Director’s Desk | Kaia Sand launches ‘Better not Backward’ column series exploring next steps two years into Measure 110 with a visit to the Overdose Prevention Society
Our conversation began in the dark. Trey Helten had warned me before I walked the mile to the downtown eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, that a storm had taken out the power at the Overdose Prevention Society.
I first stopped at a storefront etched with the Overdose Prevention Society logo on East Hastings Street, a street where people have survived and died from homelessness and poverty for decades.
Two people were working in the dark, sorting out safe-use supplies for people. Power might be out, but the services continued. They had a bathroom open for people who might need it and a box of flaming tea candles next to the toilet.
I was instructed to ‘go through the clown across the street’ when I asked where I could find Helten, the manager of the Overdose Prevention Society.
Go through the clown across the street? Indeed, there was a large painting of a clown, and I opened the door in the middle of its face.
An alarm steadily chimed in the darkness. I first saw Zelda, Helten’s black pitbull. I had read about Helten and Zelda in an article in Megaphone, the sister street publication to Street Roots based in Vancouver, also located in the downtown eastside.
Although inoperable in the darkness, that room behind the clown was where people could consume drugs under the attention of workers who consistently made rounds to make sure people were still breathing. Behind the building — but locked off because the electric gate was jammed shut in the power outage — was a patio where people could smoke. When Insite, the first safe consumption site in North America located next door, began two decades ago, most opiate users injected heroin; now, many people smoke the cheaper and more dangerous fentanyl, and heroin is rare.
Telling Zelda to wait, Helten took me back across the street, and we climbed up onto a loft where a shaft of daylight streamed through a window onto his face. Helten had formally struggled through addiction himself and accessed services at Insite.
All the death, the constant death, weighed on him, he told me, confessing he couldn’t remember one day from another. He just kept showing up, saving lives, wanting people to have more.
It was the constancy of death that prompted Sarah Blyth to set up a tent marked Overdose Prevention Society in 2016, legal or not. She was determined to save people who overdosed on opiates, one naloxone injection at a time.
British Columbia declared a public health emergency soon after, allowing the Overdose Prevention Society and other sites to operate legally as overdose prevention sites, with naloxone and oxygen tanks as the overdose-reversing tools alongside clean supplies, monitoring, education and resources. Blyth now serves as executive director. Overdose Prevention Society receives funding from the health authority and provides honoraria to drug users, some in recovery and some who aren’t, to check on people.
No one under this system has died, just as no one has died at Insite in the two decades it has operated. The need for health responses to the North American overdose crisis has far exceeded the walls of Insite, but its careful data collection and community-based response have paved the way for overdose prevention sites in British Columbia.
“The main thing is just to keep people alive,” Helten told me as he leaned against an old locker. “We can try to direct them to get housing. We can try to direct them to safe supply programs or a doctor that's willing to prescribe something that's a little less dangerous than the street dope, refer them to detox. But the main thing is just like if someone's dead, they don't have the opportunity to make better choices.”
Everywhere I stopped in my several days in the downtown eastside of Vancouver — at Megaphone, at Insite, talking to folks on the streets trying to reverse overdoses — people quoted the same statistic that Helten did: six people a day were dying of overdoses in the British Columbia province, and fentanyl was implicated in most of those deaths.
Oregon’s rate of overdose death is just below Washington's and quite a bit less than British Columbia's. About seven people die of overdoses every day in Washington State, and about three die per day in Oregon, based on 2021 statistics. With 4.3 million people, Oregon has about a million fewer people than British Columbia and 3.5 million less than Washington.
These deaths are caused by, as the British Columbia coroner put it in a quarterly report, an “inherently toxic and volatile nature of an unregulated drug supply.” Drug users might unintentionally use fentanyl or use fentanyl that’s contaminated with other substances. They never know the potency of what they are ingesting, akin to not knowing whether they are receiving water, vodka or Everclear, as Outside In’s Haven Wheelock told me for a column last summer.
British Columbia's provincial government has put the health needs in front since 2016 by allowing and supporting sites like the Overdose Prevention Center to provide education, equipment, drug testing, and spaces where people can be watched so they don’t die of an overdose.
And not just people.
“Zelda will check on people,” Helten explained. “I didn't believe it at first, but she does go around and kind of check on people. And when I'm walking around with her in the neighborhood, if there's someone on the ground that I'm not sure if they're sleeping.”
Helten suggested he show me around the streets, so we walked out into the light.
Among the throngs of people, many desperate, homeless, and still alive, Helten became animated, still committed — when the stakes are life and death — to life.
Correction: an earlier version of the column spelled Helten incorrectly as Helton
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2023 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404
