People First Radio – February 01, 2024People First Radio – February 01, 2024
People First Radio
Joe Pugh talks with researcher Dania Fast about 15 years spent alongside young people using drugs and living in poverty in Vancouver, as told in her book *The Best Place*. Their discussion touches on youth dreams, boredom, substance use, institutional responses and the impact of the toxic drug crisis on young lives.
0:00•1 Feb 2024
Dreams, Drugs and the "Best Place": Young Lives in Vancouver’s Margins
Episode Overview
- Young people using drugs in poverty often hold very conventional dreams of homes, steady work, romance and family life, even while living on the margins.
- Substance use is described as both dangerous and, at times, a way to ease painful boredom and create a sense of momentum in lives with few resources.
- Supportive housing and treatment programmes can feel institutional, controlling and isolating, and may not match young people’s ideas of a real home or better life.
- Policies that separate romantic partners for treatment or housing can clash with youths’ strong commitment to staying together, sometimes with serious consequences.
- Fast argues that living wages, more homelike housing, early family support, robust harm reduction and a regulated drug supply are all needed to prevent further loss of young lives.
“"Treatment and housing and abstinence are not in and of themselves the answer."”
How do people find hope in the darkest times? This conversation on People First Radio turns that question toward young people using drugs and living in deep poverty in Vancouver.
Host Joe Pugh speaks with medical anthropologist and researcher Dania Fast about her book *The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver*, a project built on 15 years of relationships with youth who used drugs while moving through homelessness, shelters, rundown SROs, supportive housing and treatment programmes.
You’ll hear how many of these young people still saw Vancouver as “the best place on earth” and dreamed of utterly ordinary things: a basement flat, a steady paycheque, a soulmate, kids and a pet, weekends skiing or hiking.
Fast explains how sharing coffee shops, car rides and photo walks with her gave youth temporary access to that “normal” life, while also exposing the harsh gap in power and privilege when she went home to her flat and they returned to shelters or the streets. A major thread is substance use as something that can add meaning and motion to lives weighed down by crushing boredom and poverty.
Fast insists she doesn’t want to erase the harms, yet she also highlights “all of the things that drugs were opening up for them,” helping explain why people keep using in a toxic supply. She links this to how treatment, housing and abstinence can still leave young people isolated, broke and bored enough to return to drugs and street life.
The conversation also digs into Vancouver’s extensive “poverty management infrastructure” and how supportive housing and treatment can feel institutional or even carceral, undermining relationships and autonomy. Fast closes by calling for living wages, real homes, early family support, harm reduction and a regulated drug supply so fewer young lives and dreams are cut short.
If you’ve ever wondered how policy, poverty and drugs intersect in real lives, this episode might leave you asking what kind of city – and society – you want to help build.
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