Homeless in Vancouver: Likes his coffee stickers…needs his beer

McDonald’s coffee stickers are another thing of value binners can now find in the garbage.

While I put mine on sticker cards and keep them in my wallet, my friend here slaps them on the side of his shopping cart.

Funny, but I think it may have something to do with hand-eye coordination and the fact that only his first drink of the day is coffee; all the rest are beer.

By the middle of yesterday afternoon—when I took these photos—he was drunk as a skunk and happy as a clam.

Being impaired never impairs his sense of humour or his ability to bin or chit chat.

As for walking—he has the shopping cart to lean on, doesn’t he?

So that’s probably why he slaps the stickers on the side of his shopping cart.

As to why he drinks so much, that’s another story.

How to beat hard drugs? Drink plenty of fluids

My binner friend—I’ve known him for nine years—didn’t always drink so much. When I first met him in 2005, I don’t know if he drank much at all but he did have a fairly ferocious crack cocaine habit.

When he set about breaking his crack addiction six or seven years ago, he didn’t enroll in a drug-treatment program. He took the cure recommended by his peers: he hit the beer and the weed.

The old ‘lesser of two evils’ strategy

Trading one hard drug (crack cocaine) for other, theoretically, softer ones (alcohol and marijuana) is an exit strategy commonly prescribed by street drug users.

In recent months I’ve also watched a homeless heroin addict try to get off heroin, subsisting on prescription Percodans and quantities of whiskey.

I don’t know how that’s going—I can guess—but this kind of homemade (homeless-made?) substitution treatment can and has worked apparently. The street talks up the successes while the failures go without saying.

It’s easy to see how such a DIY treatment method would be attractive.

Drug users on the street generally already smoke marijuana and drink beer. The regimen is straight forward—just drink and smoke a lot more—and it can be managed on personal terms without recourse to healthcare professionals.

Many drug addictions stem from people self-medicating with street drugs in an attempt to heal or blot out physical and/or emotional suffering.

These same people are going to, when the time comes, be open to self-administered detox and addiction treatments, despite the the fact that going it alone didn’t work so well for them in the first place,

As for my binner friend, he’s is in the second of two long stretches where he freely admits to occasional use of crack but not heavy daily use. I, for one, believe him.

Better a happy drunk than a paranoid crackhead

A few years ago, when he fell of the wagon and went back to heavy crack use, there was no hiding the fact. The sudden shift to aggression and freakish paranoia was unmistakable. As is the complete absence of such behaviour now.

His transition from being a crackhead to being, well, an alcoholic is a real personal achievement on his part and probably says more about the quality of his character than the quality of advice from street people on how to kick drug habits.

And after a lifetime of drug use, it’s unrealistic to expect him to ever be completely drug free. His drug use can be turned up or down but not off. His goal has to be controlling his drug use rather than letting it control him.

Many years ago we argued about this and he became infuriated at my inability to understand the simple fact that he had an addictive personality. Of course, that’s not how he put it. At one point he just blurted out, “I gotta buzz!”

When I saw him yesterday, he was definitely buzzed but it wasn’t an angry buzzing of crack cocaine; it was a happy-go-lucky beer buzz. There’s a really good difference.

A drug for all reasons (would that be…coffee?)

Interesting thing about marijuana. It’s considered both a “gateway drug” by some and an “exit drug” by others.

Many law enforcement types still believe the largely discredited theory that marijuana use inevitably leads to the use of harder drugs, while many others—including many of the users of those harder drugs—see marijuana as a potential way out. And just maybe it’s both. Maybe marijuana does whatever people really want it to do.

As for me? People have suggested that I’m addicted to coffee and computers. Pshaw!

While it is true that I’ve used both of them since public school, it’s silly to suggest I’m addicted to either of them—any more than I’m addicted to breathing.

But, um, if you don’t need that McCafe sticker, I’ll take it, thank you very much.