For nearly a year now, I have been using Calgary’s LRT system in order to get to the downtown offices of the Western Standard. There aren’t many daily downtown commuters anymore, but the price of parking is still set at boom-time levels. While public transit has always drawn something of a seedy element to it, the rapid deterioration of conditions on trains and in the stations in the last few months has been shocking..I am a moderately healthy middle-aged man, and I feel nervous while riding on city transit. I can only imagine how women or those less confident in defending themselves must feel..After one of my more harrowing rides in a train that was populated almost exclusively by addicts in various conditions of consciousness, I put out a tweet on the matter. The responses from others who had been having similar incidents on city transit came quickly. I was far from alone in what I had observed..A gentleman shared a video with me that he had taken of a man openly smoking meth on the C-Train while passengers sat next to him. Watch below:.The video was recorded on February 5th on the Blue Line. The fellow got on the train at 8th street, smoked his meth, and got off again at 3rd street. He smoked his bowl as he traveled straight past the front doors to our offices. For him, the train was a comfortable, warm, safe consumption site..The man who took the video understandably wants to remain anonymous. He assures me as a daily commuter that this is a common sight and from what I have seen I can believe it. As seen in the video, a woman sat next to the meth smoker at one of the stops. The fellow taking the video asked her later why she didn’t move. She replied: “If I moved every time someone was doing something like that, I would be getting up to move every day.”..It’s hard to decide which is more disturbing: how indifferent the meth smoker was, or how blasé the fellow passenger has become about it..Other tweets like the one below show’s the typical mess and leftover drug paraphernalia to be found on trains lately..This problem is getting visibly worse every week and the city can’t afford to ignore it any longer. Not every addict on these trains and in the stations is as polite or passive as the fellow in the video. Many are aggressive and disturbed. They often intimidate passengers with panhandling demands and can also often be seen fighting with each other..Addicts are people in need of help, but that doesn’t mean that they are harmless..The cold weather makes this problem more acute. Trains provide a convenient spot to warm up and get out of the wind. Desperate addicts can hardly be blamed for using them..The solution is not so simple as tossing homeless addicts off of trains and out of LRT stations. These people need somewhere to go..We are in the midst of an addiction epidemic. The causes leading to this epidemic are fodder for another story. The only feasible solution we have right now is expanding addiction treatment. As one who has spent countless nights in church basements in support meetings around North America, I have learned a thing or two about addiction. One of the big lessons is that most addicts simply can’t stop without help. They can’t simply get tired of the addiction and go cold turkey. It takes treatment and support systems and we don’t have nearly enough..To his credit, Premier Jason Kenney has seen this need and his government has been working to add addiction treatment beds by the thousands. It still never seems to be enough, but it is going in the right direction. Safe consumption sites may help keep addicts alive, but it is only prolonging the inevitable if treatment and support isn’t available..The city needs to find a way to get the addicts out of the transit system and into some sort of safe-shelters. Not an easy task but an essential one..Calgary’s downtown is already a virtual ghost town. Ground-level retail and hospitality businesses are gone for the most part, and the office buildings are nearly empty. There are initiatives that intend to help grow the residential population of downtown Calgary. We can rest assured those initiatives will be doomed to failure until the mess of drug-addled homeless people is addressed. Nobody in their right mind wants to move into that right now..Cory Morgan is the Podcast Editor and a columnist for the Western Standard
