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Breaking news! There is actually a place called hell. No, it’s not where you think it is. On a recent trip to Norway I learned that “Hell” is a sleepy rural village. Actually the word means luck, from the overhanging cliff caves in the area known as hellir in old Norse.

Gosh, all this time I thought hell was located in the Downtown Eastside. In reality, it is.

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Hell is found in those DTES alleyways where any hour of the day you can find some poor soul doing the funky chicken, “tweaking” from an overdose on crack cocaine. These days the drug of choice is the opioid fentanyl, which leads to a lot less dancing and lot more dying. The body count is edging towards a thousand a year. But fentanyl is just the latest drug of choice. Coming next is carfentanyl, 10,000 times more potent than morphine, marketed under the trade name Wildnil as a general anaesthetic agent for large animals like elephants.

Full disclosure: Between 1992 and 1997 I was editor of a “street newspaper” called Spare Change, sold on the streets by homeless people across Canada. I wrote or edited over a thousand articles about “solutions to poverty,” including drug addiction. I guess you could say I know a lot more about the DTES than most reporters. Back then the drug of choice was crack cocaine, which arrived in Vancouver in 1995, and then crystal methamphetamine. In 1997, the local health authorities declared a public health emergency. Rates of HIV infection, spread by needle-sharing drug users, were worse than anywhere in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa.