There's no way to sugar coat the grim reality of life on the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
There's no way to sugar coat the grim reality of life on the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The tragic realities and consequences of drugs, homelessness and addiction - it's a grim scene that awaits four members of the Okotoks Oilers and two members of the Okotoks RCMP Crime Reduction Unit (CRU) who will travel to the area on Aug. 31 as part of a program intended to bring the hard lessons of drugs home to young people.
Const. Jeff Girard said sharing the real, vivid stories from a community like Downtown Eastside that has been devastated by drugs and addiction can provide important lessons for other people about the impacts of drugs.
They want people to know it's all too easy for people who use drugs to end up like the residents in the area.
“You don't even want to try it one time,” said Girard.
The RCMP and Oilers have partnered as part of the Odd Squad Junior Hockey Mentorship Program. It was launched in 1997 with the WHL's Red Deer Rebels and Red Deer RCMP teaming up to take young hockey players to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Dubbed Project Keep Straight, Girard said it's a vital program to help spread awareness among youth about drugs and addiction.
Life on East Hastings will be an eye opener for the Oilers, said Girard.
“They're going to see used needles, they're going to see garbage, they're going to see rubber bands that people use to inject,” he said.
For those who call the streets home, everything they own may be within an arms reach.
For those lucky enough to have a roof over their heads, home may be an eight-foot by eight-foot room. Bathrooms are either outside or in communal bathrooms that aren't much better. Garbage bins reserved for needles in the area are welded shut to prevent people from trying to get the tiny amounts of leftover heroin from syringes.
“The living conditions are not good by any means and that's where the smells and the sounds come in,” he said. “We'll be on the third floor of a building and we'll just hear screaming from other places in the building.”
It's not easy to see. Girard said they will meet with the four Oilers before they head out to prepare them for the experience.
Girard said he saw the value of the project in other communities and wanted to bring it to Okotoks.
He took a group of four players from the Fort McMurray Oil Barons to East Hastings in 2014.
The players were excited to go at first, said Girard, but the reality set in quickly.
“Once they're on the ground and they're walking the streets and they're talking to the people who live there every day, they're literally walking over syringes and garbage and household articles and blankets and things like that and the sights and the sounds and the smells, it really opens their eyes,” he said.
The impact was profound, as they saw that it's far too easy for it to become the reality for anyone addicted to drugs or alcohol.
“You could tell it was an eye opener, night and day,” he said.
“When we went there it was more fun to this is serious, this is life changing.”
When they're back in Okotoks, the players and officers will go to local schools to share the experience.
Girard said it's important to bring the message back to schools for other young people to learn from.
“When you really try to drive home the seriousness of the topics, with the stories that the kids are able to tell first hand, you really can see that the kids can figure it out,” he said.
Cpl. Darryl Dawkins, with the Okotoks RCMP CRU Unit, said the project is important for the Okotoks CRU officers working to keep drugs out of Okotoks.
“Obviously we don't see it to the scale as East Hastings, but we do encounter people in Okotoks almost daily who are fighting their own addictions,” he said.
Dawkins said seeing the negative results of addiction is important in the fight against drugs.
Third-year Oiler Carter Huber, 20, is one of the four who will be joining Dawkins and Girard in Vancouver.
He said taking the anti-drug message beyond a simple “just say no' approach to sharing the realities of drugs and addiction can help bring the message home to young people. It also helps when it's coming from other younger people like himself and the other Oilers, he added.
“It's easy to be in one of those seminars or lectures to just tune out, so I think when you're hearing from someone of a similar age, someone you can relate to it makes a big difference to those kids,” he said.
Huber said it's tough to prepare for something like this.
There's little in his native Calgary that compares to East Hastings. He expects it to be an eye opener, so he wants to make the most of the lessons he will learn on the trip.
“I think for me it's not really about being prepared it's about going in with an open mind and really trying to soak it in and see how bad life can get in some circumstances,” he said.
