heterosexual marriage. You’re a daily user of street drugs, but you’ve got a job, a nice house and a good haircut, and no one would think to label you a “drug addict.”

That’s passing. It’s obviously an uneasy place to exist, what with having to hide your true self in order to not be called out, fired, or even killed by the dominant social group. But in terms of how effective it has been throughout history as a means to live without harassment alongside the dominant social group, it brings home so well that decisions about who gets “othered” largely come down to visibility.

Since time immemorial and across all states of stigmatized being, we have always been free to be whoever we are as long as nobody finds us out. The dominant social group’s objections aren’t so much about someone actually being black, Jewish, trans, a drug user, etc, they’re about having to know that they are.

Sex work provides a useful local example. When I first moved to Victoria some 35 years ago, outdoor sex work strolls were common on both Government and Broad streets downtown. Everybody complained about them regularly.

Business owners lamented their presence. Social agencies worried about the vulnerability of the workers. Police conducted undercover operations where they pretended to be customers, in that usual way of pretending that enforcement would clear things up. Many, many media stories were written.

So when was the last time you heard complaints about sex work strolls in the city? So long ago I can’t even remember. That change isn’t because sex work doesn’t exist anymore, it’s because the instant connection via cellphones and online communication has ended much of the need to walk streets so your customers can find you.

A more distant example: Colombia. Not so long ago, it was widely viewed as a dangerous country neck-deep in the cocaine industry and completely unsuitable to visit. Today, tourists love it, and return home raving of its beauty and sophistication.

That isn’t because Colombia wiped out its cocaine industry. It’s because the industry decided to tone down its visibility. Dress a high-ranking narco in a nice suit and he looks no different than any other corporate guy.

Consider the current hubbub about street issues through this lens, and you can see why everyone is so worked up. It’s all so visible at this point. People have always lived sick and impoverished with profound disability, but now it’s fully out there for all to see. The days of being able to hide our social problems are long gone, especially during a housing crisis.

I suspect the fervor around starting up involuntary treatment again is largely related to this high-viz situation. We’re pretending that it’s about getting people the help they need, even if it means shoving it down their throats. But in reality, we’re mostly just craving a place where people we don’t want to look at are locked up out of our sight.

There’s obviously a big human-rights perspective on this issue of “passing,” of course. Someone should not have to blend in with the dominant social group just to ensure they have human rights.

But as a diehard pragmatist, I also see the utility of just reducing visibility so that we can all settle down for a while. Some kind of fast housing solution that turned down the public profile has a lot of potential to calm things down.

In a dream world, we would build some beautiful facility full of support where everyone with all their challenges could find peace, a bed to call their own, and the stability to take a few hopeful steps into a new life.

We’re far from a dream world, however, so how about we figure out a slapdash fix in the meantime? If an earthquake put 100 people onto the streets of Pandora Avenue, we’d scrabble together a hasty fix in a heartbeat. Yet here we are, years into the crisis, paralyzed, grasping at the ridiculous idea of locking everybody up “for their own good” just so we don’t have to see them anymore.

All around the world, people leading troubled lives find a modicum of peace and community in hidden places where they can get out of sight. Slums, tarp huts under the freeway, tent cities, condemned buildings, empty lots – not great solutions by any means, but still better than a filthy square of Pandora Avenue sidewalk amid the endless misery of constant scrutiny and community loathing.

Many big, big problems to sort out on Pandora, and no end in sight of new people falling into high-viz homelessness. But we can’t even get started when we’re this worked up. Making it all a little less visible has to be a priority. Get these poor people a place to live. 

Life's a mess for people on the streets. But at least they've got friends

Bianca van Djyk, Pixabay

I spent a bit of time on “the block” this past weekend, that stretch of Pandora Avenue that is currently one of the city’s most visible hot spots of social crisis.

I hope the city’s big plan works out well for all concerned, and sign me up for helping. But after three decades of watching so many variations of Victoria councils trying to get a handle on this issue, it's obvious that we'll just be moving street problems into someone else's neighbourhood unless we grasp what really creates these hot spots. 

There's a tough little core of maybe 70-100 people at any given point in time in our region who are youngish, hardy, and deep in a late-stage struggle with whatever substance has got them, generally with mental and physical illnesses taking an additional toll. Their chaotic and unpredictable lives place them far outside the many rules, online forms, waiting periods, and service restrictions they face when trying to get help.

Like anyone, they need to get their needs met. So they settle in areas where there's food, washrooms, and a shelter mat in bad weather or some shade when it's hot. The drug sellers follow, and in many cases are the same people, because how else does an impoverished person afford a $50-100 daily habit?

But there’s another factor at play in why this group of people find their way to each other. They are each other’s community. Most everybody else in town either hates them, fears them or views them with disgust, pity, or some mix of the two. On Pandora, the judgment stops.

