Open Drug Use, Violence Plague Businesses in Duncan, BC—But One Shop Owner Is Trying to Turn the Tide

Will Arnold stands by a mural outside his shop, Experience Cycling, in Duncan, B.C., on June 12, 2024. Courtesy of Will Arnold

When Will Arnold set up a bike shop in Duncan, B.C., more than 30 years ago, he didn’t realize he'd spend nearly a decade dealing with littered streets, graffiti, and open drug use.

He certainly never thought he would be threatened with a gun or have a knife pulled on him in the once-quiet community of 5,000 people.

When Mr. Arnold first moved to the tiny city on southern Vancouver Island in 1991, Duncan was a peaceful place to live and run his bike store. That all began to change approximately eight years ago, he says.

As the owner of Experience Cycling, which is located on the Trans Canada Highway that runs through the community, Mr. Arnold has had a front-row seat to the homelessness and public drug use that plague many parts of the province.

“The stuff I’ve seen … it’s hard, it’s been really hard,” Mr. Arnold told The Epoch Times via telephone. “It’s scary out there. It is absolutely scary.”

Mr. Arnold said the community became inundated with people living on the streets, most of them drug addicts.

The clean and friendly neighbourhood of years past became dirty and, at times, dangerous, with garbage littering the storefronts of the businesses lining the highway. Seeing the trash, drug paraphernalia, and graffiti taking over the neighbourhood was disheartening, he says. On more than one occasion he had to power-wash the walls of his business after someone defecated on them.

During those early years of the drug epidemic, he often considered leaving Duncan.

“There’s days where I was just at my wit’s end,” he said. “I was ready to give up.”

A Turning Point

One day Mr. Arnold saw a video about a reformed drug dealer who now works with drug addicts and owns a rehab centre in Kelowna, B.C. He decided to message him on Facebook, and soon learned he had been born and raised in Duncan.

Together they forged a plan to start improving the situation in the community. With the help of groups like the Rotary Club and other volunteers, they started painting over the graffiti defacing businesses along the highway.

A scene near Will Arnold's shop in Duncan, BC. Courtesy Will Arnold

The newly-painted buildings gave the community a facelift, but it didn’t solve the ongoing issue of litter lining the streets.

Faced with the problem daily, Mr. Arnold decided it was time to roll up his sleeves and get to work.

“I started posting on Facebook [about] me picking up garbage every morning, and people saw how much garbage I was actually picking up in my area,“ he said. ”And then a few people started reaching out, wanting to come and work with me.”

Eventually those few became more than a dozen business owners and community members pitching in. The fact that so many people were willing to help “really restored” a lot of his faith in the community, he said.

A clean-up crew heads out to pick up garbage around businesses in Duncan, B.C. Courtesy Will Arnold

From there, a community cleanup crew was created. Previously a daily occurrence, it has now become a Saturday tradition with as many as 18 business owners and community members working together to clean up the street.

The crew no longer had to do a daily cleanup because the business owners hired Lance, who was homeless in his youth, to do daily cleanups.

The young man is one of the many people Mr. Arnold has helped get off the streets over the past eight years. A former drug addict, Lance is now training to be a butcher and uses the extra money he makes from cleaning up the streets to support his young son.

Scared for His Life

While Mr. Arnold has many fond memories of helping drug addicts and the homeless, he has some frightening memories too.

He has been threatened with a gun, had a knife pulled on him, and been cursed and yelled at. Although he later discovered the gun was fake, it didn’t diminish the terror he felt at that moment, he said.

One of the best steps he took to safeguard himself and his business, he said, was installing high-quality surveillance cameras. Those cameras kept him abreast of what was happening around his business overnight, and what he saw on the surveillance footage brought him down to the store many nights.

It wasn’t uncommon to see fires burning just a few feet from his storefront while addicts injected drugs or inhaled vapour from glass pipes. Sometimes people would be passed out on the sidewalk.

There were many nights when Mr. Arnold would end up having to be at his shop, but it gave him a chance to apply his “tough love” philosophy and he began to connect with many of the people he had seen on the streets. He’d often make coffee for them or hand out food or other supplies.

