Opioid Tragedy: Inside the Fentanyl Crisis | Ten Dollar Death Trip | ENDEVR Documentary

pure fentanyl it is fire like it is so dangerous it's like the most horrid wretched pure terror you can imagine it feels like something's slowly like just pulling your life force out of you and then you get tunnel vision starts getting smaller and smaller and around this tunnel it's just darkness right and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller closes and you're dead that's it you think you're dead no you're dead you're a flat line no heartbeat dead [Music] vancouver a city renowned for its natural beauty a quote from the tourist board but beneath the

mountain vistas the city has a tragic underbelly despite being known as one of the world's top three cities in which to live a tiny neighborhood known as downtown eastside is experiencing a huge drug problem thousands of lives have been lost and in nearly nine out of ten autopsies a deadly new illicit drug has been present the painkiller fentanyl is now the number one killer drug in the us you can die just by touching it fentanyl a fatal dose of fentanyl the potent opioid that's supposed to tranquilize elephants a synthetic painkiller a hundred times more powerful

than morphine just two milligrams of the pure drug which is about four grains of salt is enough to kill the average adult prince died from a lethal amount of the pain killer ten-year-old boy in florida has become one of the overall more than 63 000 people died of monster drug kills far more people than gun violence if you don't know what fentanyl is it is basically the new heroine but much much [Music] stronger hey what's up bro not a whole lot i'm on a documentary right now brother i'm on a documentary here talking about opioid

use and [ __ ] yeah i'll come talk to you in a minute hey wait down here i gotta talk to you bro just give me a minute yeah there's no another fellow bro on the hood you know um friend of yours yeah a good friend of mine no that doesn't matter ask no ask no questions i'll tell no lies here in downtown east side addiction is nothing new heroin has flowed through vancouver's ports to this deprived part of town since the 1970s but market forces have seen that heroin supply replaced fentanyl is stronger cheaper

and much less bulky to import where are we going kevin where would you like to go do you want to see what it's really like sure let's go let's go this is east hastings street now this is where the ghetto starts basically what you're looking at is the mecca of drug addiction we have been an active narcotics hub for ever since i can remember maybe that's why i came here i know yeah that is probably why i came here illicit fentanyl hasn't flooded the street drug supply outside north america yet do you think this could

become a global problem and if it does what should people expect death lots of [ __ ] death people are gonna die and it's not gonna be pretty it is wildfire people will try it love it and they'll never quit [Music] these these streets were crowded you're talking about 1500 2 000 people died just in this block mama put my guns to the ground our government knows what's killing them now i've seen our government address an epidemic before soros they spent multiple multiple millions of dollars to keep us safe from czars any idea how many

people died from tsar's i know 14 people died from stars we lost 14 people last [ __ ] week right this is a huge problem the united states lost 72 000 people at overdose death last year canada lost 8 000. all right these are these are large numbers of people dying of a preventable death and it will not be any different in australia the united kingdom uh anywhere in the western world it's just uh it's inevitable it is i mean this stuff will kill you if i wanted to buy fentanyl right now how easy would

that be well it would pretty much be simple for you to get fentanyl and be impossible for you to get heroin because that's what it's all fentanyl now even if there is heroin it's got feminine all in it how far drinking meal from a drug deal though feet [Music] a lot a lot yeah what's your name buddy sylvester and what are you doing hanging out on the street corner is it western uh south south fentanyl you know trying to get by i live on the streets so i got to make a living somehow i don't

want to rob stores or nothing i've got about 10 years in the pen this way here i stay out and how's business are you selling a lot booming man like you can never have enough so how many people are buying fentanyl from you each day 100 150 every day every day is the dealing here quite organized is there like a bit of a kind of chain of command here yeah different gangs run different alleys i'm on a 12-hour shift how do you get that job because i don't think they're emphasizing that in the newspaper right

