For those of you still bumming that New York’s halcyon days of block-long heroin line-ups and daily drug deaths are over and done with, welcome to the city of your dreams. While most major cities in North America have us beat in terms of tall, shiny buildings and waterfront promenades, if you’re looking for a little grit with your tourism (or a LOT of grit), it’s pretty hard to top the Couve.

For instance, how many places do you know of with a government-sanctioned shooting gallery, where you can do massive whacks of cocaine and/or heroin without fear of prosecution or harassment? How about an otherwise pleasant outdoor marketplace where drugs are available 24/7 right outside the door? Does Vancouver have such a place, you ask? Yeps. In fact, should you happen to run out of needles during your stay, the government will even help supply you with new ones. They wouldn’t want anyone using a dirty rig.

In September 2003, Vancouver Coastal Health opened Insite, a “supervised injection center” in the heart of Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. The facility operates from 10 AM to 4 AM seven days a week. We asked our buddy “Bobby” who works there (he asked we not use his real name so that none of the assorted crazies who frequent Insite take umbrage and slice him into pieces small enough to fit in a crack pipe) to tell us what the scene is like.

Photo by Jen Dodds
“It’s so crazy that after a while you just get numb to everything you see,” he says, with all the world-weariness and seen-it-allism of a veteran police officer. “There’s this one girl who likes to take big shots of cocaine, and then, staring in the mirror, lean forward to stick herself in the eyeball with the used rig. It’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen. At first, I wanted to rush up and snatch the needle away, but now I just let her do her thing.”

Of course the junkies don’t always limit the violence to themselves. “Last night, a girl was inside shooting up in her foot, and this guy walked in and kicked her right in the head. Then, when a staff member tried to throw him out, the guy labeled him too. And when two cops came in, the fool hit one of the cops. So naturally, 12 cops ran in and jumped on the loser. I mean there are cameras everywhere in here. You’d have to be on drugs to try to pull some shit like that.”

Yet despite all the insanity, Insite has actually saved many lives. More than 190 ODs have occurred at the facility since it opened, and, thanks to quick intervention and readily available treatment, most of the overdosers lived to nod out another day. It’s a testament to the wonders of vertical integration, and it’s about to become more popular than ever.

You see, recently the Vancouver Police Department announced a major crackdown on shooting up in public. Up until now, it was ridiculously common to walk past groups of people openly injecting drugs or smoking crack in the streets and alleys of the Downtown Eastside, but now the hammer’s coming down. The police won’t admit it, but we suspect the cleanup has something to do with the Winter Olympics coming in 2010. It’s entirely possible that by the time the torch rolls in, Vancouver’s seedy charm will have gone the way of Times Square, with Insite a vestigial reminder of just how down-and-out things once were. So try to catch a little of the grit while it’s still there to be caught (though try your best not to catch anything else at the same time).

Oh and if golf courses are more of your thing than shooting galleries, don’t worry. We got a fuckload of those too.