“They started to know I was around and expected it,” he said.

While he was always ready to lend a helping hand, he wasn’t afraid to let the people camping near his shop know there were boundaries they needed to respect. And that meant not lighting fires near anyone’s business nor leaving drug paraphernalia lying around.

When he saw people breaking those rules—or the law—he would call the police. His cameras picked up a multitude of drug deals, not to mention beatings, and even rapes. Mr. Arnold always shared his footage with the police and, eventually, it became known by the people living on the streets that that section of the town was under surveillance.

“One night I was in front of the store … and they had three fires going,” he said. “The sidewalk was just littered with garbage. I’ve never seen it so bad in my life.”

He told the people camped in front of his store he was calling the police. While he was on the phone, a drug dealer knocked on the door and asked for a garbage bag and a broom and cleaned up the street until it was “spotless,” Mr. Arnold said.

“Afterwards, I went to the guy and I said, ‘why‘d you do it?’ And he says, ’we know what you put back into the community. We do have respect for you,'” Mr. Arnold recounted.

On another occasion Mr. Arnold chased a bad actor down the street at 3 a.m. while calling the police on his cellphone.

“There was a group of people in front of three businesses, and they’re homeless, and they yelled out at the top of their lungs: ‘You don’t [expletive] with Will Arnold.”

He said it “felt good” to hear that because it reinforced that he was becoming known for his “tough love” approach among the homeless and that he was winning the respect of the people he hoped to help.

The ‘Rat Fink’

While many of the addicts now respect him, and maybe even like him, they still refer to him as a “rat.”

“I’m known on the streets, to the street people, as a rat, and I’m pretty proud of it,” he said. “There’s even a picture of the rat fink [cartoon] on my desk. When the police come in here they laugh.”

As good as his relationship is with the “street people,” it’s even stronger with the local police force, who Mr. Arnold says he has the utmost “love and respect for.”

“We'll sit in here and look at my 12 cameras,“ he said, referring to the camera footage he shares with the police. ”They’ve put quite a few people behind bars.”

“I do phone [them] a lot. The police, everybody on the 911, definitely knows me and they’re very proactive in how they respond to me.”

The officers working night shifts are often run off their feet and, because it’s a small force, it can sometimes take a while for a cruiser to respond, he said. Nevertheless, the police have taken the time to recognize him and his efforts on more than one occasion. He has received a number of “Challenge Coins” from the police, which are given as a mark of appreciation to civilians who have assisted officers as they do their work in communities.

Will Arnold is awarded a challenge coin by police officers outside his shop, Experience Cycling, in Duncan, B.C. Courtesy of Will Arnold

One day, the entire detachment, including the  inspector and the staff sergeant, showed up at his bike shop to present him with an award.

“It was beautiful. I cried that day,” he said. “It was pretty emotional for me that the police would recognize me.”

‘Good-Thing-Bad-Thing’ Story

Mr. Arnold’s determination to help people in need was a lesson he learned from his mother at a very young age. His mom always taught him to “stand up for the people” who can’t stand up for themselves, he said.

That is a lesson the 59-year-old has carried with him over the years, but it has never been put into practice more than since the drug and housing crisis began to impact the small community where he lives and works.

While he has described the past eight years as a difficult time full of heartache and worry, the knowledge that he is helping others has also brought a lot of satisfaction, he said.

His biggest success to date is Lance, who he described as his favourite “good-thing-bad-thing” story.

Mr. Arnold first began telling his “good-thing-bad-thing” stories while teaching a 14-week elective on bicycle maintenance at a Catholic school. He would begin each session with one of these stories not only to share about the dangers of drugs, but also to talk about the importance of helping others.

While he has many “good-thing-bad-thing” stories to tell, nothing beats recounting Lance’s story, he said.

