Maple Ridge Has Been Sounding the Alarm on the Drug Crisis for a Decade. Nobody Is Listening.
The camps along the Lougheed. The overdoses behind the Haney strip. The families watching their neighbourhood change in ways nobody prepared them for. Maple Ridge didn't create this crisis — but it is being left to absorb it alone.
Marcus Webb
Maple Ridge Post
There is a clearing behind a commercial strip on Lougheed Highway where, on any given morning, you will find the evidence of what a decade of failed drug policy looks like at the community level. It is not an abstraction. It is not a statistic. It is the lived reality of a town that asked for help years before it became fashionable to talk about the overdose crisis, and was told to wait.
Maple Ridge has been waiting.
The town declared a public health emergency related to the drug crisis before most Lower Mainland municipalities were willing to acknowledge that the problem extended past the Downtown Eastside. The tent camps that appeared along the river, in the parks, in the alleys behind the businesses on 224th Street, were not imported from somewhere else. They grew here, from the same failures of housing, mental health care, and addiction treatment that grew them everywhere — they just grew faster here because the services didn't follow the people.
The response from senior levels of government has followed a pattern that Maple Ridge residents know well by now. Acknowledgment. Concern. A working group. A framework. A commitment to further consultation. And then, several months later, an announcement of funding that, when divided among the communities that need it and stretched across the timelines required to actually build or operate anything, amounts to far less than the problem requires.
Meanwhile, the people who live here — who run businesses here, who walk their kids to school past encampments, who call 911 when someone collapses in a doorway — are absorbing the costs of a crisis they did not create and cannot fix at the municipal level.
Maple Ridge's council has passed motions. It has written letters. It has sent delegations to Victoria. It has done the things a municipality can do when a problem exceeds its jurisdiction and its budget. None of it has produced results commensurate with the scale of what this community is dealing with.
What Maple Ridge needs — and what it has not received — is a provincial and federal government willing to treat this community's drug crisis with the same urgency they would bring to any other public health emergency of equivalent scope. Not a pilot program. Not a regional strategy that treats Maple Ridge as a footnote. A committed, funded, locally-delivered response that acknowledges this town has been carrying a burden it should not have to carry alone.
The people sleeping behind the Lougheed strip are not someone else's problem. Neither are the people stepping around them every morning to open their shops.
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