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.