Short for Downtown Eastside, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside">a neighbourhood in Vancouver</a>.
Tim Bray: “There's a lot of HIV down there, so the dopers are caught between the Scylla of crack, which kills you quick, and the Charybdis of heroin, which makes you too fucked-up and drowsy to worry about keeping the needle clean.”
From a comment to an article on K5 about the drug problem on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside: “"You couldn't pay me to park my car there and walk away from it, but I never once felt physically threatened walking through the area."” Same here, except as a tall, fairly athletic-looking male, I don't speak for the diminutive women who have had some bad experiences walking through the neighbourhood.