Get talking to people on the block and it quickly becomes clear that as sad, rough and garbage-strewn that life on a sidewalk appears to be to people like me, there is community on that street. More than one person told me they would be so happy for housing, but that it would need to be big enough for all the people on the street who they consider to be their family.

If you are a sick, struggling person who is spat on, sworn at, and openly scorned pretty much everywhere in the region, it must be pretty nice to have one place you can exist where most people aren’t going to hate on you. Anyone who has known the feeling of being an outsider finally finding their “people” can surely relate.

Can we even fix the multi-pronged social disaster that has been created from decades of neglect? I don’t know anymore. But if we’ve got any chance, it hinges on recognizing that people living homeless don’t just need homes that accept them as they are, they need community. "Don't put us all two by two in a bunch of different buildings where nobody likes us," said one woman. "Let us stay together."

I first encountered this group (not the same individuals, of course) 25 years ago when they were living at Holiday Court, a rundown motel on Hillside Avenue. I was working as a journalist at the time. It was a crazy little scene at that motel, but you didn't have to be there for more than a few minutes before you saw that they were mostly glad for each other's company and assistance. 

Soon enough, the motel scene got too hot for the community to handle, and Holiday Court closed and was torn down. The group moved somewhere else, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, with new people falling into the group at roughly the same pace that others were falling out. They would stay until neighbours or police started howling, then move on.

Eventually there was no place where they were tolerated but the street, where a person has no choice but to live every moment of a problematic life out where everyone can see you. The rest of us make a lot of noise about having to see them, but reflect for a moment on what it must be like on the other side of all our loathing and intolerance.

So many things have changed since the days we dream of returning to, when Pandora's tree-lined boulevards weren't blocked off with ugly blue construction fencing lined with litter. Businesses used to operate side by side with social services that have dominated the block for many years. But that has all changed since the pandemic, when we fully lost control of our weakening social safety net.

Housing affordability, the job market, easy access to medical care, the mood in our communities - all that has changed since the pandemic as well. We definitely weren't doing great before 2020, but we've been doing so much worse ever since. 

Our jails have filled with people with mental illness. Our schools have more and more students who don’t fit into the way we’d like to teach them. Our child-welfare system pumps out half-grown “adults” into homelessness, poverty and substance use disorders. Our street drugs are toxic with fentanyl and more, causing death and chronic health problems at unprecedented levels.

Brain injuries abound, an unintended consequence of bringing people back from the dead in the toxic drug crisis. People with intellectual disabilities are falling into homelessness as “inclusiveness” becomes an excuse to cut services. Mental health issues are increasingly common, even while resources are increasingly scarce.

And now the City of Victoria is setting out to fix things once again with its Community Safety and Well-Being plan. The days of anything resembling an easy fix are long past. I don't want to be a wet blanket, but let's just say I'm moderating my expectations accordingly. 

If we truly want this time to be different, though, then we need to see the problem through the eyes of the people living it. There are many reasons why people end up on Pandora, and feeling like they're finally part of an accepting community is a pretty big one. Is that in the plan?

My radio interview on - surprise! - the toxic drug crisis

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20, Pixabay

Anyone else like a radio opportunity that gives free range to say whatever you want to sound off about,  but then you listen to it and think good grief, couldn't I have been more eloquent and organized in my thinking?

Ah, but then I wouldn't be me, right? Or that's what I like to tell myself. 

Here I am, blathering on People First Radio this month about the street scene in Victoria. For some reason, I'm listening to it for the first time today, 10 days after it aired. I think that might relate to my reluctance to not want to hear myself talking in random, wandering, no-key-messages fashion. That's my dealio, but that's not to say that I love that I do it that way. 

But all that said, thank you, Joe Pugh, for letting me sound off in my usual stream-of-conscious style, and for including some clips from the speaker series on the toxic drug crisis that I organized in partnership with Peers Victoria earlier this year. 

On the upside, illicit drug deaths in BC fell to 143 in March, from a monthly peak of 241 in December 2023. That's about where we were at in April 2020, though up from February 2025 when we saw "just" 132 deaths. 

But I note that figures on the BC Centre for Disease Control dashboard haven't been updated for  April and May, and I wonder what that means. My connections are telling me that BCCDC communications now have to be vetted by government first. I am really hoping that is not impacting the data they are able to put out. 

Just saw a Conversation piece from a US academic who specializes in communication strategies for resistant audiences. I sent her an email for any advice. All I see is people like me talking like crazy, and nobody listening. 

Sidney McIntyre-Starko was loved. So were the other 50,000 people who didn't get their stories told

Pixabay

I hope the inquest recommendations that have come out of tragedy in a University of Victoria residence really do lead to major change. What happened to Sidney McIntyre-Starko is very sad, and there were some major stumbles on a number of fronts leading up to her death at 18 from toxic drugs.

But if anyone is thinking that the terrible stigma that hangs over illicit drug use got eased by all the news coverage of this young woman’s death, just let that one go. If anything, the coverage deepened stigma.

