Businesses in Duncan, BC Struggle with Open Drug Use and Violence, but One Shop Owner Aims to Make a Change

June 25, 2024 TruthUSA

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 shop. 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 plaguing 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 neighborhood 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 neighborhood 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.

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