ORGANIZATION
The Portland Hotel
The residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where Maté practiced for over a decade — the clinical setting that produced his addiction framework and the institutional embodiment of the harm-reduction philosophy his work helped establish.
The Portland Hotel is the residence and harm-reduction facility in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where Gabor Maté served as staff physician for more than a decade from the late 1990s. Operated by the Portland Hotel Society, the facility served Canada's most severely addicted population — patients with combinations of substance dependence, mental illness, HIV/AIDS, and homelessness whom conventional medical institutions had largely failed to reach. Maté's work at the Portland produced the clinical experience on which In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts was based, and the harm-reduction philosophy the facility embodied provided the institutional foundation for his framework's rejection of moralizing approaches to addiction.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Portland's approach was founded on the premise that traditional abstinence-first addiction treatment had systematically failed the most severely affected populations, and that harm reduction — meeting patients where they are rather than where the treatment system wishes they were — produced better outcomes across