“Lance is a kid that I never gave up on. He used to graffiti my building, he was always doing drugs around my building, but I never gave up on him and I saw the good in him,” Mr. Arnold said. “If I saw him on the street, I would pat him on the back and buy him a sandwich, or give him a coffee and say, if you ever need me, you know, I’m here for you.”

After three years of Mr. Arnold offering a helping hand and words of encouragement, Lance finally reached out. He has been clean for five years now, and the pair remain close and talk every day.

Lance recovered from drug addiction, supported by Will Arnold. Courtesy Will Arnold

One of his fondest memories of his time spent with Lance is when he took him to a Vancouver Canucks hockey game.

Retired Canucks player Dave Babych heard that he was bringing Lance to a game and surprised the pair by inviting them to the prestigious Club 500 on the penthouse level to watch the game.

“He was waiting for us with a jersey and he signed it and shook [Lance’s] hand, and they sat and watched a game together,” Mr. Arnold said.

“At the end of the game I said to him, ‘Dave I owe you for the jersey’ … and he turned to me and he says, ‘You don’t owe me nothing.’ He said, ‘here’s a kid that was graffitiing and stealing from you, and you never gave up, and you bring him to a Canucks game … The thanks goes to you.’”

‘Chasing the Dragon’

Success stories like Lance’s and some of the other addicts he has helped give Mr. Arnold hope that the drug crisis won’t always plague British Columbia’s cities and towns.

The issue has been rampant since 2016 when the province first declared a public-health emergency in response to a growing number of overdose deaths.

In January 2023, B.C. was the first province in Canada to decriminalize drug use as part of a three-year pilot project with Health Canada. The federal agency issued an exemption to its drug laws, decriminalizing possession of up to 2.5 grams of certain illegal drugs, including heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

The province was not even halfway into the three-year pilot project when it asked Ottawa to recriminalize open drug use in public places such as hospitals and playgrounds. The move came after a public outcry that the project was making the drug problem worse.

The federal government approved the recriminalization request on May 7.

Safer supply programs provide those at high risk of overdose with prescribed drugs as an alternative to purchasing illegal substances off the street.

Mr. Arnold said in his observations, for drug addicts, safer supply drugs may tide them over but it doesn’t truly give them the fix they crave.

“They’re chasing the dragon,” he said, adding that many of the addicts he sees hanging out on the highway near his business start mixing drugs to try to increase the potency.

“That’s when we start to see the deaths.”

He said the government’s recent move to recriminalize public drug use has helped get drugs off the streets, but that doesn’t mean the problem has ceased to exist.

When public use of drugs was decriminalized, “it was more in your face … more blatant,” he said. Since the change last month, “people are hiding it more.”

Education and Healing

Even if the problems with safer supply and drug overdoses do become less noticeable, Mr. Arnold said, it is essential that young people be educated about the dangers of such drugs. Too often he has seen teenagers buying drugs from dealers near his store.

“Schoolkids are lined up buying it from the dealers now, and that to me is so wrong,” he said. “We need to educate our kids. They are our future, and if we’re starting to see kids now getting addicted to the safe supply, that’s a problem, and that’s what scares me.”

Mr. Arnold is a survivor of childhood trauma and that has made him a big believer in helping young people to deal with emotions or past trauma that could set them on a path toward making bad choices like using drugs.

While he has never struggled with drug addiction, he said he understands the impact childhood trauma can have on someone. He was the victim of what he calls a “minor” sexual assault while staying at a friend’s house when he was just 9 years old.

While he doesn’t like to share specific details about the incident, he said he’s not afraid to talk about being victimized as a child because he wants “to encourage people not to be afraid, to speak up.”

“I think we can all learn from our conversations with people,” he said.

If there is one message Mr. Arnold hopes others will take from his story of community activism, it’s that “it’s important to fight for what you believe in,” but he also hopes his story will teach readers that “not all the people on the street are bad.”

“I think, politics aside, we definitely need to work as a community,” he added. “I think that we’re coming into a situation where we’re afraid to speak out, and I hate seeing that. I really do, because I think that everybody has a voice, and everybody should be heard, no matter if you’re on the streets or you’re a business owner.”