Right to the final stories, we have seen photos of beautiful Sidney in all her active, “normal” roles, been reminded that this was the first time she’d ever used drugs. She was a good person, we have been assured many times by those quoted in the stories. She died because of system failures, the stories emphasize, not because she was a drug user.

And there it is. The stigma. The coverage is careful not to say out loud that Sidney was not like all the other drug users who are dying, but it comes through clearly. She was different – active and beautiful and loved, with a bright future. She even got her own inquest.

The lives of the other 50,000 lost souls who died the same way that Sidney did in these terrible nine years ended largely without comment, and certainly without government investing any scrutiny as to how systems may have failed them.

I mean no disrespect to Sidney or her family. Her death will change the way things are done, and that is a big deal. 

But this young woman’s tragedy has been put forward in a way that affirmed from the start that she was Not Like Those Other Drug Users. The coverage has confirmed - if not intensified - the terrible stigma that hangs over all the other active, beautiful and loved people with bright futures who also continue to die in the toxic drug crisis.

The irony is that in a way, Sidney was killed by stigma. If someone had said from the get-go that Sidney and her friend had just used random drugs someone had found in an abandoned case of wine coolers downtown, I expect things would have gone very differently.

But the young people who knew drugs were involved felt the stigma so heavily that they didn’t acknowledge it to any of the first people they asked for help even when two young women lay before them turning blue and having convulsions. That is some kind of stigma that can do that.

In a way, stigma likely led to those young women using the drugs they found in the first place. 

They went from age 9 to 18 in the years since BC declared a state of emergency over toxic drugs, which started killing so many people after the heavy-duty pain drug fentanyl and all its analogs started to creep into the street drug supply as a substitute for heroin.

How is it that two girls who literally grew up in the era of a horrendous toxic drug crisis in BC didn't know that using random drugs from an abandoned box of booze a friend found downtown was a dangerous risk to take?

I’m pretty dubious of that story if I’m being honest. But if it’s true, then that’s because of stigma too. And if it's not true, then there's the stigma again, getting in the way of these young people admitting that they'd actually bought the drugs.

If the conversations we have about street drugs were at all realistic, those young women would have known from years of education that just about the craziest thing to do in a toxic drug crisis killing 150-200 people a month was to take unknown drugs from a completely unknown source. At the very least, they'd have known to take them to the UVic drug-checking storefront first to see what was in them. 

If we hadn’t criminalized and cast shame over drug use (well, other people’s drug use, never our own), then we would acknowledge that lots of people use drugs, and that it’s actually in everyone’s best interest if people find their way to a regulated supply.

I don't know about you, but I really appreciate going to liquor stores knowing that none of the bottles has been topped up with methanol. I haven’t minded giving up the strange lengths I used to go to for acquiring cannabis now that it’s just in a store, with a label and everything.

I’m glad that when my nurse practitioner gives me a prescription, I know what’s in that drug, who made it, and that I’m taking the recommended dose.

People seek drugs. So why have we put this stigma around a very narrow little group of them, and told ourselves that we are protecting our children by doing that? And how is that working out for us, what with toxic drug deaths now the No. 1 killer in BC from age 10 up?

We are paralyzed with fear that regulating illicit drugs will put our children at risk through easier access. But that's like drawing a comparison to some dream world we aren't living in. The reality is that our children are at tremendous risk right now - never more at risk than now, in fact, and still we dither over our political opinions and our support of tactics that have failed us for decades.

That’s one tough stigma, locking us up like this so completely and for this long.

Sidney, you died far too young. I feel sure you were growing into as beautiful a person as all the photos of you in the media depicted.

But the families of all those other people who have died have those beautiful photos too, and there were so many system failures for so many of them as well. If something good can come out of your death, Sidney, I hope it’s a realization among all of us that there’s no difference between you and them.

What might we learn if we listened?

Image by Couleur: Pixabay

Nobody knows the challenges of getting out from under harmful substance use like someone who has actually done it. The third event in the Peers Victoria speaker series on the toxic drug crisis brought together a powerful panel of six past and present substance users to talk about their journeys with frankness, wisdom and so much insight. (I was the lead organizer of the series.)

But while we've got a complete video of the event, it's a rare devotee of the subject who would watch the whole thing, clocking in at over two hours. So I made a "greatest hits" compilation, if you will - 40 minutes all in, with clips reordered and with a bit of categorization that helps bring more focus to the panelists' comments. 

Here it is for your viewing pleasure. If you have people in your circle who are still saying stupid nonsense about substance users not wanting recovery sufficiently or being content to exist in a state of oblivion, please share it with them. 

What kind of systems for substance disorders might we have if we just listened to the people who have already been through this toughest of life challenges? 

As these six voices remind us, of course, we would be foolish to just listen to ONE voice when designing approaches (Marshall Smith, you're on my mind). The path to healing is so very distinct and different for each person, and the underlying pain and trauma that lead up to harmful substance use are highly individual as well. But if we genuinely wanted to address this crisis, the experts are all around us.