The Best Place
The Best Place
Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver
In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.
Wow! A gripping ethnography of the everyday ecstatic emergency and boredom of methamphetamine, fentanyl and failed relationships that cuts short the lives of Canadian youth—often indigenous—desperately seeking community, meaning and survival. Documents the dysfunctional meshes of care/jail/gentrification/predatory narcotics markets and human betrayals that betrays their persistent universally recognizable dreams/hopes against all odds for a better futures that never arrives.
The Best Place offers an analysis of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, British Columbia, a locale where young people's illicit drug use has received international attention. Fast has worked in this area for many, many years, developing long-term relationships with young drug users and health professionals. This is a collaboration that offers a model of multi-level analyses and showcases the hope of Fast's interlocutors for the future. Fast draws on their visions of possible futures, and on their critiques of current approaches, articulated with those of healthcare professionals. This is a book many have been waiting for.'
Foreword by Lenore Manderson
Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
Places
Introduction
PART I: DREAMS OF PLACE
Lee, the Best Place on Earth, 2009
Jeff, Paradise, 2009
Big-City Dreams
Lula and Jeff, Paradise, 2012
Senses of Place
Lee, World City, 2009
Where I’m Going, Lee, 2011
Jordan, Normal Places, 2012
Danya and Nancy, the Field, 2010
Lee, Not These Service Places, 2009
Jordan, Normal People, 2008
Frictions
Danya, around Downtown, 2008
Janet and the Lost Boys, Never Never Land, 2008
Trajectories
Carly and Connor, Family, 2009
Geographies
Patty and Joe, Home, 2012
Part II: SOMETHING
Patty, Coast Salish Territories, 2009
Vital Experimentation
Shae, Lula, and Jeff, Lighthouse Shelter, 2009
Momentum
Laurie and Aaron, Trafalgar Hotel, 2010
Moral Worlds
Terry, Jail, 2011
Carly and Connor, Apartment, 2013
Stagnation
Janet, Trafalgar Hotel, 2010
Patty and Joe, Mackenzie Hotel, 2010
Endless Business
Terry, Field Office, 2012
Lee, Mackenzie Hotel, 2012
Reentering Never Never Land
Jordan, Beachwood Hotel, 2013 74
Shae, Mackenzie Hotel, 2009
Disappearances
Lee, Gone, 2015
PART III: LOST
Patty, City of Glass, 2011
Community Care
Patty and Joe, Lakeshore Hotel, 2010
Losing Everything
Patty and Joe, St. Mary’s, 2012
Boredom
Aaron, Northwest Apartments, 2013
(No)Exit, Shae, 2013
Flashbacks and Futures
Patty, Terminal City, 2013
The Dance of Death
Patty and Joe, St. Mary’s, 2013
Where We’ve Ended Up, Patty and Joe, 2013
Waiting
Terry, St. Mary’s, 2014
Flights
Patty and Joe, Lakeshore Hotel, 2014
PART IV: NOWHERE
Patty, Saltwater City, 2017
The Will to Intervene
Shane, Passages, 2017
Living on the Edge of Change
Jessica, Horizons, 2018
Filling the Hours
Shane, Downtown, 2017
Stalls and Dead Ends
Lula, Wenonah House, 2016
Everything We Need, Carly and Connor, 2013
A Churn of Intervention
Raymond, Downtown, 2017
The Colonial Present
Aaron, Field Office, 2017
Living with Death
Lula and Jeff, Field Office, 2017
The Broken Promise Land
Janet, Johnny, Rachel, and Gordo, Camp under the Tracks, 2017
Exits, Janet, 2015
PART V: EVERYWHERE
Jordan, Rain City, 2016
Laura, Field Office, 2017
Shae/Trix, Apartment, 2017
Janet, Recovery House, 2018
Exits, Janet, 2018
Terry, Psychiatric Ward, 2018
The Way Home, Terry, 2011
Laurie, Downtown, 2018
Aaron, Beachwood Hotel, 2019
Lula and Jeff, Greystone Hotel, 2019
Dom, BC Children’s Hospital, 2020
Carly and Connor, Field Office, 2018
Joe, Field Office, 2018
Patty, Everywhere, 2018
Where We’ve Ended Up, Patty and Joe, 2013
Afterword
Notes
References
Index
Everyday Desistance
The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth
By Laura S. Abrams and Diane Terry; Foreword by Michelle Inderbitzin
Global Health for All
Knowledge, Politics, and Practices
Edited by Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Andrew McDowell, Claudia Lang, and Claire Beaudevin
Global Health for All
Knowledge, Politics, and Practices
Edited by Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Andrew McDowell, Claudia Lang, and Claire Beaudevin
