Long-term equitable recovery services needed to manage addiction in B.C.: report

published on July 18, 2018 by Camille Bains in Canadian Press

When the daily partying, boozing and cocaine binges following high school left him homeless and living in a tent on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Josh McDearmid believed his life would end there.

“I was born into addiction and I thought: ‘This is who I turned out to be and if I die down here, I die down here.’”

What surprised McDearmid, now 25, was that no one providing the many social services he accessed on the street offered any information about recovery programs as he repeatedly ended up in hospital and suffered withdrawal from alcohol, cocaine and marijuana.