The arc is long, yet still bends to hope Harm-reduction efforts may often seem imperceptible — but it’s the only way to lasting change By: Melissa Martin Posted: 5:31 PM CDT Thursday, Jul. 2, 2026

The first time I saw open opioid use on the street, it was not in Winnipeg, but in Portland, Oregon in 2007. It was my first time in that city, and on a central street leading down to the river, a mass of people huddled against the walls of shuttered shops, curled up in damp sleeping bags amidst a scatter of empty food wrappers and used needles.

At the time, opioids — to my understanding, it was mostly heroin in Portland back then — were not a common drug in Manitoba. Winnipeg was, of course, deeply marred by poverty, homelessness and addiction, and that I had witnessed many times; yet nothing I’d seen here prepared me for the scene that day in Portland.

So I stopped. I gazed at the people on the street, trying to make sense of how they were living.

My friend, who was from that city, grabbed my arm and urged me not to stop, to keep moving, to not to look at all.

I didn’t understand then how one could just keep walking. How can you see such pain spread out all around you, and simply carry on?

Now I understand. Because in the nearly 20 years since then, that depth of visible suffering has come to us too.

To live in Winnipeg now is to become entirely too skilled at looking away from what we cannot bear to see: the tents, the tarps, the man lying face-down on the street.

To live in Winnipeg now is to become entirely too skilled at looking away from what we cannot bear to see: the tents, the tarps, the man lying face-down on the street. The young woman huddled on the corner. The living proof of too many generations of accumulated trauma, and too many years of social failures.

This is, inevitably, where such failures end. This is where they lead.

As the years turn, the places we look away from have grown. Then, maybe it was one side of a certain section of Main Street; now it’s both. If you’re driving that way, maybe you’ve already steeled yourself to look away as you approach. You can’t help them anyway, you tell yourself. You can’t change it.

You still see it out the corner of your eye, though.

Over time, maybe all that looking away changes you too. Maybe you feel less empathetic than you once did to the suffering that pushed people onto the street, and multiplied once they were there.

Winnipeggers are exhausted of how the spiralling effects of addiction have impacted our city, and how the problem seems to only grow.

That part is understandable. Everyone wants, and deserves, to feel safe in our public spaces — including those caught in a cycle of addiction and poverty they haven’t yet been able to break. And as the visible suffering spreads, many would like to see a far more forceful response to move the problem out of sight entirely.

If we are to turn the tide, it has to start by accepting there is no such solution. There is no hard-line approach to fix it.

Winnipeggers are exhausted of how the spiralling effects of addiction have impacted our city, and how the problem seems to only grow.

This central conundrum was in the headlines again last week, as Winnipeg police pursued a 10-day crackdown on open drug use on city streets.

It started with speeches, as Mayor Scott Gillingham announced his support for the effort and front-line social service workers raised alarms about how it would affect some of the city’s most vulnerable people.

That police and front-line social service workers stand at odds is inherent to their mission. The work of front-line harm reduction is to connect with people where they suffer, to build trust, to give people a lifeline they can grab onto when they need, and when they’re ready. People won’t take it if they fear being arrested.

Winnipeg police Chief Gene Bowers said carefully that police are “not criminalizing addiction,” but only open use and drug trafficking.

To someone with an addiction, I’m not sure that distinction matters. If you are not able to stop using, and have nowhere else to live or use than the street, it boils down to the same thing.

Earlier this week, after a meeting with social service groups, Bowers agreed to keep officers away from locations where people go for help, so as not to compound their suffering by also making their sources of relief inaccessible. He also pledged to “reassess” the approach after the crackdown ended.

In the first two days of the crackdown, police made 25 arrests, sent another roughly two dozen people to hospital or detox, and acknowledged they’d “underestimated the scope” of the problem.

But what must also be acknowledged is that all this was, in a way, enforcement theatre. Ten days of increased policing will not result in any lasting change.

Temporary crackdowns may push people who are suffering elsewhere for a short time, but the circumstances that feed the suffering don’t change.

That much is obvious by the nature of the problem. Addiction, poverty and homelessness are not solved by police; Bowers himself stated that enforcement alone cannot fix the problem.

Temporary crackdowns may push people who are suffering elsewhere for a short time, but the circumstances that feed the suffering don’t change.

The crackdown served one key purpose, which was for the city and its police to be seen taking decisive action against the issue that understandably worries and frustrates Winnipeggers above almost all others.

Residents want to see something being done. They want to feel their frustrations are being heard.

And if a problem is pushed out of sight — even temporarily — then it’s easier to look away.

But in the end such actions could just provoke even more frustration. A headline-grabbing crackdown that doesn’t produce lasting change could make Winnipeggers even more cynical about the city’s trajectory.

Helplessness is corrosive; if citizens start to feel nothing will ever work, it won’t encourage them to actively engage more promising solutions.

Because there is hope, but we have to see it clearly.

Every day, an immense amount of work goes on in this city to reduce the harm of addiction and to build pathways out of poverty and homelessness.

Compared to a police crackdown, this work is far more quiet. Unless you are present in the most hurting parts of the city, you won’t always see it.

And here is another painful truth: that work is slow. It takes time. The trauma and social ruptures that produced the current drug crisis took generations to reach this point; it may take generations to reverse.

In the meantime, we have to keep finding ways to champion hope and healing where it happens.

It’s there, if we can look closely enough to see it.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca