Health committee  No, I have not. There are so many empty buildings on our block. I think there are about 800 units that were formerly available with the region—with The Balmoral, with The Stanley, at 58 West—that are now gone. Also there's the fact that people generally stay with each other. A

Health committee  We haven't received any money for our site.

Health committee  No, we haven't had any support; we're pretty much on our own. To be honest, it's very challenging because we just know we have to go on and there's no choice. We don't think about our mental health, really, unfortunately.

Health committee  Yes. We've definitely seen people.... At the very beginning, a lot of people stayed home. They're starting to come back out again, just because the numbers are so high in overdoses compared to COVID deaths. I haven't heard of anyone dying of COVID in the Downtown Eastside—well, m

Health committee  Go ahead.

Health committee  I think that right now we have to do something really serious in order to stop these deaths. Really, if we don't, people will continue to die. The drug users and community groups—people who are on the front lines—have all come together and said that decriminalization is one of t

Health committee  Yes, you do.

Health committee  Oh, I'm sorry, guys. Is it better now?

Health committee  Okay. Mainly, it's just getting support for the City of Vancouver. I'm sure cities across Canada are facing this with COVID, especially since a lot of people who were near homeless used to be able to stay at other people's houses. Now, there is no way to have visitors, especiall

Health committee  Thank you so much. My name is Sarah Blyth. I'm representing the Overdose Prevention Society. We opened an emergency safe injection site in order to deal with the emergence of overdoses in the Downtown Eastside and all of the deaths that were happening in 2014. We see up to 700

Health committee  Thanks a lot for having me today. It's really an honour to be able to speak to you—

Health committee  I would say that we're in an absolute health emergency crisis right now, and people are using highly addictive drugs. There's no real way out of it except for giving people safe drugs so that we know that they know what they're taking, and then we can get them the proper help the

Health committee  The solution is decriminalization and getting people safe access to the medication that they need, which would be at overdose prevention sites or at InSite or Crosstown Clinic, where people can get safe access to drugs, safe supplies. They can have somebody there who can help the

Health committee  Yes, what we see is people going out and buying their drugs in the street. That's how they use them in our overdose prevention sites. They get their drugs taken away and are criminalized that way. They get criminalized for the survival sex trade. All of these things are causing

Health committee  We see, I would say, 200 meth users a day. Having them in the environment of the overdose prevention site and identifying those things and calmly talking to those folks, we avoid any of those kinds of issues. It's mostly just by engaging with them and having community members tal