Young people at the centre of the toxic drug poisoning crisis

Vancouver may be considered by many as the “best place” to live, but many young people living in the city are facing unprecedented challenges that are making their futures more precarious than ever. Hundreds of youth who call Vancouver home are standing at the intersection of a housing affordability crisis and a toxic drug poisoning public health emergency. For the past 15 years, Dr. Danya Fast, a research scientist at BC Centre on Substance Use and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Medicine, has been following the lives of young people who use drugs in Vancouver. Those experiences are captured in her new book, “The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver”. As she traces the lives and deaths of one group of young people, we witness these young individuals attempting to navigate various services and systems as a public health overdose emergency sweeps BC. Fast centres the perspectives of these youth, who are often pushed to the margins of Vancouver, as they strive to find their footing. We spoke with Dr. Fast about her experience writing this book, the insights she gained, and new ways to think about how we support young people who use substances. Your book spans 15 years of fieldwork and interviews with youth who are making their lives in Vancouver, while navigating substance use, addiction, and unstable housing and homelessness. Is there anything you would want to say to your younger self when you first started this work? I had no idea that the timeline would end up spanning 15 years.  This book became a very different book from the one I originally set out to write. The young people who I had formed such close relationships with started to die as we entered the overdose public health emergency in 2016. I realized around that time that this book wasn’t only going to be about living in Vancouver as a young person who uses drugs, but also about dying young. At the time that I started the research that informs this book, none of us could have imagined the sort of loss that would become a part of my research. As I was doing a lot of the writing from 2019 to 2021, I had to change so many endings as people were passing away. I probably would tell myself to cherish the moments I had with these young people even more fiercely. In the beginning of the crisis, when less people had died, I often didn't realize that each conversation could be – and in many cases was – the last time I would see this person. What did you set out to achieve with your book? The book is really for the young people who are featured in it, and the people who love and care for them. But I also want readers to feel like they got to know a group of young people in a particular time and a particular place. Because so many of them are no longer with us, it’s a way of remembering them. I hope that book not only […]