As homeless people were moved out of Oppenheimer Park, many were prescribed a safe supply of drugs

published on May 20, 2020 by Rafferty Baker in CBC News - BC

For Happy Kreter, doing outreach in Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park was an all-consuming activity going back as far as January.

Kreter, who works for the Portland Hotel Society (PHS), was at the park in the Downtown Eastside for the massive effort to meet a deadline earlier this month to clear the park and move the approximately 300 residents into housing.

He was also at the centre of a parallel effort to get drug users off the unpredictable, toxic supply of street drugs, and onto doctor-prescribed medications.

That push got some help from new pandemic prescribing guidelines issued by the provincial government in late March, as the COVID-19 situation in B.C. was beginning to look extremely worrying…