Pubdate: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC) Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 2000 Contact: 200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3 Fax: (604) 605-2323 Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/ Page: E3-E5 Author: David Beers Referenced: Don's story http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1725/a03.html Sherry's story http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1720/a07.html Series: Searching for solutions - Fix on the Downtown Eastside http://www.mapinc.org/thefix.htm OUR LIVES, OUR HOOD For several weeks Sun reporters Frances Bula and Chris Nuttall-Smith shadowed Downtown Eastside residents and drug users Don Granbois and Sherry Cowx, who graciously allowed them complete access to their lives. We pick up their stories Oct. 25. At precisely one minute past midnight this crisp last Wednesday of October, the party starts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. People who get their welfare and disability cheques on direct deposit line up at the cash machines in Chinatown and Gastown for their first 40 bucks. Then they head for the waiting crowds of dealers up and down Hastings - -- at Main, at Carrall, at Abbott, at Cambie -- to buy their first rock, first up, first down, first powder of the day. Mardi Gras. Welfare Wednesday. The day when the welfare system helplessly bankrolls the biggest party of the month for the poor and addicted, putting thousands of dollars into the hands of the milling crowds of dealers in this neighbourhood. The party is beginning elsewhere in the Lower Mainland too, but almost everywhere else it's behind closed doors. People with the money for an $80 to $100 minimum order can phone to get their drugs delivered by one of the pizza boys, as they're called, complete with rigs even -- a needle, water, maybe an alcohol swab. Down here, among the poorest and least able to plan ahead, a fast-food, drive-through approach to drug shopping prevails. It's $10 a rock or a paper, $27 for three, and that's as much as most people will spend at a time, not wanting to invest all their money in what might be bad stuff, spreading their business around among the dealers. The smart ones treat their friends who don't pick up their cheques until later in the day, expecting their friends will treat them back and keep the party going a little longer, maybe even into Thursday. The ambitious ones band together to buy a couple of eight-balls, hoping to start their way up the ladder to being dealers -- hoping that this time, they won't end up just using it all themselves. And the ones who have to pick up their cheques or don't have cheques at all but have friends who do -- they're sleeping still, resting up for what will be a long day. Fifteen people will die of drug overdoses throughout the province in the aftermath of today's welfare Wednesday party. Four will be from Vancouver: Two in the area around Nanaimo and Powell -- New Crack City, they call it; one in Marpole; and one from among this waiting crowd in the republic of the Downtown Eastside, at a rooming house on Cordova. But no one's thinking about that now. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake