Living Human Tragedies

Sometimes society can exercise the best of intentions, sacrifice time, attention and tax dollars to an extreme degree, and find itself incapable of effecting the kind of humane rescue it sets out to accomplish, regardless. And, one supposes, that the best of societies, caring for all its populations, inclusive of those whose degraded condition of drug dependency leads inevitably to suffering and early death, will accept those sacrifices for the sake of what amounts to end-of-life hospice care.

In British Columbia, a massive infusion of tax dollars abetted by a grim determination of government to combat the scourge of life-deadening drug dependency on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, has resulted in a slender amelioration for the thousands of hopeless drug-addicted human failures, but a concomitant recognition that the initiatives haven't really worked. In that they have not been successful in helping to turn people away from drugs and toward normalcy.

In the struggle to achieve some positive results, charitable organizations and social agencies continued to grow new services along with a greater determination for a better outcome for those they served, living degraded misery on the bleakly squalid streets. Free and subsidized housing was thought to represent a potential break-through, giving hope and dignity to the afflicted.

The province's government purchased six decrepit hotels for refurbishing, to house people in single-room occupancy hotels as permanent residents to single occupants. The government has spent $84.5-million in the last two years for acquisition of conversion properties and anticipated a similar amount to be spent on refurbishing. The cost coming to $123,268 per room once renovations are completed.

Single-room occupancy hotels have been opened for the 'hard to house', that segment of the homeless who are direly addicted, and the terminally ill. Renovations related to that housing represented an $326,484 outlay of tax funding per room of building space. People on disability allowances and pensions live in these accommodations, injecting their drugs.

Some of these accommodations are maintained for 'palliative care'. It just isn't working out that people are given hope and opportunities to turn their lives around. With the best of all possible options available to them, taking them off the streets, hoping for the best, they're simply unable to wean themselves off their dependencies. And they're slowly, agonizingly, dying, with services incapable of keeping up with their needs.

Perhaps offering this hopeless human flotsam decent accommodation off the streets, and with it a modicum of human dignity is the most, in the face of such unrelenting dependence, that any society can hope to accomplish.