How many 
    drug addicts are in
                           your neighbourhood?

by Annette Hellweg

Coming as a tourist to Vancouver, inadvertently lost in the 'wrong' areas could eventually evoke the impression, that Vancouver has a 'little' drug problem. But why does drug use appear, where it appears? Why is Main-and-Hastings at Main and Hastings. Why do we apparently bump more often into junkies strolling through the East-end than through the West-end? Coincident or Determination? The question, my project is getting to the bottom of is, whether there is a particular spatial distribution of drug use in Vancouver or not. Therefore, I am going to find out, which areas in Vancouver are most likely to have drug-use. I am not going to take into account cigarettes or marihuana or possibly caffeine (than the whole city would be drug-addicted - first of all, me and my neighbourhood) but only Cocaine, Heroin and LSD.      My result will be a map in which every Enumeration Area of Vancouver is given a number. The higher the number the greater the probability that drug addicted people are living there. The given numbers are the result of an analysis that is based on the dependency of drug abuse on particular socio-economic factors. The distribution of socio-economic factors as age, gender, education and employment status as well as the strength of their correlation with the use of particular drugs are taken into account for calculating the resulting values.     What sense does the project have (if any), except for the dealers to know where to find their customers? First of all, it will show if there is theoretically a spatial pattern of drug use or if there is non and every area is as likely to have a drug-problem as every other one. If there is a spatial pattern, we will have learned something new about Vancouver - got to know the structure of the city we live in (or at least near) a little bit better. Or we will simply find confirmed what we always presumed. Or may be we doubt about the results as they apparently do not meet reality - than we can criticize the scientifically claimed dependency of the socio-economic factors and drug-abuse, because it is obviously not always true. In any case, we get new information, which can help us and for example the city council to understand the connection between drugs and space in Vancouver. To understand a problem is the only chance to fight it successfully.                                                                                                 Cocaine under the mikroscope     For analysis reasons, I decided to do additionally a little market research for dealers. I found out, which areas are the best for dealers to sell their products. Apart from the number of customers I took safety-criteria into account - distance from police stations and proximity to skytrain stations (in order to escape quickly and without a ticket).

 

Next

 
 

1 .  Background Research  2 .  Data Collection, Preparation, Manipulation  3 .  Methodology

4 .  Spatial Analysis  5 .  Results & Discussion   6.   Problems & Errors