The world looks bleak from behind the counter of Mr Kam's optical shop. Heroin users lie motionless outside his barred doors, crack addicts smoke up in the rain, and Mr Kam watches drug dealers conduct business openly on the street.
'The drug problem is very bad around here,' Mr Kam mutters as he peers out of the window. 'They smoke around here. They use the needle. It's really bad.'
Mr Kam, 65, opened Quality Optical, his shop at the edge of Vancouver's Chinatown, more than 20years ago after emigrating from Hong Kong. Back then, this corner of the city was a bustling, working-class neighbourhood. Today, his East Hastings Street shop is situated along the city's poorest, most drug-ridden and disease-infested strip in the Downtown Eastside.
Mr Kam, who declines to give his full name, blames the area's decline on the government's leniency towards illicit drug use. 'It looks like the government allows addicts to do that,' he says. 'They use drugs on the street because the policy is so slack, they think it is legal. This doesn't happen in Hong Kong, but here...' He shakes his head.
Although some, like Mr Kam, disapprove, others believe the government's progressive drug policy is saving lives here on skid row. Using public funding, health centres and outreach workers distribute free needles, alcohol swabs and sterile water vials to the neighbourhood's drug users to control the spread of disease. Now the provincial government is planning to add free crack-pipe mouthpieces to the list.
British Columbia's Ministry of Health plans to offer sterile mouthpieces - small, detachable pieces of plastic tubing that fit at the end of a glass crack pipe - to curb the transmission of HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis (TB) among crack users who share pipes. Those who smoke crack, the crystalline form of cocaine, often develop burns, blisters and sores around their lips from hot pipes.