Julia basically grew up on Victoria streets after her parents kicked her out at 14 and the systems that are supposed to notice something like that missed her entirely for the next 4 years. “It’s hard enough to find a place to live as an adult, let alone when you’re 14,” says Julia. “I bounced around from place to place for a long time.” Now 23, Julia has housing but still finds her community on Pandora, where so many of the adults who helped her through those years and became her family continue to be stuck in homelessness themselves. She had some powerful insights for a CBC reporter yesterday when media was on the Block in the runup to a six-hour closure of the area for a big cleanup of sidewalks and boulevards. The reporter asked Julia what she would say to people who argued that the existence of a place like the 900-block was “enabling addiction.” Julia told her that if it hadn’t been for drugs these past 9 years, she’d almost certainly be dead by now. Such a truth: Drugs can be both the sickness and the cure.