no no through connections mostly coming out of jail what's fentanyl done to the community around here destroyed it i lost like 40 people that i know wells close to me in the last three years people never did drugs in their life picked it up once dead from fencing from fentanyl is it possible any of them got that offensive from you baltimore that bother you to an extent but they're going to get this from somebody right i mean i guess apart from anything else it's not great business practice to be killing your customers right no i

don't think anybody wanted anybody to die but the thing is heroin it used to come in it's heroin this fentanyl we're making it ourselves you go online on the on the dark web you order an ounce of fentanyl from china cost you 350 bucks pay an extra 50 bucks the next day is delivered right to your door you take that four hundred dollars with a fentanyl yeah and you make a thousand grams of down yeah and you're getting anywhere between 100 120 per gram so do the math like jesus diamonds isn't it yeah like gold

you're taking 400 and you're making 100 grand but while it's lucrative illicit street fentanyl is often being cooked by amateur gangsters in their basements they're making the recipe up as they go along and the final product is synthetic and wildly inconsistent customers here told us that what they buy on the street can be any color of the rainbow that's what like right now everybody wants the dark green they come up and ask you you got the dark green you don't got it they shop around why is they working because that's the highest fentanyl but that's

also the [ __ ] that's killing people right yup you're playing russian roulette and people are comfortable to take that risk as soon as they know that that stops dropping people they're running to you who got that green stuff because they think they can they're the ones that can take half of it or a quarter of it or the people are dying from it then it must be good [ __ ] is that the logic that's the logic last night this girl just came over to detox and i knew she just got back she's all

healthy and everything she sees me oh sylvester come running up give me a point i see you just got out didn't you i just got out two hours ago i said what do you want a point for oh i'm just going to use a little bit of it and have some for tomorrow i said don't use it at all because you know you know your tolerances no no i won't 10 minutes later the ambulance in the alley they were working on her i don't know if she lived or died i don't know ambulance come please

come i leave so how much do you sell it for and what do people get from it ten dollars for a flap can i see that's a 10 flap of fentanyl and that's dark green dark green that's a [ __ ] that's dropping people do you know what purity that is 15 female 3 heroine the rest is baby laxative sugars is it possible that i die if i took that yep all depends how high your immune system you know your tolerance i mean i've never taken pencil before if you took that you'd die 100 100

and if i bought the same quantity of heroin with you would i die no definitely not definitely not would you sell it to me do you want to buy it if i want to buy it like if i give you 10 bucks for that now you'll sell me that yup it's your life bro you got to make your own choices right and i got to eat so just like that man the candied way in which sylvester discusses his day job is conflicting it's easy to judge him but the reality is that fentanyl has become normalized

in downtown east side and for the homeless community who live here in desperate hardship it's one of the very few tradable commodities [Music] vancouver is a very rich city surrounded by you know very rich real estate and unlike most canadian cities vancouver's decided to ghettoize poverty as the city gentrifies people get squished and squished and it used to be 15 square blocks now it's down to six or seven square blocks of people and uh most of them are in search of some sort of drug from day to day so just a block over that way

i just purchased this could that be fentanyl i think it could be i mean it comes in all different shapes and sizes where do you think that ambulance is going to that we can hear behind us probably an overdose yeah it's uh yeah this i mean it's surprising it's the first one we've heard because there's a multiple overdose calls in this little community per day and some sometimes it's just been horrific like it's just been just wall-to-wall ambulances and fire trucks and people lying on the street and it can look like a war zone people

are being slaughtered down here at numbers that are just offensive and nobody gives us iraq and afghanistan combined the system no you're you're in it right now like you think afghanistan's about this is unregulated this right here was my last ten dollars and my only ten dollars that i sold a crowbar and an angle grinder for i got a coffee and some dough yeah usually you don't eat and you live breathe and work for this how can you know really what's inside that so i guess it's fentanyl he's also got the powder version there oh

like you never know what you're gonna get it's a surprise all the time so these are both fentanyl but it almost looks like a different drug and it does you never know like it always looks different it's just one big [ __ ] around really is sorry for the language but it's um you know food clothes shower drugs it's constantly [Music] take a walk on the wild side shall we why'd you call it the wild side spike there seems to be an idea here that it might be dangerous down here or it might be uh

yeah mainstream society is a little bit of a intimidated by it or afraid of it i'm and yeah so i said it in jest because it's not the wild side at all it's just a it's a neighborhood of people that are going experiencing a lot of pain and dealing with a lot of trauma and what kind of pain do people typically go through well high poverty area there's there's there's all kinds of people people survive all kinds of trauma from early childhood abuse to to to you know relationship pain to you know just yeah just

people have gone through a lot down here do you think addiction is a disease and there's an illness definitely you know what starts out as an original choice to use substances to self-medicate from the pain turns into a lifetime of suffering and i became dependent on using um heroin and fentanyl because reality was was painful opioids like heroin and fentanyl belonged to the same pharmaceutical family as morphine and like morphine they were intended for pain relief everyone in this self-medicating community has a backstory and pain both physical and mental is all around is this person

okay well we'll check right now i'm sure they're probably breathing but hey how are you i'm fine cool uh we're filming the wall but we we won't okay cool sorry to enter sorry to it's already coming into your space ma'am i i had an ugly childhood and so i i i dabbled um yeah i was running away from things from an awful lot of pain when i was a kid and i i used narcotics uh i cleaned up in 1997 i cleaned up to raise my child i was a his mother killed her he killed

herself and i raised my i was a single dad i raised my child my son and uh because i i owed him a life and and i have an amazing son he uh he turned out exceptionally well i did i'm really proud of the job that i did and then i had an accident and it kind of brought me back um i got hit from behind on my bike i broke my legs my pelvis my hip my ribs ripped my rotator cuff crush both hands broke my back and four places my skull in four places

my face my nose my teeth with a shearing brain hemorrhage uh yeah it wasn't a good day in my world i'd have met you down here 10 years ago what would the difference have been no yeah you'd probably you wouldn't you wouldn't have met me if you would have met me i'd be apologizing right now so uh completely different what would you be apologizing for oh probably for something that i've done to you or or taken from you but yeah i inject drugs 30 to 40 times a day i mean so yeah i mean just

uh the shell of the you know a person that was just how much does that costing oh probably a good uh 600 bucks a day fence noise now sweeping through north america at a horrifying rate since it hit the streets drug overdose has become the leading cause of death for those under 50. you can't find anyone in these alleyways who hasn't lost a loved one it's scary how commonplace it's become have you lost any friends michelle who's this fentanyl [ __ ] oh my god my brother i love him i'm so sorry to hear that

thank you how did your brother die michelle yeah so sorry that's the fentanyl truck there perhaps fentanyl's cruelest trick is the stockholm syndrome it pushes to its victims the more it devastates this little community the more people seek solace in his arms but here in the hardest hit neighborhood the very people in the midst of its grip are the ones leading the fight back right now we're going to go to the washington needle depot it's pure lead and we hand out harm reduction supplies for the community peer-led means that the people that the staff that

work there uh use drugs themselves and are part of that community yep absolutely yeah it's really important that people from the community are the ones leading it hey guys hello hi cameras so double shift no one showed up for this afternoon so we're gonna go hit up the east end perfect and we'll yeah we got uh one od this afternoon went this morning 55 needles found and some two narcan kids give it up that's your first day everything first days not bad that's amazing all right thank you so much we'll hit it hard you're welcome

well done yeah see ya and it was this guy's first day yes and he saved an overdose already yeah is that pretty common would you have an overdose every day like that well i mean we it depends on where the routes are but downtown east side is pretty common [Music] inside this building clean injecting equipment is handed to locals through a hole in the wall the idea is to stop the spread of blood-borne viruses like hepatitis and hiv it's open 24 hours a day and hands out a million syringes a year so corey how many

