One brisk evening last fall, I took my 15-year-old daughter out for a driving lesson near our home in Portland, Oregon. We were in our old Ford pickup, and I was cheering her smooth downshifts and complimenting her feel for the clutch and gas when she made a left onto an unlit street. Suddenly, we were surrounded by tents, piles of garbage, grocery carts, old bicycles. A few figures sat in the shadows. Ahead and to the right, a man squatted in the dark, firing a blowtorch over something near the ground.
When a car approached from the other direction with no room to pass, my daughter braked, then stalled. The car stopped a few feet in front of us, headlights in our eyes. “Mom, Mom, I can't reverse, and I can't get around him,” my daughter whispered. The driver of the car in front of us leaned out his window. One of the figures on the street approached. They exchanged words, and something else.
I said to my daughter, “It's okay. It's fine. We're fine.”
I am a physician who treats addiction for a living. Many of my patients sleep in cheap motels or shelters or live in tents on dark city streets. Some of them use blowtorches to vaporize and inhale
