As a senior manager of Dublin’s Ana Liffey Drug Project, Dawn Russell wasn’t shocked by what she saw during her daily shifts on a recent working visit to Vancouver’s Insite injecting centre.
The scale of the city’s drug problem was something she hadn’t witnessed before, however.
An opioid epidemic has claimed thousands of lives in Canada. In Vancouver, the crisis is concentrated in the Downtown Eastside area.
On her way to work at the injecting centre, she said:
"I was walking through a very big community which was just ravaged by drug problems – it felt kind of like being in The Wire a little bit, in that most houses and most people looked like they had been just obliterated by drug use."
Source: Daragh Brophy, The Journal.ie, 12/11/17