From The Outside Looking In: Slate Joins Media Covering DTES

We’re starting a new set of posts in the run-up to the Games called From The Outside Looking In. In this series we will be posting excerpts of and links to articles from those major news media outlets that take the time to look beyond the steel, glass, mountains and water of our great Potemkin village to report on the horrors of the Downtown East Side (albeit through the prism of outsiders). Read them with as many grains of salt as you like, but they should be read nonetheless. Today, Matthew Power over at Slate does his profession proud in a story called “The Vancouver Experiment”:

At the corner of East Hastings and Carrall Streets in Vancouver, Canada, a raucous crowd milled around the sidewalk. Goods were on offer from a dozen sellers: hand tools, electronics, clothing, toiletries, all of uncertain provenance. There was a frenzy to make deals. A man opened a backpack filled with new tubes of toothpaste, smiling with stumps of teeth. Another sold cartons of orange juice out of a baby carriage. A shiny new mountain bike was on sale for $20. Below it all, a hushed chorus: “Powder. Powder.” “Rock. Got rock.” “Down. Need down?” This last is the local term for heroin, and there were capped syringes, tourniquets, and empty ampoules of sterile water scattered on the ground. In a shuttered doorway, a pale blonde girl in a dirty pink miniskirt, her thumb bruised black from constantly flicking her lighter, drew sunken-cheeked at a crack stem and looked up for a moment to ask, “You hooking?” A police car rolled slowly by but didn’t stop.

Read the feature in its entirety and click through the companion slideshow.