Downtown Eastside is the central Vancouver neighborhood where the city’s drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health crises are concentrated. Gabor Maté, Bruce Alexander, and Liz Evans all developed their theories of addiction while working with addicts in Downtown Eastside.
Downtown Eastside Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Downtown Eastside or refer to Downtown Eastside. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 13
Quotes
Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.
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Downtown Eastside Term Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the term Downtown Eastside appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 12: Terminal City
Hari interviews Gabor Maté in Vancouver. After becoming a family physician, Maté started working in Downtown Eastside , a rundown neighborhood with one of the highest concentrations of drug addicts in the...
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Hari walks around Downtown Eastside , wishing he could tell the ordinary people who look down on addicts that addiction...
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Chapter 13: Batman’s Bad Call
...learning about Alexander’s research in university, Hari gets the chance to meet him at the Downtown Eastside library in Vancouver. Alexander is clearly part of the community—an addicted woman even approaches him...
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...was assigned to teach a class on social issues in psychology. To prepare, he visited Downtown Eastside and offered free family therapy to local drug addicts. His first patient was a 23-year-old...
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Chapter 14: The Drug Addicts’ Uprising
Vancouverites constantly tell Hari that Downtown Eastside used to be far worse. They largely attribute its change to a homeless poet and...
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...a seat on the board. While the rest of the board admitted that they hoped Downtown Eastside ’s addicts would all get HIV and die out, Osborn secured funding for VANDU and...
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...a voice during public press conferences and open North America’s first safe injection site in Downtown Eastside . He gradually abandoned all of his prohibitionist ideas and came out in favor of...
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