For the next few months, the City worker passers-by notice hauling a sandbag on a waterworks project may be a recovering drug user. A pilot project that started at the end of April is supporting four recovering drug users in their transition back into the employment market. The Four Pillars Supported Employment Pilot Project was initiated by the City of Vancouver’s Drug Policy Program (DPP) and was created through a partnership with a number of organizations that collectively planned the program and are actively supporting various aspects of it. Through this pilot, the DPP hopes to create a model for employing recovering drug users.

The sub-foreman is directing a paving crew as it dumps asphalt on the prepared section of 73rd Avenue in Vancouver. A few minutes later, he consults with another City staffer, as they coordinate tasks being carried out by the crews working on three separate paving projects within the four-block area.          Then he turns back to a visitor to explain a little more about his journey from years of drug use and criminal behaviour to a stage in his life where he holds down a responsible job, carries a mortgage, has a loving relationship with his girlfriend and is helping to raise their infant daughter.

The status quo is not acceptable. That’s the main message Living In Community (LIC) coordinator Lisa Gibson heard from those who attended LIC’s neighbourhood dialogues across the city, as well as those who attended focus groups or filled out LIC’s online survey, had that common message. “It is not okay the way things are working right now,” she said. “That is the biggest message we got.” LIC is a two-year, city-wide project examining issues of sex work in Vancouver. It has just released its action plan, complete with 27 recommendations on addressing the issue.

By the time Vancouver was alerted to the number of women missing from the city’s Downtown Eastside, there were 69 women listed. Between the end of last July and the end of April, sex workers had reported 69 “bad dates” to the Women’s Information and Safe House (WISH). WISH Executive Director Kate Gibson notes the sad coincidence as she flips through her organization’s collection of bad date sheets, reported by sex workers to WISH. A bad date is a report by a sex worker describing men who have behaved in a violent, threatening or upsetting manner towards the woman.

A walk down any street in the core of the Downtown Eastside reveals the telltale discarded needles, signals of robust drug activity in the area. But, since last July, you’ll also see some sky blue, metal boxes, similar to small postboxes, sprinkled throughout the area and covered with graffiti-designed stickers inviting intravenous drug users to drop their used needles into the boxes. The boxes are the latest effort to collect used needles from the streets of Vancouver.

A daily marijuana smoker who was not doing well in his classes, the student would have been asked to leave school. But when he joined SACY --the School-Age Children and Youth substance abuse prevention program-- he slowly opened up about his problems, SACY Youth Stream Leader Heather Charlton said. The student is just one of about 30 teenagers who are part of SACY, a pilot project in two Vancouver secondary schools, Kitsilano and Tupper.

When it comes to offering counselling services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT) communities, Toronto beats Vancouver. But Vancouver is catching up. While Vancouverites can boast that their city offers the innovative Four Pillars approach to tackling drug programs and that practitioners typically offer evidence-based services far in advance of the rest of North America, Toronto started offering drug and alcohol counselling programs to that city’s LGBT community through Rainbow Services in the late 1990s. This spring, Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is offering the new Prism Alcohol and Drug Services which includes seven counselling groups targeted to the LGBT community and offering a range of options.

The scene was remarkable in its complexity: behind the white screen, the character Katie is trapped inside an oversized liquor bottle. She cries and pounds on the bottle, wanting to be let out. The audience can hear the echoing sounds of her pounding on the glass and can see her shadow as she writhes in agony and lashes out at side of the bottle. This was just one of the powerful scenes in Vancouver Moving Theatre’s (VMT) most recent production, “The Shadows Project: Addiction and Recovery, We’re all in This Together.”

Billed as a contemporary fable from the Downtown Eastside, the play was two-and-a-half years in the making and involved literally hundreds of people, most of whom are Downtown Eastside residents. It tells the story of two families trying to cope with their struggles around addiction.

Earlier this year, there was heavy media coverage of a 2006 report by the United Nation’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) that said harm reduction measures – such as Vancouver’s Supervised Injection Site (SIS) and Ottawa’s crack-pipe distribution program - flout international drug control treaties.Zhu Li-Qin, chief of the Convention Evaluation Section of the INCB was quoted in the March 2, 2007 edition of the National Post as having said, “In a way (Canada) is encouraging illicit trafficking. Traffickers are searching for markets, and a (safe injection site) serves as a small market where people go and legally inject drugs.” Added Melvyn Levitsky, a retired US ambassador who sites on the INCB, “Although we understand the compulsion behind these sites, the convention says drugs are supposed to be used for medical or scientific purposes – not for getting public nuisances off the streets.”