The Americans notice Vancouver....

Isn't time for us to clean up Vancouver???

Five blocks away from the venue for Vancouver's Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, four grizzled addicts huddle in the rain, injecting themselves with heroin behind a trash bin.

This is the Downtown Eastside, where life is volatile and the slightest misstep can invite brutal retaliation.

"It's a jungle," said Glen, a 49-year-old heroin addict who goes by the street name Trouble. "You want to get out of here."

As Vancouver prepares for the Olympics and the descent of the world's media, the Downtown Eastside remains a huge problem -- 15 square blocks of despair, squalid rooming houses and alleys populated by thousands of addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug dealers who prey on them.

This neighborhood is the most concentrated drug and poverty ghetto in North America, with high use of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, according to criminologist Benedikt Fischer of Simon Fraser University. It also is the only place in North America where drug addicts can shoot heroin into their veins at an officially sanctioned injection site.