The Best Place Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver

"Wow! A gripping ethnography of the everyday ecstatic emergency and boredom of methamphetamine, fentanyl and failed relationships that cuts short the lives of Canadian youth-often indigenous-desperately seeking community, meaning and survival. Documents the dysfunctional meshes of care/jail/gentrification/predatory narcotics markets and human betrayals that betrays their persistent universally recognizable dreams/hopes against all odds for a better futures that never arrives." - Philippe Bourgois (author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and co-author of Righteous Dopefiend) "The Best Place offers an analysis of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, British Columbia, a locale where young people's illicit drug use has received international attention. Fast has worked in this area for many, many years, developing long-term relationships with young drug users and health professionals. This is a collaboration that offers a model of multi-level analyses and showcases the hope of Fast's interlocutors for the future. Fast draws on their visions of possible futures, and on their critiques of current approaches, articulated with those of healthcare professionals. This is a book many have been waiting for." - Dara Culhane (co-founder and co-curator for the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography)