NIMBY's

We are only four hours north of Victoria, what McLean's magazine sited as Canada's most dangerous city. It is no wonder that homelessness, poverty, mental illness, drug addiction and prostitution is alive and well in Campbell River.
Some of it is hidden in the confines of cheap apartments, homeless shelters, transition houses, the forest, the caves along the waterfront, in campers, vehicles, under tarps, and in drug houses. Some of it is fairly prevalent now, and it is impacting our businesses, homes, our incomes, and the feelings of safety and security.

While we may choose to deliver our "get out of town" message straight to the drug dealers and prostitutes via posses with video cameras, you won't solve the problem by putting people in jail or forcibly moving them out of your area.

I think establishing the drug and prostitution trades as poverty and public health issues rather than as a crime issue might go a long way towards really solving this problem for everyone concerned. People have to be let out of jail sometime, if they go at all, and since it is the government that has made choices to put them where they are, it is the government that has to make a choice to deal with this issue so it goes away for good. This starts with an aggressive action plan to house and support the mentally ill, addicted, and homeless. Remove the barriers between society and those in need.

If the local government does not have the authority or money to do it, then it is their responsibility to aggressively advocate for our City. They must put pressure on the provincial and federal governments who do have the authority and money to do it. And they do have the money. We must not wait until it is in all of our backyards. Be preemptive and just assume it will be. They have to go somewhere.

It is a fact that homelessness and drug addiction are closely related to mental illness.

Each homeless person costs BC taxpayers $55,000.00 a year, a new study has found. That is an annual cost of $644.3 million in health, corrections and social services spending for all homeless people in the province.

What if that money was spent on social housing, mental health and addictions supports?

If housing and support were offered to these people, it would cost $37,000 a year, not $55,000. In the money saved from courts, jails, hospitals, and shelters, tax payers actually end up significantly ahead. If support was available, many of the homeless and addicts and prostitutes would change their situation all round. We would all benefit.

These results do not contradict what other similar studies have said.

We all disagree endlessly about why the poor are poor and what, if anything, the rest of us should do about it. Many blame poor people themselves, stressing mistakes or bad character, while others point to what they consider an unjust society. And a lot of us can go either way, case by case.

In almost every case, within just a few minutes of conversation, you can identify the mistakes that led to a poor person's troubles: child poverty, child abuse, drug or alcohol addiction, teen pregnancy, criminal trouble, failure in school, lack of access to higher education, undiagnosed or untreated learning disabilities, untreated mental illness, or bad luck.

I've also noticed that the people who pay the biggest price for such mistakes, who wind up as poor adults, are the ones who lacked a cushion to recover from their poor choices - that is, those who grew up poor, those who got lost in the education or health care system, and those who lack a family supports.

It is embarrassing, given our overall level of affluence that people in our community have to prostitute themselves, not as a chosen career, but because they have no other way to make money, for themselves, for their families, or for their pimps. Life as a street prostitute is a grisly existence. There is an extremely high prevalence of lifetime violence and post-traumatic stress disorder. Ninety percent have been assaulted and/or raped, homeless with housing as one of their most urgent needs. Eighty two percent need treatment for drug or alcohol addictions. Ninety two percent of the prostitutes surveyed wanted out of the sex industry but lacked the financial means to support themselves.

It is time to respect each other, no matter who we are or where we come from. We need to help people if they cannot help themselves. Desperation and indignities have not been lost on those we look down on. "Hookers, druggies and crazies" are people's mothers daughters sisters, fathers, sons, and brothers, and yes, it is up to us to keep them. They have souls and emotions. They are humiliated, hurt, embarrassed and scared every day. They are all trying to survive , to get by to live another day.

I agree that those who are drunk or high in public and causing a disturbance should be arrested, as should others who display threatening, intimidating and criminal behavior.But what can we expect when we are putting people on the street with serious problems. There are people in our community whose mental illnesses have either been unrecognized, ignored, under treated, languished on waiting lists, or treated and released into the world to get along by themselves. There are people who just do not have enough money, either through welfare, minimum wages or no hope of getting either, to eat, to have shelter, to live. There are people who are just so humiliated, traumatized, hurting, that they take the first drink, toke, snort, or i.v. injection just to not have to think about their pathetic, painful lives, and it is all downhill from there.

The studies, the close connections between all the issues we are complaining about, and our humanity, gives us the just cause to make our community safe and sound for everyone.