Cycle of addiction can be broken
Huddled in his sleeping bag and trying to ignore the pain of his broken ankle, Gary Quinn was sleeping outside on a Calgary night just like he had many times before.
Having been homeless for years, the 55-year-old got used to roughing it outdoors and chose not to sleep in shelters; he doesn’t like having to deal with others.
Four or five months ago — he can’t remember exactly when — he first met workers from the Downtown Outreach Addiction Partnership (DOAP) when they brought him a lunch and asked if he wanted to spend the night at Alpha House in Victoria Park.
“I said, no, I’m more comfortable outside,” Quinn said.
Despite his protests, they came back another day.
“They came and they checked on me even when I wouldn’t come in. They came to check on me to make sure I wasn’t cold or freezing and they talked me into coming in when it was really cold,” Quinn said.
The team, which is run by Alpha House Society, operates a van, mostly around downtown, 24/7, to make contact with the addicts living on Calgary’s streets. On a typical day, the mobile outreach team can do anything from bringing lunches to driving people to appointments.
Team members can help relieve emergency services personnel or shuttle people between shelters.
And by building on those friendly interactions, the team can later help them deal with the addiction that controls their lives and help move them into more permanent housing.
On a cold day in the fall, Quinn decided to get in the van for an hour just to warm up. “They’re all real nice,” he said. “The night I went on the tour with them, I wouldn’t want their job, man,” he said with a laugh. “Wow, they’ve got to put up with a lot.”
Quinn was convinced to go back to Alpha House to stay in their detox program.
Alpha House Society executive director Kathy Christiansen says the DOAP team is taking on challenges that traditionally fell to emergency services: police, EMS and bylaw. Its eight full-time outreach workers and four parttime employees are always on the move.
“The response typically was to ticket people and then at some point fines could be fairly significant. At some point there would be an inability to pay those fines and people would get locked up. That would be a cyclical sort of response,” she says.
“When the DOAP team started there were about 40 people a night being locked up in the city’s cells for intoxication. Now, there’s maybe one,” she says.
“It’s much easier for a police officer to call the DOAP team; it’s a team that’s very skilled at dealing with street level addiction.”
The cellphone in the van rarely stays silent. The team made 14,302 transports in 2011, including 1,096 emergency service referrals and 2,091 trips from health services facilities to shelters.
Since 2009, 107 people sleeping on the streets have been housed.
Christiansen says the team is “engaging with people who are on the edge of the community” and helps them address not only the addiction but also health and mental health issues, which are often undiagnosed.
“It’s just very meaningful work.”