Pubdate: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Copyright: 2001, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168 Author: Jane Armstrong FIVE YEARS LATER, HE WOULD BE A HEROIN ADDICT VANCOUVER -- The photograph barely hints at trouble. The handsome blond boy is standing on the beach with a windsurfing board at his feet. He's grinning, but there is bemused distance in his curled lips. His hand dangles by his hip, as though he's too cool now to pose for family photos. The picture was taken in 1991 during an outing at Vancouver's popular Jericho Beach, when Ross Hall was 11. That was the same year he started drinking and smoking marijuana. Living with his parents in a two-storey, wood-frame house in Vancouver's comfortable west side, Ross -- like his older brother before him -- would quit high school, steal from his family and his friends' families, and panhandle on the streets of his well-heeled neighbourhood. Before school each day, he would head downtown to buy smack. One day, he would assault his father in their living room for a cigarette. And he would be in and out of treatment programs, seldom staying clean long enough to finish them, before he was even old enough to drink legally. Ross stopped using heroin four months ago, when he was accepted into a methadone program. He is still addicted to crack cocaine. Now 21, he is tall, with an athletic build and clear blue eyes, a far cry from the scrawny, hollow-eyed addicts that inhabit Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. His hair is cut short. His clothes are West Coast casual. Yet the first thing Ross thinks of when he wakes up in the morning is getting high. If he lets his guard down, for even a few minutes, he finds himself downtown, in an alley, with a piece of tinfoil and a lighter, burning a rock of cocaine until it curls into smoke. "Sometimes my addiction will come on so strong," he says, "I will go down to Hastings Street and I don't know if it's Comet or bleach that I'm buying. But I'm ready to punch out my own mother to get it." There are an estimated 12,000 injection-drug users in the Greater Vancouver region. Last year, 239 people in British Columbia overdosed and died, 96 of them in Vancouver. Many of them lived in the Eastside, Vancouver's notorious ghetto for drug users. Not Ross Hall. He lives on the "good" side of town. But that doesn't seem to have done much to protect him. Ross should have led a charmed life. He was born in 1980, seven years after his parents settled in Canada and four years after his older brother came. Ross's father, Ray Hall, an Australian by birth, was a documentary filmmaker who went on to teach at the University of British Columbia. His British-born mother, Nichola, is now UBC's program co-ordinator in continuing studies, but she lived all over the world in her youth, working in publishing and television. She met Ray in the Middle East, were she worked for the CBC and he was making films for the United Nations. When her children were born, she spent 12 years as a stay-at-home mother. Ross's childhood was filled with travel, elite schools and the attention and love of his parents. Vacations often took him abroad, on visits to Ray's relatives in Australia or Nichola's family in England. The family also loved B.C.'s outdoors. When their kids were small, the Halls joined a camping co-op on Hornby Island, and it's been a summer tradition ever since. Ross and his brother snorkelled and went fishing with their dad. As a child, Ross loved maps, especially of cities. He drew his own of Vancouver, detailing the major roads and traffic patterns. He is still fascinated by traffic, freeways, even ramps. When Vancouver city council was debating its official plan, Ross accompanied his mother to public meetings and often went to the microphone to give his opinion. "He would say: 'I think you should put the road there. That's where it's needed,' " Nichola remembers, laughing. "He wasn't afraid to give his opinion." As he got older, Ross learned to play the piano, composed his own songs and skied like a daredevil. But family life soured for the Halls when their boys reached their teen years. Both boys had trouble in school. The elder, John (not his real name), was bored. Ross was a loner, and he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. On a trip to Australia in 1995, the Halls discovered that their boys were drinking regularly and concealed alcohol in their suitcases. On the plane home, 15-year-old Ross got furious when his parents refused to order him a drink. Soon, both boys were smoking marijuana. John dropped out of school in Grade 11. For months afterward, he complained of flu symptoms and backaches. One morning, six years ago, Nichola walked into the bathroom and saw John with a piece of tin foil and a lit match. John told his mother that it was heroin. He said he had been trying to quit for months and told his parents that he needed help. Nichola and Ray were terrified. They put John on a plane to Toronto's Bellwood Centre, a long-term treatment facility. He completed the three-month program, but on the plane home, he drank to quell his nerves. He started using heroin again within weeks. To pay for his habit, he stole from his parents. Once, Ray returned from a business trip to find that his video cameras worth more than $7,000 were missing. John confessed to hocking them, and they drove to the Granville Street pawn shop. The owner claimed never to have seen John, but in the shop Ray spotted two other still cameras that had vanished