As a nine-year-old, Brittany Marsh started drinking alcohol. At 13, she tried marijuana, which became a habit. The she started using ecstasy; a few years later she added cocaine. For three or four years, she had an eating disorder. In her early 20s, she started smoking crack cocaine.

“That really scared me, and I realized I had to do something,” she said.

What Marsh did was admit her substance abuse problem, something she could not do for years. “A whole part of my life was denial,” she says. She found a counsellor, joined addiction groups and studied treatment options. One night, she had what she calls a spiritual awakening.  

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Pacifica is that it looks like an upscale condominium development with a sand-coloured finish, tidy landscaping and tasteful lettering spelling out “Pacifica” over the front entrance. It's only when you enter the building, note the reception area and see the inner courtyard filled with men and women smoking and laughing together, that you learn its purpose.  

On the walls, there are posters about treatment services, bad dates and steps to injecting safely. In the counter, there's a metal plate drug users push open to dispose of used needles. On the counter, this rainy day just before Christmas, there is a metal bowl offering mandarin oranges and candy canes. Welcome to North Community Health Centre Addiction Services' needle exchange.  

What's so different about women and substance abuse?

Ask that question of Nancy Poole, and she tells of an entire career spent trying to let others know that there are differences, that they are basic and that they hold a key to successful treatment for women. The fact that she's been saying so for a couple of decades, however, doesn't always mean she's been heard as she works to pull people around to her perspective. 

For the vast majority of those who want to detox - get drugs out of their system with the assistance of a medical professional - there is no wait to access the service.

That's the surprising message from Mary Marlow, Manager of Withdrawal Services, Vancouver Community Health Services. While the common belief is that drug users must wait significant amounts of time to enter detox, Marlow says that about 80 per cent of people get into detox within 24 hours of contacting a health professional or calling the special detox phone line in Vancouver. 

Last fall, a new item popped up on the Vancouver Police Department's (VPD) website: The VPD's Drug Policy.

VPD Drug Policy Coordinator Inspector Scott Thompson wrote the original draft of the policy and then saw it through about 15 drafts, before it reached its final form. “We wanted something that other police organizations and the public could look to and see our public stand on these (drug-related) issues.”