Videos give shocking glimpse inside shelter
‘It felt like I was walking in hell,’ U.S. activist says
Drug users using miniature torches to light up in common areas. Graffitied walls bearing the scars of repeated damage. Men and women slumped in unnatural positions, surrounded by scattered food.
This was the scene captured inside a low-barrier East Vancouver shelter in a video published Sunday on the social media site X by U.S. activist Kevin Dahlgren. A former outreach worker based in Portland, Ore., Dahlgren now advocates for the notion that existing approaches to homelessness primarily create dependency and serve to exacerbate the problem.
Dahlgren explained his philosophy in a column published by the New York Post: “We are loving the homeless to death ... we will end this humanitarian crisis not with big budgets or unrealistic utopian fantasies but by empowering people to reach their fullest potential.”
Dahlgren’s social media channels are ordinarily filled with video interviews of Oregon homeless — many of them decrying a system that supplies food, tents and other materials to live on the streets, but offers few options to get clean.
Just last week, he featured a woman living in a trailer inside a tent encampment who told him that regular handouts of “supplies to make this sort of lifestyle possible ... make it way too easy for people to become complacent and just keep doing this.”
But despite more than 20 years of moving among the tent encampments and skid rows of the U.S. West Coast, he reported that the Downtown Eastside was “the most chaotic street I have ever been on.”
“It felt like I was walking in hell,” he said in a statement to National Post.
In a caption accompanying the video — which has now garnered nearly two million views — he wrote “staff were nowhere. It was horrifying.”
“Easily the best example why the decriminalizing of drugs and poorly regulated safe injections sites is a bad idea,” he added.
In his hometown, Dahlgren has been described as a “well known Oregon social media figure” and in 2022, his work was praised by Rene Gonzalez, who is now Portland City Commissioner.
In October, however, Dahlgren was charged with multiple counts of theft allegedly committed while he was Homeless Services Specialist with the City of Gresham, Ore. An official statement by the Multnomah County District Attorney cited 19 charges related to “multiple incidents of theft and misuse of his official position as a homeless services specialist for the City of Gresham.”
Dahlgren has pleaded not guilty.
Dahlgren originally reported that his Sunday video was the scene inside a Vancouver “safe injection site,” but he later clarified that it was a shelter located along a section of East Hastings serviced by several safe consumption sites. Maps produced by the City of Vancouver show a one-block section of Hastings that has four overdose prevention sites operating within sight of one another. One of them is Insite, the supervised injection site opened in 2003 and famed as North America’s first. A separate Overdose Prevention Site is located just next door, and next to that is an “inhalation tent” serving users of meth, crack and other inhalant drugs. Finally, across the street is the Molson Overdose Prevention Site, which operates out of an alley and offers supervised drug consumption in a “stigma-free and culturally safe environment.”
It was the first time Dahlgren had been to Vancouver since visiting Expo 86 as a 15-year-old. But he was visiting the epicentre of a place that has often been cited as a model for U.S. harm reduction policy, particularly in Portland.
Advocates are currently pushing for Oregon to begin hosting Canada-style supervised consumption sites. In 2022, Kelsi Junge, a representative with the Multnomah County Harm Reduction Clinic was citing Vancouver as a success story in how supervised injection could reduce rising overdose deaths.
Dahlgren is far from the first to have a video go viral by merely pointing a phone camera at a relatively common scene of daily life on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Most notably, American Youtuber Tyler Oliveira has attracted 14 million views and counting for a profile of Vancouver posted four months ago entitled I Investigated the Country Where Every Drug is Legal.
“The city’s goal was to make using drugs safer by making them legal, but many Canadians thing it’s done the exact opposite,” Oliveira says in a narration.