needles would you give out in a normal shift oh wow um i've gone through one of these boxes have 500 rigs in it and one day i went through four boxes of rings and one ship yeah that was a busy day why is it so important that people around here can get access to those clean noodles well they'll they'll use they'll use whatever they need to use they'll use a dirty rig that they find though that's how people get hepatitis and they integrate those share rigs they will use toilet water and puddle water um whenever

they need to to use to get water right and i guess that water is going straight into their bloodstream and that does not sound great well can you imagine the diseases in these alleys where people urinate in feces and you know this is known as piss alley it smells like piss right from the back of the building the staff run a mobile response unit working in shifts to reverse street overdoses so for my shift i have my vest on i have a 8.8 narcan ready to go i have my bike my helmet and i always

have extra narcan on me so in case i come across multiple overdoses i'll put that right here right now workers like jen patrol these alleyways administering life-saving medical interventions their secret weapon is naloxone the fentanyl antidote commonly known by its brand name narcan fentanyl is an opiate and what it does is it shuts down your respiratory system so pretend like this this here this is the fentanyl coming in your system right so when you shoot some up a narcan it's like a wall goes up and so the fentanyl hits the wall it can't keep on

going the more narcan you put to the system the bigger that wall gets so what you're saying is is it's actually quite easy to reverse an overdose yes it is so then if it's that easy to reverse an overdose why do we have so many people dying of overdose because people are using by himself people are really ashamed about their drug use they're labeled as a criminal or a junkie or a crackhead so they use by themselves in dark places you know like where people can't see or can't find them until it's too late do

you find someone overdosing how long have you got you got three minutes and that depends i mean usually it starts off that your lips are blue and then you you you only got so much time to react if you find that their face is purple it means you're saying a dust door and if you find their face is black you have like a slim chance of breaking bad so when you do find someone that's od'd and you're able to turn that around save their life how does that feel extremely stressful and traumatic um you know

you remind yourself this is why you do this job so for myself personally in the last two years i respond to 31 drug overdoses one friday we had 103 overdoses and then a week later we had 12 people die in the city of vancouver on one day and one day [Music] corey how does it feel to work in a place like this where you're saving lives every day sure you can um it means it means a lot um because i lost my son's father loving my life to a heroin overdose it's good i like it

it feels good to uh save a life instead of being just part of the problem so it's kind of being part of the solution you know when it comes to addiction don't be a surprise right it's a monster and um you don't know they people don't even know who they are anymore how's it affected you personally we won't go there it's affected me tremendously right changed your life what do you do i think the tube and four pieces of tin foil please yes of course the city of vancouver has invested millions trying to combat the

crisis and while health responses like this have made some inroads fentanyl has at times been an impossible challenge for lawmakers it's become so bad the average life expectancy is officially reducing and a public health emergency has been declared it's caused a deep mistrust from those in the community here towards those in power try to keep the character the camera on this side of the street not too much on that side and then tell somebody he tells us to [ __ ] off we'll walk up british columbia has four times the landmass of the uk and

yet seven percent of all its 9-1-1 calls came from these two blocks there's another one over there spike there's three police cars up there they are horrendous they you know if people are out here they're at the lowest they could possibly be and the police want to [ __ ] grind them a little further into the ground like does it make sense not to me if i'm bleeding to death i didn't want their help the public's bleed out i don't want their help they're not my friends and you know what i'm sure i've played a

part in every single interaction i i'm not yeah i have a colorful vocabulary and i'm i've been known to have a bit of an attitude however they're professionals right i'm not a professional i'm i'm not i'm i'm not a professional there there's always cops somewhere there's three cars right there and to be totally honest i think a lot of it is just like pr to show that they're out there you know cause they they don't give a [ __ ] about us the cops are literally watching them shoot up and they do not arrest them

they've got a bunch of drugs on them they do not because they want to contain it yeah and keep it away from the city keep it away from from where people are spending money and if the cops had rolled up when you were selling me that fentanyl do you think they'd have arrested us no they tell you to [ __ ] off say grab me put me against the wall search me take my [ __ ] and tell me to [ __ ] off they say go explain that to your boss in spite of the

