For the first few years Liz Evans worked at the Portland Hotel Society, a network of homeless shelters in central Vancouver, she would arrive at her job already exhausted. On her morning walk through Downtown Eastside—a neighborhood infamous as the poorest zip code in Canada—she stepped over drug addicts passed out in doorways and sidled around alleys where people would cook dope and shoot up in broad daylight. It was 1993, and Vancouver was in the throes of an HIV epidemic. Tens of thousands of impoverished injection drug users were crammed into a fifteen-block radius.
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