months earlier. John had stolen those as well. John started shooting speedballs, a potentially lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine injected into the veins. It cost him $100 a day. Eighteen months after he confessed to using heroin, his parents threw him out. Once he came back in the middle of the night, high, and banging on the door. Ray called the police, who took his son to a downtown shelter. "The officer said, 'You're doing the right thing,' " Ray recalls. "I couldn't believe this was happening to our family." Ross witnessed his brother's spiral -- a cycle of using and thieving, followed by doomed attempts to quit cold turkey. During one bid, John spent four days in his basement bedroom, vomiting and shivering with a fever. He told his parents that he had the flu. Ross knew he was withdrawing from heroin. Still, when John's friend asked Ross if he wanted to smoke heroin, he said yes. "I knew that [John] had been going through withdrawal," he says now, "but it was like, 'I'll never get to that point.' I'll just enjoy this and experience this." Within months, Ross also was using every day, securing a fix before school started at 8:45. For a while, Ross tried to maintain a front of normality, to spare his parents the pain of knowing that a second son was also addicted. "We'd go to Hornby [Island], and I'd detox. I'd be really sick for the first couple of days. I'd tell my dad I had the flu." Ross got himself a dealer who delivered to his house in 25 minutes, "faster than a pizza." When the dealer demanded a $40 minimum purchase, Ross dropped him, preferring to make the daily trip to East Hastings Street to buy a $10 hit to get him through the day at his North Vancouver private school. Other times, he would panhandle or steal shampoo and meat from Safeway for resale at variety stores on the Eastside. As John had, he mined his parents' house for cameras, computers, jewellery, anything of value. When his parents began locking valuables in their room, Ross ripped off his friends' parents. Sometimes, his mother would give him $50 to go skiing, which he would spend on drugs, then return home, fabricating a story of snow conditions on the slopes. Nichola says she had known Ross was troubled, but she never considered that he was using hard drugs. But in 1997, the Halls discovered Ross was using heroin. It was just before Christmas, according to Nichola's journal, but she cannot recall the exact day. "We had been struggling with the ADD and his marijuana use. [John] was already using. It's hard to sort out." She does remember what she felt -- fear, grief and helplessness. She confided in no one, not even her mother, who died suddenly last year. "It's a very, very hard thing to tell other people." Ray says his wife was inconsolable. "It's been excruciatingly difficult for Nicky. She couldn't get past all the promise they showed." Ross was asked to leave school. The teachers were fed up with his truancy and drug use. After that, the Halls plunged themselves into trying to get him help. In the spring of 1998, Ross went to Edgewood, a private centre in Nanaimo, but he was asked to leave after a month because he disobeyed ground rules and distracted other clients. What followed was a string of failed efforts at treatment centres and alternative schooling. Ross's parents sent him back to Edgewood, but he was discharged again; this time they said Ross's problems were too complex for the staff. Mother's Day, 1999, Nichola says, was the worst day of her life. She ended it by fleeing her own home with a friend, her valuables tucked in the trunk of a car. She had been home alone with Ross. Ray was in Australia, visiting relatives. Ross was in withdrawal, struggling to detox on his own, agitated and edgy. Still, he presented his mother with a card: "You are the best mother in the world." Nichola and Ross went to church and then to lunch. She knew her son was waging a physical and emotional struggle to stay clean, right in front of her. She suggested that he go swimming. Ross agreed, but when they got home, he made a phone call, which he didn't want his mother to hear. "My antennae were up. I had seen this before." She knew he was buying heroin. She drove Ross to the pool, and was going to give him the money for the gate entrance, but thought better and bought him the ticket herself. She watched him go in and waited. A few minutes later, he emerged. Nichola caught up with him and confronted her son in public. "I started crying," she recalls. "I said, 'Please, please don't do this.' " Ross was embarrassed and mother and son went back to the car to continue the conversation. They drove home and finally Ross handed her a piece of tinfoil and said, "Okay, okay, I've given it to you. You can flush it down the toilet." Nichola flushed the tinfoil, but she noticed Ross had slipped something else in his pocket before going to his room. A few minutes later, he was on the phone, this time trying to get into a detox centre. While he was talking, Nichola went into his room and grabbed a box from underneath his bed. In it was a primed needle, filled with heroin. She took the needle to her room and locked the door. Within minutes, Ross was banging on her door, shouting, "Where's the box?" He kicked down the locked door and tried to grab the needle from his mother. "Here I am standing in my room with this needle waving around in the air." But Ross was stronger. He grabbed it from his mother's hand, ran downstairs and locked himself in another room. His mother was banging on the door, screaming, when a friend walked up to the front door. By now, Ross had used the heroin and had calmed down. Nichola was the one who was hysterical. Her friend urged her to leave, and the two gathered up the valuables. She stayed at her friend's house until Ray returned a week later. "The only thing you can feel," she says now, "is despair. If you have one child that goes that route, you can say to yourself: 'Well, perhaps that is the way he is.' But if both your children are drug addicts, you have to say, 'Something we did was wrong.' " Ross himself is not so sure about that. "I had this longing for something, like I had this emptiness inside and it wasn't getting filled," he says, sitting on his parents' back porch. "And it wasn't because my parents weren't loving. I started to develop this dissatisfaction, it was like a gnawing dissatisfaction. And when I smoked pot, that went away. It was like that was the thing I was looking for the whole time." The smiling photo of Ross with the windsurfing board was taken when he was 11. In Grade 4, he had been diagnosed with ADD and he coped by erecting a shield of defiance and bravura. "If anyone dared Ross to do anything, he would do it, no matter what the consequence," Nichola says. When he was 4, he threw his teddy bears out the window on a dare from a neighbourhood friend. When schoolmates dared him to climb the wall around Crofton House, a private girls school, he agreed. As a young child, Ross had been self-sufficient, curious and "a joy to be around," his mother says. "He was such good company. He liked cooking and arranging flowers. He could entertain himself for hours." His parents now think that intensity was part of the ADD, but they didn't know it at the time. Ross was interested in fire hydrants, then chimneys, then traffic lights, and sometimes he would focus on such objects to the exclusion of everything else. In Grade 4, a teacher discovered him in the middle of the road outside his school, directing traffic, because he said the busy intersection needed lights. Teachers complained that Ross was distracted. He had difficultly dropping one task and switching to another, and if he had to change classrooms, he would forget his books and supplies. His parents put him on Ritalin, but Ross complained of side effects and showed no improvement. In Grade 6, he was expelled from Kerrisdale Public School after a run-in with a teacher. Ray says his son accused the instructor of being unfair to another student. His parents put him in a private school in North Vancouver, but by then Ross already thought of himself as an outcast. "Ross had such a hard time with his peers," Nichola says. "He was never able to pick up on the vibes of other kids, so he would say the wrong thing. I think that's why he was always up for a dare. The other kids could get him to do anything and I think he did those things as a way to belong." And, eventually, this anxious child turned to alcohol and marijuana. When he is asked how his drug use began, Ross shakes his head and looks down, the same distant smile curling his lips as in the childhood photo. Each time he is asked a question, he takes a deep drag from his cigarette before answering. When he thinks of his first experience with pot, his eyes widen with animation. "It was like a fairy tale," he says. "This porch was just being built. And I got this joint the day before and I came out under the porch. I was thinking, 'Oh, this smells good.' It was like all my senses perked up. It was rather like the euphoria I first experienced with heroin, but not as strong, and not as disconnecting. I was still in reality when I smoked pot, [but] all the harshness was taken away." By the time he was offered heroin, Ross says, "I had broken all those mental barriers that I had toward the dangers of drug using. So when he offered me heroin, it was not so much a danger as it was an opportunity to get a better high." Ross's marijuana partner was Gavin Ruttan, his best friend since Grade 4. They both loved music and high-risk pursuits, especially skiing the "black diamond" runs at Whistler. Today, Gavin is also a recovering heroin addict. The Halls knew Ross was drinking and smoking pot and tried to clamp down. They withheld his allowance, grounded him and cut him off from favourite activities, such as swimming and windsurfing. But he was difficult to discipline, says Nichola, because he never understand the consequences of his actions (another possible symptom of ADD). Ross says he realized almost immediately that he had a problem with marijuana and sought counselling -- a gesture that became a recurring theme throughout his addiction. In Grade 9, he started seeing a counsellor regularly for two years. "It didn't help," he says. "No counsellor has ever helped. You leave with a head full of knowledge and advice, but it won't have any effect on you unless you make a conscious effort to take it to heart," he says. "I didn't." Both Ray and Nichola have searched their pasts, looking for genetic traits that might have contributed to their sons' addictions. Alcoholism was prevalent in Ray's family: His mother drank every day, and two aunts died alcoholics. But neither Ray nor Nichola drink to excess or even smoke. Their backgrounds are filled with professional achievements, hard work and social activism. Lawyers and police officers have scolded the Halls, accusing them of being too soft on Ross. Nichola says she has struggled with the accusation. They tried the tough-love approach with John, and he went into a spiral on the street. "You walk a very fine line as a parent, between being supportive and being what they call an enabler." Some counsellors have said Ross won't get better until the safety net is ripped away and he hits rock bottom. "For Ross, rock bottom would be death," Nichola says. "So what do you do?" They even ordered Ross out several times. Once, when they sent him to Toronto's Bellwoods Centre, they gave him a one-way ticket. He would get the return ticket only when he was clean. He was kicked out of the program for using. When he called his parents, they told him to go on welfare. But Ross wasn't eligible, because he hadn't lived in Ontario long enough. He was considering moving in with a drug dealer. It was February. Toronto was in the grips of a cold snap. The Halls agonized four days before sending a ticket. "Ross could have died in a snow bank in Toronto," his mother says. "I know if we let him stay at home, it is easier for him. But if we kick him out and he dies of an overdose, we will blame ourselves for the rest of our lives." "It's like a bell curve," Ross says, describing the inward battle he wages every day. "At some point on the curve, your mind starts to switch over and you don't remember the pain you've caused. You may start off thinking you're going to have a sober day, but then something triggers a feeling and then you start thinking, 'I'm going to use,' and once you start thinking that, it's impossible to go back." Ross and John are now both on methadone, which controls the powerful physical cravings heroin addicts experience. John has a job at a supermarket (to protect it, he asked that his real name not be used in this article), and Ross just completed him GED exams. John lives in the Halls' basement suite with his girlfriend; Ross lives upstairs with his parents. The Halls have ground rules: No lying, stealing or panhandling. Ross has complied. He goes to support meetings, where he has made some sober friends. The problem is, he is still addicted to crack. "He's using cocaine," Nichola says. "He doesn't tell us because he knows it upsets us. He uses marijuana and he would abuse alcohol too, if he had the money." Ross is luckier than most drug addicts. He has a large cheering section of family and professionals, all tasked with keeping him safe. His doctor phones the Hall residence if Ross skips an appointment. The pharmacist also calls if Ross is late for his daily methadone dose. His music teacher, his math tutor, his parents, his brother, his sober friends in support meetings -- they're all rooting for Ross to beat his addiction. Ray Hall said he has watched Ross struggle with the "bell curve" and it breaks his heart. "He will lie, cheat, betray, steal, feel remorse. He will hate himself, white-knuckle himself for the next three days, then relapse again." The Halls have come to think of their sons' addictions as lifelong diseases for which there is no final cure. Last year, the Halls and Gavin's parents, Rob and Susie Ruttan, started a support group, From Grief to Action, for families of drug addicts. Nichola says talking publicly has helped to quell her feelings of helplessness. The first meeting, last year, was held in a Kerrisdale church and attracted more than 150 people, largely a middle-class group -- including Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen. The group wants policymakers to treat drug addiction solely as a health issue, lobbying for more treatment centres and safe injection sites where addicts can use in clean, supervised surroundings. The Halls know their income gives them political weight. Politicians take their calls. Earlier, this year, Owen unveiled a new drug policy that, for the first time, puts as much weight on harm reduction and improved treatment as on law enforcement. Nichola says there has been a sea change in public opinion about hard-drug use and its effects on the community. "People are starting to realize this is happening everywhere, even in the suburbs. All parents and teenagers have to realize that it is so accessible, even in our neighbourhood. You have to be on your guard." Yet as Ray Hall says, sometimes even personal experience does not help. A UBC colleague recently asked for advice about his own son's drug problems, and Ray says he was dismayed at how little he had to suggest. "I realized that I didn't have anything useful to tell him. All the things we tried to do were predicated on the fact that logic or good sense would kick in at some point." He recalls a school counsellor telling the Halls that Ross just needed to make more friends. Today, Ross goes to support meetings and is looking for a job. He doesn't steal or panhandle. But he can stay free of drugs only for a couple of weeks at a time. He would like to be an urban planner, but he hardly knows where to begin. "I have this fear of success," he says. "It's a fear of the unknown, even doing something that's good, like studying. I know drugs. I know my own isolated world of drugs and procrastination and dependence and immaturity. And I don't know another world." He still feels like an outsider, especially with his peers, most of whom are in university now. The last time he admits to smoking crack, in June, was a bad experience. Walking home from the Eastside, he looked longingly at some kids on the street who looked to be his own age. "They're laughing and going to concerts and I have this heavy crack headache. And I think, 'I can't live like this. I want to have a life, like one of those kids on the street.' " - --- MAP posted-by: