What the Telegraph Got Wrong about the Downtown Eastside

When Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside became the subject of international press coverage last week, locals snapped to attention. The Telegraph, a daily broadsheet based in London, England, published a news feature with a headline that claimed decriminalization had made Vancouver “the fentanyl capital of the world.”

The article was paired with shocking photography of people using and overdosing on illicit drugs. The photos were published with little context and, in the case of shots of those unconscious or those with needles in their necks and arms, no evidence that the photographer had requested or received informed consent from his subjects.

Informed consent forms the basis of photojournalism ethics. It’s taught in journalism schools and practised by leading photojournalists in Canada.

“As photojournalists, our job is to hold up a mirror so we might all better understand our communities, and ourselves. The painful outcomes of failed or failing public policy must be reflected. Sometimes that means photographing people on the worst day of their lives, especially if that day takes place in public,” acclaimed Vancouver photojournalist Jesse Winter wrote in The Tyee in 2021. “But when we rely on photographing only the pain, showing only one element of complex issues like housing affordability, mental health or substance use, the mirror gets broken. The public sees only a tiny shard of the whole mirror, and it’s that shard that helps determine what they believe.”

The Telegraph’s photos were paired with questionable reporting. Citing no evidence and pointing to no research, the piece claimed that the powerful opioid fentanyl is manufactured in “Canada’s wilderness” and is so common that “you can literally pick it up off the street,” like a piece of old gum on the sidewalk.

The article neglected to note that fentanyl is regularly and safely used in medical settings across North America. But fatal quantities of the opioid in an unregulated supply of illicit drugs increases their toxicity. Illicit drug toxicity contributes to overdose deaths that continue to break annual records in B.C., eight years after former health minister Terry Lake declared a public health emergency in April 2016.

With all of these gaps in information, the article unhelpfully left its readers to come to their own conclusions without providing them with the necessary guideposts to help them understand the complexity of what the article sought to shed light on.

It left the false impression that B.C.’s decriminalization pilot unleashed fentanyl on the streets. It left out the fact that drug use and, by extension, the experiences of drug users are shaped by intersecting social, economic and political systems.

Those include the legacy of Canada’s residential school and child welfare systems, as well as our contemporary welfare system for people who require public financial support. The Tyee has reported on how B.C.’s current income assistance and disability assistance rates are not in keeping with the costs of living in the province. Those receiving such support have described how the monthly payments have the effect of keeping them in poverty.

Many in Vancouver are aware of these realities. And we shouldn’t be inured to them just because they are ongoing. But these facts may not be immediately apparent to those trying to figure out the city. They might feel baffled by what they see as a discomforting duality: how can such extraordinary disparities exist in a city as patently beautiful and categorically livable as Vancouver?

I hear good-faith snippets of sentiments like these often, from people who don’t mean harm. They are understandably surprised to see this stunning disparity in a place that was sold to them as equitable, safe and well resourced.

I met a smart, adventurous senior this spring who had recently immigrated here. “My son told me, ‘Don’t go to Main and Hastings,’” he said to me one afternoon as his grandchild played with my kid in the park. His son meant well. He wanted to keep his father safe and didn’t want him to get into trouble while he was away at work.

“But I wanted to know!” the senior told me. “So the other day, I walked right down! Why is it like that?”

We chatted for a while. We talked about inequality, municipal politics, how a place can seem to promise certain things, but the reality is very different. He related his family’s own struggles to find a place to rent in Vancouver. They couldn’t believe the expense. I agreed; it is unbelievable.

It’s also hard to believe that, eight years into a public health emergency, we are still struggling with many of the same problems that were rising to the surface when fentanyl was first becoming prominent in the illicit drug supply.

And I’m continuing to contemplate the media’s role in making that which should rightly shock us seem part of the everyday fabric of life in Vancouver.

A desire for connection, community

I was involved with Megaphone, a Downtown Eastside social enterprise and magazine publisher, as a volunteer and a staffer from 2010 to 2017. I edited the magazine, managed its creative writing workshop program and published non-fiction, poetry and journalism by people in the Downtown Eastside community. In 2016 and 2017, I worked on a storytelling project led by drug users that became the Megaphone Speakers Bureau.

People sent their writing to Megaphone from remand centres, supportive housing, detox, homeless shelters, single-room occupancy hotels and spots in the North Shore mountains where they camped. Some people used drugs, some were sober, and others had more complex relationships with drugs that reflected different seasons of their lives. Using was sometimes a strategy to manage the traumas people carried and the physical pain they endured every day.

Some dreamed of reuniting with their children, like a couple I met while facilitating writing workshops at Onsite, a detox facility above Insite, a supervised injection site near Main and Hastings. Others were in search of better housing and meaningful work where they could rest in the security of a sense of purpose.

Everyone wants different things. But in the Megaphone community and elsewhere, I found people shared a universal wish: a desire for connection and community where they felt seen and cared for.

Reporting like that in the Telegraph article fails to address how connection and community, its presence and its absence, shapes how people live.

Without it, the work contributes to a harmful, stereotypical portrayal of the Downtown Eastside that does little to address or propose a serious, outcomes-oriented approach to helping people who use drugs and live in poverty, something we still have yet to see implemented at a successful scale.

Community members have been at work on solutions, like safe supply, which is in many ways connected to harm reduction.

And people also need what the community can’t make on its own: housing, livable incomes and dignified, accessible pathways to healing, which includes sobriety for some.

A legacy of dubious journalism

The Telegraph’s Downtown Eastside reporting marked the latest piece of journalism for which the 169-year-old newspaper has been publicly rebuked.

In 2021, the Independent Press Standards Organisation ordered the Telegraph to publish a correction over a column that spread disinformation about the spread of COVID-19.

In 2023, the climate news site DeSmog published its analysis of over 2,000 Telegraph opinion pieces dealing with environmental issues. It found 85 per cent attacked climate policy, questioned climate science and ridiculed environmental groups.

Now we’re here in the summer of 2024, where Canadian journalists, Downtown Eastside residents, harm reduction advocates and allies have vociferously denounced the Telegraph’s report for its inaccuracy.

Unfortunately, its editor’s unhinged tantrums on social media have seen him digging in his heels in response to the critiques.

All of the above may lead one to believe that we’re at a polarizing standstill between those who advocate for the rights of drug users and those who don’t see them as human.

But here’s another, quieter fact that doesn’t always make news headlines: life keeps moving in spite of its many challenges, even and especially when it’s not screamed about on social media.

On a grey morning one spring, I was walking down Quebec Street towards Chinatown. I crossed paths with a person I’d met years earlier at Onsite.

“Hey,” he said. “We got our kids back.”

They were living together as a family again, the outcome of a long journey of which I saw only a glimpse. One thing I did see, and which I’ll always remember, was how the people who worked at Onsite worked exceptionally hard to open doors for their clients while respecting the fact that the process of healing and recovery is long and non-linear, and requires the presence of people who believe in your potential and see the best in you.

We need to work together to make futures like these possible for more people. It requires bold, aggressive work on housing and healing.

And it begins with the provision of basic respect for the people most affected by these issues. That should seem easy. But if the Telegraph article and its related discussion is any example, it seems to be in unreasonably short supply.