St. Paul's OD Prevention Site Is 1st In Vancouver Outside Downtown Eastside

Kevin King guides a man through the fentanyl testing process in a blue tent in the alley behind St. Paul's Hospital.

After a brief wait, King, a self-described rocker with dyed blond hair and multiple chains dangling near his belt, shows the man a single line on the test strip, revealing that the tiny sample of drugs tested contains fentanyl.

The man says he's been using the same drugs for months and hasn't overdosed, but leaves the facility discouraged, without injecting.

bit.ly/2GFHz26 via @CBCNews

Pregnant Woman Loses Unborn Baby In Targeted Double Shooting In Vancouver

A 31-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man are in hospital after they were seriously injured early Friday in a targeted double shooting in Vancouver.

The woman, who was pregnant and in her third trimester, is in critical condition. The man suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

The woman’s unborn child did not survive.

Vancouver police say shortly before 6 a.m., an unidentified person went to the home of a 31-year-old Vancouver woman on Industrial Avenue near Scotia Street and shot her.

The victim called 911 and the suspect left. Officers attended and found a 23-year-old Langley man had also been shot in the same apartment.

bit.ly/2SDSAm4 via @theprovince

Terry Lake Comprehensive National Climate Action Plan Will Take Time

Climate action, much like the challenge it seeks to address, is a rate of change problem. Closed systems do not like rapid change as it throws off equilibrium and all sorts of consequences occur, many of which are entirely predictable.

bit.ly/2Va10DG via @VancouverSun

MP Kennedy Stewart Enters Guilty Plea To Charge Of Criminal Contempt For Kinder Morgan Protest

Kennedy Stewart, who announced last week he will be running for mayor of Vancouver, pleaded guilty on Monday to one count of criminal contempt of court arising from his involvement in protests against Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline project.

Under an agreement reached with special prosecutor Michael Klein, the Burnaby South NDP MP was fined $500 for violating a B.C. Supreme Court injunction at the company’s Burnaby work site on March 23.

bit.ly/2Vc0uoK via @VancouverSun

The Fall Of The Poverty Entrepreneurs

With its multitudes of addicts, prostitutes, drifters and homeless people, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is Canada's epicentre of human dysfunction – a magnet for the down-and-out. It is also the epicentre of the poverty industry, which seems to flourish no matter what else changes. There are social agencies on every block – more than a hundred of them, which compete and overlap to offer every imaginable kind of service. The giant of them all is the Portland Hotel Society, which receives $27-million a year in public funding. It manages housing for a thousand people at a dozen sites, as well as numerous other services. It is also largely responsible for Insite, the controversial supervised-injection site that has attracted world attention for its progressive approach to drug addiction.

tgam.ca/2SboPfx via @globeandmail

Vancouver's Rate Of Drug-Overdose Deaths Now Ranks Among Highest In North America

A new B.C. Coroners Service report makes clear the province’s unprecedented epidemic of drug-overdose deaths continues with no end in sight.

The number of fatal overdoses across B.C. last March was 161, according to the coroner’s latest monthly update.

That’s only one body less than the record high of 162 fatal overdoses that was set in December 2016.

Monthly numbers are often revised several times as additional autopsies are completed and new lab data comes back, and so it’s possible the March 2018 number will grow to make that month the very worst on record.

bit.ly/2Afw2RH via @georgiastraight