I have always worked my entire life,” Bordas said. There is a kindness and depth in that acceptance that I didn’t understand until I was in its midst.įor Bordas, being a volunteer brings him a sense of purpose. The dignity of being helped without judgment, and being the helper without judgment, may be the first step toward recovery - giving people a reason to value themselves when society largely doesn’t. Sarah Blyth, the unofficial mama bear of East Hastings who started this facility, said users make the best monitors because they understand the people they are saving.
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At first it freaked him out when someone went down, but now that he’s done it so many times, he’s calm and focused. He’s reversed multiple overdoses, just as he’s had overdoses reversed multiple times. Twice a week, when he is not using, he volunteers to monitor while others do.
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“It becomes a community.”īordas has been coming here for roughly a year. It’s a “place where the stigma doesn’t follow you everywhere,” Bordas said before he left our reality. This safe space has provided him with an escape from the death, filth and predation outside, and something more. I couldn’t watch without thinking of my kids and how I would feel if Bordas were part of my family. Bordas pushed the plunger down and the drug disappeared inside him, and he began to disappear into it - floating through the universe, talking to John Lennon, as another user described it. With skill, he slid the needle in and red blood burst into the barrel, swirling with the fentanyl.
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When people on L.A.'s skid row want to try to wrench free from opioid addiction, the closest options for getting daily methadone may be miles away. He drew the liquid through a needle, then held the syringe between his teeth as he pulled up his jacket sleeve, revealing those veins, blue under his skin.Ĭalifornia Skid row is an overdose ‘epicenter.’ But methadone can be miles away The added coloring serves as a kind of street branding. In a tin bowl the size of a quarter, Bordas melted a lavender chunk of fentanyl until it turned into an bright violet syrup. Black pouches of the anti-overdose drug naloxone were copious, and nearly everyone was trained to use it. A handful of volunteers, mostly addicts themselves, watched for overdoses. I met Bordas sitting at a metal table in a safe drug consumption site that lies behind a colorful gate off what locals call Piss Alley.Įighteen others were already in various altered states or making preparations - smoking heroin and “down,” as fentanyl is called, gathering free supplies from yellow plastic bins, socializing at picnic tables surrounded by planter boxes of pansies. They popped up from his muscular forearm when he made a fist, visible even beneath the bruises of previous injections. Unlike many in Downtown Eastside, Geoffrey Bordas still has good veins. In California, on average, 16 perish daily. Across the U.S., one person dies every five minutes from an overdose. Six thousand is the roughly number of Californians who die each year from traffic accidents and firearms combined. I came to Vancouver to see what can be learned as we debate safe consumption in California, where more than 6,000 people die each year from overdoses. For many residents and business owners in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, only a block away, East Hastings means theft, garbage, graffiti and a near-constant blare of sirens. In every direction, there were needles in arms and butane lighters melting chunks of fentanyl, heroin and meth - the stench of burning chemicals was unavoidable. 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.