By Joe Mancini
Published December 2022
The homelessness crisis can be seen in any Canadian city. Every municipal council is struggling to open or expand shelter beds. Tent encampments show up in public parks, a concept that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. In Kitchener, since the spring, there have been large encampments of 50 people or more at Victoria/Weber and Victoria Park.
In large cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Tampa Bay, Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, the homeless population exceeds 10,000 people.
Why Are New Housing Options Not Emerging?
The question often asked is, what is behind the homelessness camps that are affecting every city in North America? There is no question that in Waterloo Region, the high cost of rent and the lack of affordable rental housing is a root cause. But this part of the story needs to be unraveled further. The market for housing is almost always under pressure but for the most part alternative housing options evolve. For example, in the 1960’s old houses were turned into rooming houses to accommodate the baby boomers searching for cheap housing when they left home to go to university or take their first jobs. For 20 years now, the potential for new low-to-the-ground housing has not emerged. Rather, rooming houses have shut down in the face of enforced regulations, building code restrictions and higher tenant controls. While single family houses are often only half utilized, there is little demand and minimal scope within the building code and zoning to allow new creative housing options. While this is a very important aspect of the story there is more to it.
Underneath the rising impact of homelessness is a growing dependence on synthetic drugs. While these drugs have found their way into significant niches of the wider population, they are especially impactful on people who are homeless. Heavy use of these drugs over time reduces the ability to find or seek out housing opportunities. Drug use and apartment living do not mix well, particularly as we begin to understand the full story of the effects of Meth and Fentanyl.
Homelessness, drug use and lack of housing options are interrelated societal issues. Understanding how society effects drug use and how drug use is a reflection on society, demonstrates how interrelated these issues are.
Understanding the Roots of Addiction
Drug use grows out of disconnections from family, work and community. When as a society, individuals start to choose less for the common good, by sharing less and focusing more on individual/personal needs, then society loses its core strength of cohesiveness. When work and family are not anchors that hold people in community then the culture starts to fray. When a win-at-all-cost mentality seeps into business and social culture, then the outsiders feel rejected and abandoned. When a significant portion of the population no longer participates in work or the opportunity to make their community better through real opportunities, then this disconnection opens the door to negative perceptions, drained hope and minimized opportunity.
This negative interpretation of society directly takes into account the question of why a significant proportion of the homeless population have turned to powerful synthetic drugs as a substitute for meaningful relationships. The drugs flood the neuropathways with pleasurable dopamine. The drug seeker continually seeks these drugs to stroke an uptick in dopamine while unconsciously the conditions for depression are setting in, the result of the drugs overwhelming and disrupting brain chemistry. Individuals caught in this cycle are increasingly less fit to live in regular, unsupported housing. The drugs are so addictive, that their body hurts and aches if they are not able to feed their habit daily.
We have watched this drug epidemic take hold in Waterloo Region over the last 20 years. At first it was small and barely noticeable. 10 years ago it was starting to be significant. 5 years later, St. John’s Kitchen dramatically changed as the drugs started to overwhelm the street culture.
Sam Quinones’ Investigative Journalism
We have found in Sam Quinones a fully engaged journalist who has sought out and investigated this story of how drugs are undermining civic cultures throughout North America. His two books Dreamland, The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, published in 2015, and The Least of Us, True Tales of America in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, published in 2021, documents North America’s debilitating drug problem and how homelessness is just one of the symptoms.
Quinones’ books document how these drugs have overpowered communities. In summary, cartels have learned to produce Fentanyl which is a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They are able to lace microscopic amounts of Fentanyl into other drug products while also creating efficient and economic distribution networks. A further innovation was learning how to make Methamphetamine more potent and cheaper. Often Fentanyl and Meth are mixed together. This combination has resulted in 1000’s of deaths and many more dependent people.
In the 1960’s, recreational drug use was limited to a small minority of people who were heroin and cocaine users. These substances were difficult to obtain, thrived in isolated communities and resulted in harsh prison sentences when people were convicted of possession and trafficking. Slowly other drugs and drug derivatives started to gain a wider foothold in society. In the 1990’s a crack cocaine epidemic in American inner cities led to increased violent crime. By the late 1990’s there were already crack houses in Kitchener. But still drug use was limited and so were the drugs which were derived from plants which caused constant supply constraints.
Industrial Production of Synthetic Drugs
For most products, industrial production and efficient distribution is a laudable goal for business organizations. The ability of industrial society to produce potent and addictive products is often praised for creativity and effort. The dark side is when these productive powers are unleashed to create destructive products.
The process of industrial production unleashes a great competition for products that have the highest use value and the lowest cost. In a recent podcast, Quinones described the process of Chicken McNuggets that contain 50% fat, which are cheap to produce because of the amalgamated ingredients, that are then fried to add more fat and then served with a sugar laced dipping sauce. This kind of product development is praised even though the product is addictive and horrendously bad for one’s health. But as Quinones notes, no one loses their house over eating Chicken McNuggets. But that is exactly what happens when this same process is used to produce Meth and Fentanyl.
By 2010, Ephedrine Meth was widely used throughout North America. When cooked with corn starch it is turned into crystal meth. An underground meth cooking spree from over the counter Sudafed resulted in a Meth crisis. This led to strict import laws for handling ephedrine in Canada, US and Mexico. In order to get around this blockade, Meth producers have devised a different cooking method called P2P Meth that uses toxic and easily available industrial chemicals like lye, hydrochloric acid, acetone, racing fuel or cyanide to produce Meth in industrial quantities. Ephedrine Meth seemed like a social drug causing the user to stay awake for long periods. P2P Meth is completely different, its side effects are psychosis, hallucinations and delusions all leading towards greater mental health degradation.
In both of Quinones books he documents the full story behind Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, and how, through legal pain prescriptions, this drug was issued in quantities of hundreds of millions per year. The long term result was a massive number of deaths by opioid overdoses. The high dosage of opioids in each OxyContin set the stage for greater levels of addictions. In essence the legal pharmaceutical drug market has helped to stimulate wider drug addiction issues.
Fentanyl and Meth Overwhelm the Market
All these drugs seem to be piling on top of each other – who can keep track of the heroin, the crystal meth, the opioids? Underneath all of this, the drug cartels have been experimenting and competing against each other to broaden their market share.
Quinones demonstrates that the process has crowned Fentanyl and P2P Meth as overwhelming market leaders. In five short years these two chemical drug derivatives have substantially displaced other drugs by having the lowest cost, the highest use value, the best high and are equally highly addictive substances. This market triumph has left livelihoods in shambles, minds broken, families torn apart, physical and mental distress and a subculture of despair. Communities and cities are worse off because of this scourge.
The real image of Meth and Fentanyl is of abandoned homeless encampments that are strewn with garbage, clothing, bike parts, cans, bottles, wood, packaging, tarps and scattered food products. In these encampments people struggle to meet basic needs while they do not have water or washrooms, where they must deal with the weather each day and where survival means a constant search for food. In this context the final result is that the drugs create a desert of human disconnection.
At the same time they are symbolic of our cultures greatest vices – our belief in the winner-take-all mentality – finding its worst expression in Meth and Fentanyl, leaving the people defenseless.
Homelessness, drug use and the lack of housing options are interrelated societal issues. Each problem is related to the other, as our communities find themselves in the middle of a drug and homelessness epidemic. There is no easy path out at this point. More housing can help but it will not lessen the level of drug infiltration. When people find meaning in work and relationships, this will lessen homelessness and drug use. What will it take to get our society focused on pathways that integrate work, family and community? These are steps that are essential to comprehend and understand in order to see change in the current crisis.
