PROPOSED TREATMENT CENTRE at MAIN and HASTINGS for SEX WORKERS IS INDECENT

Oldtown News
Vancouver, BC

PROPOSED TREATMENT CENTRE at MAIN and HASTINGS for SEX WORKERS is INDECENT


The abstinence-based proposed 20 bed treatment centre for sex trade workers in the Roosevelt Hotel, located a few steps from the largest drug trafficking corner in Canada is a really dumb idea.

The unnamed centre, announced and supported by federal Health Minister, MP Tony Clement and Mayor Sam Sullivan flies in the face of conventional wisdom which is that you provide abstinence-based treatment away from the area of which vulnerable and sick drug users are routinely preyed upon and targeted by really bad guys.

Pimps and Traffickers have staked out Main and Hastings as their drug mecca turf. They regularly prey upon women living at the Roosevelt Hotel. Let us not forget that many of the Downtown Eastside missing and murdered women who wound up on the Port Coquitlam farm lived at the Roosevelt.

Whoever advised Mayor Sullivan and Minister Clement that the Roosevelt was an ideal space for a proposed treatment centre obviously didn't speak with the women who desperately desire treatment to get their lives back in order.

Placing vulnerable and fragile women right in the heart of pimp alley and violent traffickers is subjecting the women to the most extreme, cruel and unusual punishment imaginable.

I recall a few years back when Mayor Sullivan announced while he was a City Councillor, he supported a sex worker with money. His rationale was he wanted to learn about her life. Mayor Sullivan also announced he couldn't continue this pattern because he realized his money was running out and so he dropped her like a fly.

I often wonder how that woman felt being dumped in such a cavalier and indifferent manner?

To compound and make matters worse, Mayor Sullivan and Minister Clement's half-baked idea to subject sick women and place them them in the hands of predators is absolutely disgusting and deplorable. In fact it's indecent.


Jamie Lee Hamilton
tricia_foxx@yahoo.com