It is not news that treatment of the addicted and mentally ill in the Downtown Eastside is expensive.

In a series of stories in 2014, Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I calculated that the 260 (!) social service agencies and social housing sites located within the borders of the DTES received and spent $360 million in 2013, or just under $1 million a day. Almost $265 million of that came from the three levels of government.

But for the first time — and this is new — a Simon Fraser University research team calculated, down to the tax dollar, the average costs incurred by individual offenders in the DTES.

The figures are demoralizing.

The research team, headed up by health science researcher Dr. Julian Somers, tracked just over 300 high-frequency offenders in the DTES during a five-year period. There were two subsets of these offenders: those sentenced to community supervision and those who had been put into custody. Across both groups, 99 per cent had been diagnosed with at least one mental disorder, while more than 80 per cent were dual-diagnosis patients dealing with substance abuse issues and at least one other mental disorder.

Those under community supervision incurred an average cost of $168,389 in health, social welfare and justice services over the five years, while those in the custody group incurred an average cost of $246,899.

All told, the cost of services provided to the two subset groups totalled $26.5 million. That’s just for 300 people. And just in cost to the provincial government.

Yet those numbers, Somers said, still did not reflect the entirety of the true cost of those individuals to the public. That true cost, which would be much, much greater than those figures cited above, did not include other justice costs such as police, crown counsel, defence or court services, nor did they include health services provided while in custody. Ambulance and hospital admittance services and subsidized shelter costs were also excluded.

All told, he said, the costs of public services accessed by these two groups “exceeded the average per capita income in Vancouver.”

They would be “true million-dollar Murrays,” Somers said. (It was a reference to an article by Malcolm Gladwell about Murray Barr, a Nevada homeless man who, it was estimated, cost the state more than a million dollars in policing and hospital costs.)

To what effect were all these tax dollars spent?

“The essential finding” of the study, Somers wrote in an email to me, was that despite the enormous investment of public monies, there was “no evidence of improvement.”

Instead, the study described and corroborated in hard fact the anecdotal police reports that for years have described the revolving door of the Downtown Eastside experience.

Take hospital care, for example. Of those studied in the high-frequency community supervision group, the largest single cost contributor over the five-year period was $51,500 in hospital stays. Physician payments amounted to $14,477 and publicly funded medication costs totalled $15,950. Social assistance payments averaged $46,962 per person, with payments made in 53 out of 60 months. That’s a life of never-ending dependency.

For those in the high-frequency custody group, the revolving door led to jail.

Corrections-related costs amounted to $123,466 — or just under half of the total average costs per person. And individuals in the group spent an average of 591 days in custody during the five-year observation period.

That’s a third of one’s life spent behind bars. Despite all that time in jail, those in the high-frequency custody group still managed to incur $85,344 in health costs and $38,088 in social assistance within the five-year span.

With an understatement that would be hilarious if it weren’t tragic, the study came to this conclusion:

“Our results demonstrate that involvement with relatively high volumes of public services was not sufficient to prevent recurrent correctional involvement among a subset of offenders.”

For that core of offenders, the social service system failed spectacularly. And part of the problem, Somers believes, resides with those 260 social service agencies that have proliferated in the DTES. It is a “patchwork,” he said, without oversight or a single guiding hand to coordinate services for the most needy.

Nor will it necessarily get better. Numbers have appeared to increase in recent decades here and internationally, Somers said, and given the economy and the state of the world, there’s no guarantee that even a wholesale redevelopment of the DTES would make things better. It is not a situation unique to the DTES.

But Somers is hopeful.

“I do believe that B.C. is moving in the right direction judging by investments in new service models, many of which have been subject to research and are demonstrably effective. Other investments, like the Riverview redevelopment, are in progress. But there is clearly much more to do.”

Truly, there is. But will that day ever come, a fatigued public must wonder, when there will not be?

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com