I've been to Vancouver, too, and I've seen the street you're talking about. Drove down it with my family and it was shocking. Massive piles of trash everywhere, grocery carts, garbage bag "luggage", mobs of people. It was sad and quite shocking if you've never seen it before. Nothing I've seen in SF or LA compares to this.

But...I don't think marijuana caused that. I think it has a lot more to do with a permissive city than pot. Recreational pot is legal in my city (Tacoma, WA) and we don't have this issue. In fact, we have almost no problems with pot at all. My only complaint about the entire thing is the tacky advertising and storefronts that the pot industry uses to attract clients. The market is oversaturated and shop owners are desperate to survive and are resorting to decorating normally seen at used car lots and Liberty Tax outlets.

There are many reasons that area is how it is, and the presence and legal status of marijuana isn't one of them.

The root cause of the situation in the downtown east side is the City of Vancouver's effort to help these poor addicts.

Vancouver has policies and programs to support addicts, while other cities in greater Vancouver don't. The result is a concentration of addicts from all over the place.

For example, there are medical services in place to help addicts such as methadone clinics and a safe injection site.

The methadone clinics are supposed to ensure the dose, which the provincial government pays for and the clinic profits from, is consumed by the patient. Instead it's often sold outside for cash which is then used to purchase heroin or crack.

The huge huddling masses you see on Hastings Street tend to be concentrated around these clinics. The area is perfectly safe, there's no need to fear assault or robbery. It's just stinky, dirty and unpleasant.

I had to walk through it with my family. It's difficult to describe the shock we experienced.

The reason I think it's linked to Marijuana is how easy it was to obtain. If these homeless people can get access to it, they probably wouldn't bother working to improve their lives. They can have an "awesome life" in their minds if they get to smoke pot. At least that's my impression of what Marijuana does to people. It makes you feel relaxed and completely care free.

Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope someone can challenge my perspectives, but I think the rest of the world also thinks this way. That's why all countries ban drugs even though they don't ban Alcohol.

You're really misinformed on this topic.

> The reason I think it's linked to Marijuana is how easy it was to obtain

Marijuana is easy to obtain just about everywhere on the planet. I knew around 20 drug dealers at one point in the US. I buy weed here in Cambodia from an old grandma. It's easy if you're looking.

> If these homeless people can get access to it, they probably wouldn't bother working to improve their lives. They can have an "awesome life" in their minds if they get to smoke pot.

Do you have some strong evidence that a homeless person's sole desire in life is to easy access to marijuana? Because if not it comes across as a sweeping, irrational judgement against a diverse group of people.

> That's why all countries ban drugs even though they don't ban Alcohol.

Many countries ban marijuana because the US used its leverage to compel those countries to do so.

> The amount of homelessness and crime is 10 times more what I've seen anywhere else in North America.

Woah. Talk about 4/20. I'll have what you are having.

> I've been to Vancouver and it wasn't a very pretty sight.

Well, I've been to US and it wasn't a very pretty sight either. I am of course talking about the atrocities I've seen on a late Friday night in Walton, Nebraska, but clarifying that would just totally ruin the post, wouldn't it?

What you are referring to is an area of Vancouver called Downtown Eastside, which sits to the East from downtown. More specifically - there's a several-block area around the intersection of Main and Hastings streets, which is indeed an impressive cloaca. It's been there for ages and, put bluntly, it serves as the Greater Vancouver junky area.

Outside of this part you'd be hard pressed to see homeless people and the "10x crime anywhere else in NA" statement is just a random collection of words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside

You are talking in a very defensive tone, like I have said something to deeply offend you.

The mess extends to the surrounding areas as well, such as China-town.

Also, I've mentioned the signs on shop windows (in areas far away) indicating an unusual crime level. Many streets were, not very clean, to say the least. Which is not hard to understand, given the "broken window" theory.

But it's not clear why you think that homelessness in Vancouver is strongly connected to the availability of marijuana. Any evidence?

It's the only major visible factor I was able to discern during my short visit.

I'd love to see some counter proposals as to why that's the case in Vancouver.

Well, how about closure of a big psych facility and letting people literally on the street? Or the fact that the area is starting to get massively gentrified, and whereas before that population was spread across entire East Hastings, now they have to converge by Pigeon Park, so the numbers seem massive? How about the fact that foreign land investors have caused the property prices in Vancouver to skyrocket over last decade, and for developers social housing doesn't sound like something they'd do.

I heard that Riverview will be reopening, so, hopefully people with mental health issues can get off the streets.

It's a sad state of affairs, but just saying "Because Marijuana" is silly...

That street is like that partly because it's in literally the warmest place in Canada, ideal for the homeless. I don't know of any other place like it in Canada.

If you think crime is 10x worse anywhere in Canada compared to the US, you haven't looked at the US's horrible crime statistics closely enough.

I've also noticed that Vancouver is full of Canadians, unlike similar cities in North America.

[edit: sorry, this was a dumb comment, I misread North America as "USA"]

Not so clever. Calgary is also full of Canadians.

I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Actually I would challenge you to point out other cities in Canada that suffer similar amounts of homelessness, poverty, and crime.

fwiw GP is from Toronto.

OK, perhaps that was a little too sarcastic; but the post still smacks of hand-wringing to me.

We have inequality, availability of social support, property prices, local culture and climate as possible factors just to start, and post fingers availability of marijuana?

Toronto has a "marijuana community" so to speak. But it's not so easy to obtain. Not free everywhere in your face.

Gotta reply to this, since I live/work downtown.

The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is the oldest part of Vancouver. It's located next to the port, so it's where the rooming houses have historically been located. It's much the same as Pioneer Square in Seattle, the Tenderloin in SF, or Skid Row in L.A. It's also where Chinatown is located, a historically persecuted community.

It's actually a great neighbourhood. You'd be surprised at how many of the movies and TV series you watch are filmed there.

In Vancouver, due to NIMBYism, almost all of the social housing projects have been pushed into this one neighbourhood. Deinstitutionalization led to the rehousing of the mentally ill population into social housing. You also find marginalized populations such as indigenous people. Naturally, with that concentration, that's where you find the IV drug use, drug dealers, prostitution, etc.

For political reasons, welfare rates haven't budged in a couple of decades, so beyond housing and health care, the people in the social housing projects aren't well cared for. A lot of the residents collect bottles from trash, or beg for extra income. It's not uncommon for an IV drug user to have a $300/day habit. So naturally there's a lot of property crime and there's always been prostitution.

The court system is overwhelmed, and it's not economical to re-house the population in prison, so there's a revolving-door aspect to the police/court system here. Generally speaking, don't expect your bike to not get stolen, and don't leave valuables in your car or your windows will be smashed.

On the flip side, it's a really safe neighbourhood to walk around in, even at night. There's very little violent crime. Most of the shootings you hear about on the news happen in the suburbs.

There are genuine homeless people out there, but most of the "homeless" you see are just local residents who would rather hang out outdoors than spend their day in the dingy "single-room occupancy" bedbug-infested hotels they are forced to live in.

Gentrification is a big deal. In the past 10 years, the DTES has been rapidly been redeveloped with new condo developments, hipster coffee shops and high-tech startup offices. The social housing isn't going to move, so there's an interesting mix and substantial tension. A lot of the "blighted" buildings owned by slumlords that are sitting there in an unmaintained state are just being held until they can redeveloped into major condo projects. The non-subsidized low quality housing is disappearing rapidly, which is causing pressure on homelessness.

There's a lot of innovative work being done to change the situation. Places like the Crosstown Clinic are doing real internationally-recognized research and making real progress in figuring out how to treat the underlying causes of drug addiction. There are "harm reduction" programs in Vancouver that don't exist anywhere else. The government has stepped in and purchased a lot of vulnerable SRO housing stock and converted it to public housing to prevent a major crisis.

Vancouver is a hippie culture. If you scratch the surface, you'll soon learn about how draft dodgers from the '60s and '70s worked their way into the fabric and today's civic leadership.

As far as Marijuana goes, it's effectively legal via "prescription", and recently there has been a massive proliferation of "dispensaries". That said, it's still technically illegal here. Just over the border, in Washington State, it's now fully legal, and you see billboard ads for it everywhere. The Canadian federal government has just announced that they are going to legalize it for all of Canada.

There's a one block stretch on Hastings Street where some of the earliest marijuana shops are located. But generally speaking, the social ills of the DTES are associated with addictive IV drug use (heroin) and crack cocaine and not with social drugs like marijuana.

Most people are blind to the fact that there are downtrodden people everywhere in North America - they just aren't in the most visible of places. In the DTES, that population is concentrated in a small area where they just happen to be more visible than the same population in your home town.

As someone who walks through or along-size the DTES nearly every day, this is a fantastic response and summary of the situation, Jim, capturing the complexity of the situation nicely. The DTES is not as simple a problem as many people would like to think, nor can it be ignored, as more and more external pressures are put upon it. It is, however, a fundamental part of living in Vancouver, for better or worse.

As for the parent comment: on a minor note, no one who lives in Vancouver thinks the issue is weed by any stretch. Jim's assessment, above, is entirely accurate. My personal hunch is that legalized weed would have absolutely no impact on that part of Vancouver at all.

Thanks for the thorough response.

> But generally speaking, the social ills of the DTES are associated with addictive IV drug use (heroin) and crack cocaine and not with social drugs like marijuana.

So it's still related to drugs one way or another.

Would you say "safe" drugs like Marijuana would improve the situation?

That's an interesting question indeed, specifically: would easy access to legal weed reduce property crime in the area (for most of the crime seems to be smash-n-grab property crime).

My suspicion: no, no change. For all intents and purposes weed is legal in Vancouver. You have to be pretty out of touch not to be able to get it. But weed is cheap, and non-addictive (physiologically anyhow, I suspect the jury may still be out on psychologically; IANAP). I would be surprised to find that anyone is committing re-occurring petty crime to buy weed only.