Vancouver's gritty close-up

Working with students from UBC's Graduate School of Journalism, former CBS anchor Dan Rather takes an unflinching look at the drug-riddled Downtown Eastside for his newsmagazine show

MARSHA LEDERMAN
February 19, 2008
The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- When Dan Rather arrived in Vancouver last fall to do a story about the notoriously troubled Downtown Eastside, he was armed with piles of research provided by journalism students at the University of British Columbia.

"This was not a case where the school lent its name to it and we did most of the work," Rather said during an interview last week from New York. "[The students] did a lot of the work."

The result of that collaboration, A Safe Place to Shoot Up, profiles the not-so-photogenic side of Vancouver with visuals you won't see in any tourism brochure or Olympic marketing campaign. Rather greets viewers at the show's opening, "Good evening from beautiful Vancouver, Canada," but the initial shots of scenic English Bay, the North Shore mountains and sandy beaches quickly give way to scenes from the streets and alleyways of the Downtown Eastside, where syringes litter sidewalks, sex workers await customers and drug addicts shoot up in broad daylight.

Rather calls it "a city of contrasts" in his report, describing "a landscape studded with snow-capped mountains and multimillion-dollar condos cradling a downtown that's home to one of the worst urban blights in North America." He cites stunning statistics from the United Nations: One in three residents of the Downtown Eastside is HIV-positive, and the rate of hepatitis C infection is 70 per cent.

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