ill feeling towards them the police say their approach is based on pragmatism and it's certainly true that there's open public drug use in full view of them you guys live on the streets out here yeah we've been in downtown east side for over a year is that hard sleeping rough out when it gets to winter here it's last night was very very very rough yeah no we got there was rain and uh the blankets were wet we had to move um we had weird uh we had weird people like watching us and and we're just

watching it yeah yeah no there was weird people like that came up and just like were standing at the end of uh like the foot of like our bed and he was just staring at us yeah yeah it's kind of creepy it is crazy it is it's very creepy this stuff happens here every single day i don't know what that means how did you guys meet you met at the library and he i ran after her he chose me yeah why did you run after her love at first sight yeah we were we were we

were we were in we were in the library and we were catching eyes and then i left and then and then she left and i saw her walking down the street and he wrapped i said i cannot let her leave so i ran after her and i freaked hey he's like hey whoa but you have to admit though five minutes later we were making out right around the corner right is this person okay over here well no this this is this is this is normal this is this is this is totally normal it's what we

call it's what we call the uh the nod or or the uh the hastings shuffle we we've been there we've we've we've smoked heroin i overdosed recently and i had i had somebody nark on me twice okay saved your life yeah i almost died lips were blue my lips were blue i was dead just you you shouldn't do this stop doing drugs altogether that's why liquor and weed is all the person who gave it to us said it was heroin and it wasn't what do you think it was fentanyl it was definitely we didn't even

have that much no we should like a dragon yeah like we were saying and i i was just dragging as in one you just inhaled one taking it off of smoking it off of a foil we each did like one like hoot yeah and i and i basically almost died from one inhalation yeah i was freaked out because they said like he was odin what would you have done if i died that would have crushed me how does it make you feel looking back on that day stephen thinking you nearly did never do it again

never again i love you homelessness in vancouver is at its highest since records began and as hardship rises so does addiction across the water on a disused construction site 300 homeless people are forming a temporary community the conditions here are brutal but they feel they have nowhere else to go people are very vulnerable out here families with jobs and kids cannot find housing they're sleeping in tents it's a total human rights violation is what it is you know i've seen refugee camps in other countries this is exactly what it looks like we are canadian refugees

this is a canadian refugee camp [Music] mind if we have a look at your tent and see where you're staying okay it's way down here i'm embarrassed because it's usually cleaner about than this this is my buddy and here this is bruce he's been with me ever since since i've been here yeah and i got eagle feathers out there they're saving me and keeping me safe yeah like i said it's a bit of a mess here but i golf so oh you play coke i'm not any tiger woods or anything okay but i think it

smashed the side of your tongue oh that's all good i got grandchildren i haven't seen them for a while so i have toys out here just to remind me of them my grandsons and um and you've actually got narcan here all around the flower pots oh yeah yeah i've got them hanging all over right [Music] because it happens all the time it's it's an epidemic uh naloxone that's the overdose kit i've had to narcan somebody ten times and one was a husband and wife actually we're taking care of her and he started overdosing and they

were laying kind of head-to-head and they were reaching for each other as they were overdosing like they knew for many here drugs are the only source of comfort overdoses are a regular occurrence but from the roadside at the perimeter of the camp a small group of activists are helping to reduce the death toll in here we have most of our supplies so we've got our generator chairs a table we've got narcan we've got information pamphlets we've got bottled water that we like to hand out to people everything you need to keep people alive today yeah

yeah in a few hours campers will come to this pop-up tent to smoke and inject drugs including fentanyl under the watchful eyes of the volunteers safe in the knowledge that if they do od someone will intervene that one's this corner's broken i think yeah that's all right you know technical difficulties sometimes rather than giving clean equipment for users to take away the volunteers here invite them into the tent to use their drugs under supervision but what is the legal status of the tent it's illegal uh when the police do come by and they might come

by today we kind of just remind them we're in the midst of an overdose crisis it's been declared a health emergency by the province of bc and uh you know we're not here with the intention of breaking the law right we're here with the intention of you know providing people with a safe supervised space to use drugs and uh respond to overdoses should they happen it's an odd situation although fentanyl is illegal and the tent is unsanctioned the medical supplies are directly provided by the health department in times of crisis sometimes laws become secondary in

the case of overdose if fentanyl is the assassin many believe societal attitudes to the homeless are a key accomplice isolation is a big problem shame and stigma drive many battling addiction to use alone there's a lot of hate you know people think about junkies thieves crackheads sure there's that a lot of thieving and stuff going on but there's real people here you know we get people driving by throwing bricks throwing bottles very hurtful a lot of people take it too hard i try not to but still do you know it does hurt for sure i

worked many many years i pay my way and um i collect bottles every day i average 10 to 15 a day if you make 15 today let's say how would you spend it uh 10 of it would probably go to drugs fentanyl yeah sad but true yeah and why do you do it what does fentanyl feel like when you take it just a big hug it's yeah just a warm place and nothing can hurt ya [Music] homelessness and addiction has caused real damage here but community life is vibrant and humanity abundant and in an area

of so much intoxication a sobering thought emerges how many of these people would not be here if it weren't for naloxone [Music] as night falls the injecting tent opens for business and the first of the campers arrive the governments here in canada support the use of spaces where people can use drugs under supervision and many that begin life as a legal pop-ups like this one go on to be sanctioned across the world there are more than 100 such centers over 30 of those are in canada and there's never been an overdose death in any of

them rise and shine this is breakfast with the lovely holly sea and the very charming jamie bell with until nine from officially the world's best city to live that's right folks number one and that's a fish shop hashtag amazing so my gorgeous vancouverites it's another gorgeous crispy morning and it's friday and this morning's show is going to be yay the phone lines are open and today we're asking what can be done about this pesky opioid crisis plus it's time for you guys to go head to head on another round of fish or sausage but first

from the news desk he's the nav with well you take your dough whatever you got right and put it in your little cook pot and put a little bit of water in it and take your syringe and it's like filter yeah some people use a filter some don't all right nothing's gonna fit and through the syringe that isn't already gonna get in there anyways so you're going for a vein yeah how does it feel uh uh great that's why i do it you know drugs are uh really what you make of it man like there's

functioning addicts out there and there's non-functioning addicts you know there's people that uh like do drugs until it runs them into the ground and then they die and that's it you know there's another statistic where are you heading to now ronnie heading down to the mall i'm uh oh i'm gonna go uh shoplift so i can get some money and uh support my habit because that's what you gotta do these days man i [ __ ] feel like [ __ ] already because there's a 4.25 shot i just did and uh is it already worn

off it's only a couple of minutes ago yeah yeah you know if i don't go to [ __ ] jail like trying to do it then maybe i'll get paid and get some more dope but it's not fun man i hate it i think i can't stand it dude i've spent like 10 years of my life behind bars like for what a [ __ ] drug addiction something that [ __ ] kills me like i know what i'm doing and i know that it's bad for me but like you know we've all got our problems

and i'm just trying to cope man what's fentanyl done to your life my life has been absolutely dragged through the mud i've lost friends i've lost family members and i have nothing i live on the [ __ ] street i freeze almost every night and i steal to eat and support myself i hate my life i [ __ ] hate it i wake up in the morning wishing i didn't that's opioid drug use energy stroke used forgot feel terrible i wouldn't wish this on first i wouldn't wish living like this for the person i hate

most in the world it's not living man it's dying like you're running yourself into the ground every day and willingly doing it why because you're too scared to be dope sick or get off the drugs no it's because it's uh when you've done something for so long that's all you know man all i know is jail and crime and [ __ ] drugs that's all i know i'm lost sucks not a five-year-old son man doesn't know who the [ __ ] his dad is some people say that people that use drugs have a choice you're

