“Nanaimo has become the face of public disorder.”
–Collen Middleton
I often hear the phrase “balance of harm” when talking with advocates for unhoused drug users accessing social services in our neighbourhoods. Their drug use-related behaviours cause perennial problems for the public at large, yet we are told our concerns about ‘street disorder’ and our rights as residents to peace and security in our neighbourhoods, are not relevant.
Our NIMBY whining apparently is of a much lower magnitude of suffering than those without a home who are “stigmatized” for their drug use.
I disagree.
Street disorder is distressing for both the participant and the bystander, and both perspectives deserve to be considered thoughtfully.
The negative effects for both are chronic and cumulative.
‘Participants’ of street disorder are vulnerable, unhoused people being trafficked, abused, threatened, marginalized, stigmatized and traumatized.
Bystanders to street disorder bear daily witness to extreme suffering in their neighbourhood. They feel under constant threat on the street and in their homes. They are intimidated by the network of organized criminal enterprises operating in their neighbourhoods with seeming impunity.
Bystanders are victims of assault, vandalism, arson, theft and armed robbery committed by people suffering acute mental distress, usually fueled by illicit drug use. Their homes have been invaded, their belongings stolen from locked yards, and they are awakened in the night by disturbances playing out on the street.
“When I express that it is hard living amongst this disorder constantly, other people respond with: be more empathic, at least you have a home, you are a NIMBY.”
Nanaimo resident
Feeling helpless in their own homes, bystanders develop trauma-induced mental health disorders, with some too scared to even walk down the street to do errands.
Street disorder affects the mental health of the entire community and Nanaimo has become the face of public disorder: Rising crime, addiction, drug trafficking, drug overdose deaths, poverty and homelessness.
Public disorder in Nanaimo
Public disorder damages residents
Nanaimo residents are painfully aware of how bad the situation has gotten.
“I watch people I grew up with, was friends with, the first boy I loved, suffering and feel powerless to change anything.”
Nanaimo resident
A recent survey by Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association asked local residents how street disorder was affecting their health, psychology and finances. The results revealed more than 90 per cent of the roughly 650 respondents felt their well-being or quality of life was being negatively impacted by chaos in the streets.
| Physical health impacts of street disorder | % of Respondents |
| Discarded used drug paraphernalia (needles, pipes, foil) | 77% |
| Sensory or direct exposure to human waste (feces, vomit, urine) | 72% |
| Deterrence from walking or using local parks and playgrounds | 70% |
| Exposure to loud noises (fights, yelling) at night | 60% |
| Second hand drug smoke (meth, crack, fentanyl) | 45% |
| Uncontrolled fires and/or threats of arson | 39% |
| Substance use (to cope with impacts of street disorder) | 11% |
| Victim of assault | 10% |
“I have been verbally assaulted… had a client punched in the chest… had [another] client verbally assaulted… they are no longer comfortable coming to see me at [my] home practice.”
Nanaimo resident
| Psychological Impacts of Street Disorder | % of Respondents |
| Witnessing extreme suffering | 69% |
| Witnessing criminal actions | 63% |
| Anxiety, Stress or irritability | 59% |
| Worries for child safety (physical hazards, explicit/traumatizing exposure to drug use-related behaviours) | 50% |
| Depression or feelings of helplessness | 33% |
| Loss of sleep | 29% |
| Chronic stress or Post-Traumatic Stress | 17% |
“It feels inescapable. I feel anxious. Checking to see if people are breathing shouldn’t be part of a walk to the store, or the playground, yet it is part of our daily routine.”
Nanaimo resident
| Financial Impacts of Street Disorder | % of Respondents |
| Increased cost of goods and services | 51% |
| Theft of personal property | 50% |
| Vandalism/graffiti on businesses and public spaces | 47% |
| Repairs due to property damage | 39% |
| Loss of property value | 37% |
| Higher insurance premiums due to theft/vandalism/arson claims | 36% |
| Theft of merchandise | 28% |
The full results will be published to the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association website in the coming weeks.
“I have missed work because I need to pick my daughter up from school due to the homeless addicts slumped over and doing drugs every which way she walks. I live in constant fear of my house or fence being lit on fire.”
Nanaimo resident
Authority figures ‘failing miserably’
The consequences of street disorder on public safety are impossible for any reasonable person to ignore. But we are also reckoning with the realization that authority figures with the power to effectively respond to this public health and safety emergency are failing miserably.
It was mid 2022 when my neighbours raised the alarm about mayhem they were seeing in back laneways and the area surrounding an outdoor, peer-to-peer drug consumption site. For the first time, I got proactive, trying to understand what was going on in the city. I joined the local social media group worried about degrading public safety, and attended a grassroots community-organized rally on the lawn of the Nanaimo Provincial Courthouse.
As collateral damage escalated in the neighborhood surrounding the consumption site, a few of us founded the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association.
We took the issues to city hall.
In our calls for help to the city, Island Health, our MLA, and the Ministry of Mental Health & Addictions, we discovered our neighbourhood was caught in the crossfire of an administrative shell game.
Despite being funded by the province and the health authority, the drug consumption site had no municipal permit and no record of how much money it received. Nor was there a mechanism for the city or the province to shut the site down due to neighbourhood impacts.
“While having breakfast with out-of-town visitors downtown, a gentleman across the street lowered his trousers and exposed himself while masturbating.”
Nanaimo resident
Previous efforts by the community of Newcastle to hold the B.C. government accountable for negative neighbourhood impacts of ‘Discontent City’ and the province’s remedy – a single-room occupancy (SRO) supportive housing facility – resulted in a BC Supreme Court decision that essentially told surrounding residents their right to peace, safety and security do not have a leg to stand on.
Island Health withheld information about its relationship with the operator, and the operator of the site would only meet us on their own terms.
We had to dig deeply just to learn the source of their operational funding – a non-profit organization 100 per cent funded by B.C. taxpayer dollars via the Community Action Initiative’s peer-to-peer network grant program, a multi-tiered public money-distribution organization that also funds drug-user groups. Because non-profit organizations are not directly accountable to the public through Freedom of Information, there is no obligation for the province to obtain, then share, their contractual relationships.
It began with one discarded label…
By late 2022, the number of people languishing in front of the medical services building on lower Victoria Road in Nanaimo was growing. People living on the street had become entrenched and territorial. Local residents were fearful about the safety of themselves and their families.
It was a soggy November day when I came upon a single label for hydromorphone. The label had been peeled off, folded, and discarded on the sidewalk in front of my house. At the time, I had no idea what ‘safe supply’ was, nor had I even heard of hydromorphone, the primary drug prescribed under the government program.
I’ve since come across more than 80 discarded labels during just a few walks in my neighbourhood. In the beginning, after I found that first peeled label, I naively thought the pharmacy, our health authority, our police, our city, the patient’s doctor, our elected officials – anyone! – would want to know what I’d discovered.
More than that, I thought they’d receive this anecdote with great interest and curiosity. The risk to the public was obvious, after all.
But not only did our public institutions (and the pharmacist) not want to hear from me, they collectively stonewalled, gaslit, patronized, and shamed me to maintain the false narrative they were effectively managing the public health and safety overdose emergency.
It has been one of the great disappointments of my life to realize our own government would wilfully suppress efforts to provide greater safety to my community.
Root causes of drug use must be addressed
The immediate, circumstantial cause of an effect is called the ‘proximate cause.’ But what is much more difficult to ascertain is the ‘ultimate cause’ of the effect – the underlying mechanism driving the proximate cause. While it’s true that toxic street drugs are the proximate cause for the vast majority of deaths in the opioid overdose/poisoning crisis, it’s rarely acknowledged by our governments why people are using street drugs in the first place.
But we must address the underlying drivers behind this phenomenon if we are to turn the corner on this public health and safety emergency.
Safer supply advocates say people are using street drugs because they don’t have access to a ‘safer’ prescribed alternative. This assertion implies people are going to turn to drugs regardless of social and cultural norms, laws of the land, or medical services that may help treat their addictions. It also assumes people must use drugs, as if personal agency is not something that can be realistically cultivated to guide people away from them.
Conversely, drug user libertarians profess people who use drugs aren’t addicted to them, and that meth, cocaine and fentanyl and the like are legitimate recreational drugs.
None of this explains why so many people are succumbing to addictive illicit drug use in the first place. To understand and address that, we need a proper treatment and recovery system. Something Nanaimo, and indeed, B.C., lacks.
And we need to acknowledge that both illicit street drugs and diverted safer supply drugs are being marketed to vulnerable segments of our population, including youth, by organized criminal elements in our communities, and then do something about it.
Given the proliferation and diversion of safer supply drugs like hydromorphone onto the streets, why aren’t public health officials and our elected government leaders actively warning the public, especially our youth, about the perils of opioid drug use?
Prevention and education needed
Not just prevention of harms for drug users, but prevention of drug use, period. Government literature and websites, press releases and the officials themselves focus almost solely on harm reduction, with only the barest lip service to the benefits of prevention, education and treatment.
The silence on those topics is deafening.
Inaction on these fronts is fuelling much of the chaos, violence and public unrest on our city streets and in our neighbourhoods.
Moderate citizens must speak up
Part of the reason B.C.’s drug policy is not going in a constructive direction may lie with the ideology and special interests of several powerful public health officials, current and former. Some of those occupying senior offices in our provincial and federal governments are angling to legalize and commercialize all potent, addictive and deadly drugs similar to alcohol, which is orders of magnitude less toxic.
As well, the province’s drug policy research is partly funded by big pharma. It’s unclear how researchers and policy makers might be influenced by these competing interests and industry-funded research. Much of it is out-of-view from the general public, but citizens deserve to know because it may be at odds with societal health and safety.
On other fronts, drug user advocates say ‘prohibitionist’ policies damage and escalate the danger in the illicit street supply. This argument ignores a fundamental economic principle – the black market supplies what consumers demand.
The anti-prohibitionist stance also pretends away the reality and implications of opioid addiction being an escalating condition. Consumers need ever higher potencies as they build rapid tolerance with each use. So, the illicit market complies with stronger and stronger drugs. If government legalized hard drugs, it would have to contend with customers’ unending thirst for ever stronger drugs.
Regardless of prohibition, the black market wins. We have seen this already in the thriving illicit market for cannabis even after legalization and regulation.
The illicit market will always undercut the legal one on cost and potency.
There are no easy answers. But as a public, it’s crucially important we have these tough discussions on public safety and drug addiction policy. Governments alone can’t resolve these complex problems.
There is no silver-bullet policy position, but if our collective motivator in these discussions is the health of all the people of British Columbia and Canada, we can make progress. We have to make progress. Our future as a society, currently teetering on the brink of self-destruction, hangs in the balance.
It’s time for moderate citizens to speak up and be not afraid to yell if necessary to make our voices heard.
We can no longer afford to be a silent majority.