not choosing this are you you don't have to i'm not choosing this man i made well i had one choice and i made the wrong [ __ ] one and this is what i deal with now do you have hope for the future sometimes i don't know how far my future's gonna go man i could be dead 20 minutes from now who knows thanks [Music] the chaos that you see are on the streets is only partially due to the drugs people are taking it's more to do with what they have to do to get money

to keep the economy going and whether it's sex work or stealing from cars we could fix that wow the current crisis is because people are using poison drugs and i'm at the point now where we really need to think seriously about giving people a safer supply of opiates [Music] i'm right in the heart of one of downtown eastside's worst affected streets one small medical center is looking to do exactly that so we're going to go to crosstown clinic um what happens at crosstalk so um we provide injectable hydromorphone and injectable diacetyl morphine uh to clients

with severe opiate use disorder and what is diacetyl is um pharmaceutical made heroin really let's go inside come on in that's right it's a medical center that gives heroin to people in addiction that door needs to close there we go so come on in so the clients are here for the nurses do a pre-assessment for them sorry ladies they enter into this room they come up to this window here and they'll give their name their birth date and the nurse will provide them or hand them their syringe right can you just pass me a syringe

thank you so you can see here that we get this is the dose so it'll tell us the client name and then the drug that they're on what are you getting there dave uh heroin i see the morphine and how often do you get that three times a day and this is my lunchtime fix it's another drug transaction in downtown eastside but rather than toxic dope sold in a back alley and injected behind a dumpster it's a regulated pharmaceutical given in a medical setting and supervised by people who care i'm introducing heroin into my body

now it is now in our chihuahua it makes me itchy all over like a serious itchy i gotta turn red and you know i get really itchy but my uh um my desire for heroin is met because wow that was good prescribing people heroin as a treatment for addiction it's a challenging concept but the evidence is persuasive switzerland opened a similar center in 1994 and since they've seen huge reductions in overdose deaths hiv rates and drug-related crime the theory goes that when you take people out of a life of street drugs they have the chance

to introduce routine and make incremental life changes when people start with us they're using illicit drugs every day and by six months in care with us that goes down to a handful of days a month that people reconnect with families they go back to school they start working they start working part-time they start volunteering they get housing but more importantly my most recidivist patient had been in and out of jail over 200 times before he came to treatment here and since he's been in treatment here he's not been back to jail that's a huge success

how many banks have you robbed oh i'm in banks i rob lots over 60 banks i served a prison term of 22 years two months and two days it costs 27 000 a year to supply heroin for one patient here and it's funded by the government it's not cheap but independent research suggests the service saves the taxpayer double that by reducing ambulance call-outs and in the midst of a fentanyl crisis there's a further saving one that's harder to quantify the cost of human life we haven't lost any of our clients to a fentanyl overdose because

coming here prevents all of that are you still robbing banks no no i am very grateful to say that i'm a retired bank robber i no longer need to do that our time in vancouver was up and the little neighborhood of downtown east side disappeared in the rearview mirror [Music] the opioid crisis here in north america is out of control claiming a life every seven minutes and seeing it up close and personal has been heartbreaking heading for home means escaping it but for how long [Music] i heard myself we always look at the action you

know we're so focused on the substance that we've actually forgotten the value of human life and that's just tragic but yeah at the same time these people are beautiful i got hopes though and so it's powerful i don't remember the rest sorry guys if you could go back to the day where you first put that needle in your arm would you do it again [Music] absolutely [Music] the day that i put the first needle in my arm wow but it took every day of yesterday to bring the man that you see here today and and

the man that you see i'm i'm a good man and i'm happy with who i am i still love this woman [Music] huh people don't realize they're just a paycheck away [Music] if i make 300 bucks tonight 50 bucks of it i put away i put away i put away i put away i've been doing that now for four years another year of this i'll head over here with 150 grand [Music] not look back you got to stand strong how to keep your chin up and you got to keep going because if you don't you

end up a statistic i'm marking a book man like you're just another one of those [ __ ] people that died [Music]