Pubdate: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC) Copyright: 2002 Times Colonist Contact: http://www.canada.com/victoria/timescolonist/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481 Author: Jody Paterson Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?136 (Methadone) DRUGS AND SEX NEEDLE FERNWOOD NEIGHBOURS The trouble started a few months ago. All of a sudden, dirty needles were turning up by the dozens in Fernwood and furtive couplings were being spotted in strange places as a burgeoning sex trade took hold in the residential neighbourhood. Creole Carmichael, whose Princess Avenue home is in the middle of it all, knew things had changed when her teenage son was solicited one day near the Belfry Theatre while on a driving lesson. Her neighbour Vida Waltz tells a grimly amusing story of following a trail of lingerie in the playground of George Jay elementary to a little pile of three used condoms. The most recent stories are of children finding needles in the sandboxes of local playgrounds, and of a rising number of petty thefts. Neighbours aren't sure who to blame, but they suspect it has to do with the new tenants living at two weary-looking apartment buil-dings on Spring and Ridge roads. Fernwood is proud of being "a bit of a hippie neighbourhood," stresses Carmichael. It's not a place that gets uptight easily, which is why residents never took issue with the owner of the buildings back when the apartments tended to attract "potheads." But the tenants aren't just potheads any more. And as Victoria council learned when angry residents arrived at a meeting last month with hundreds of discarded syringes, used condoms and needle wrappers from their neighbourhood, funky Fernwood isn't feeling quite so tolerant these days. "Addiction is an illness, and being a smoker, I can empathize," says Waltz. "But it's the crime that comes along with it that's the problem." The manager of the Holiday Court Motel knows the Fernwood newcomers well. For a number of years, they lived at the motel he runs on Hillside Avenue, until he squeezed the last of them out this summer amid mounting pressure from his own neighbours. The loose collection of drug traffickers and users, bound together by their addictions to methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, first drifted to Speed Street across from Mayfair Mall. But when a demolition crew of fed-up neighbours forced them out soon after by tearing their house apart, they relocated to two apartment buildings across from the Fernwood Community Centre. Discarded syringes began piling up soon after. Then came the influx of drug couriers, the teenage boys who shuttle drugs to buyers by bicycle. Injection-drug use was suddenly so prevalent in the neighbourhood that the community centre had to start locking its washrooms to keep people from using them to inject. "I walked by a park the other day and there was two prostitutes working at the gate and a guy on a bench waiting for his drugs to be delivered," says Carmichael. "I thought: Is this my neighbourhood?" It hasn't helped that the city's social services have been concentrated in the Fernwood area, says Carmichael. There's a methadone clinic and an AIDS support group on the main street, she notes, and now the city's needle exchange has relocated on Fernwood's border. "The last straw was the detox centre," she says, referring to the Pemberton House facility that recently opened in the old youth custody centre on Pembroke Street. "They didn't even consult us on that." Waltz sees the problem as just more evidence of the folly of Canadian drug laws, and Fernwood as just the latest neighbourhood to bear the pain. "They need to decriminalize the whole thing so people can buy their drugs at a safe-injection site," she says. "They have to put the dealers out of business." The recent problems have little to do with the 10-year-old methadone clinic on Fernwood Road, which doesn't dispense drugs and operates more as a counselling and referral centre. But manager Brian Oswald is feeling the heat nonetheless as tense residents look around for someone to blame. "It's definitely causing some problems for us, this being an election year," says Oswald. "And sure, we've got two or three clients who might cause some trouble. But most people don't even know we're here." Oswald noticed a sharp increase in the number of discarded syringes in the area around February. The mood in Fernwood has gradually grown uglier as the problem has worsened, but Oswald doubts that anything will be solved by simply forcing the addicts into a new neighbourhood. "These people are suffering," Oswald says. "Nobody likes being wired. Half the people using heroin stopped getting high years ago." Inderjit Gill, who owns the two apartment buildings at the centre of the storm, didn't return a call for comment. But Carmichael says the elderly Gordon Head man has received death threats from a competing drug gang demanding that he evict the new arrivals in his Fernwood apartments before the gang's sales are affected. So he was reportedly happy to accept a Fernwood resident's recent offer to act as property manager for the sites. Several eviction notices have since been issued. Police and city bylaw enforcement officers are also working with the community to help the landlord regain control over his buildings, says Victoria Police Insp. Bill Naughton. None of it will do much beyond shifting the problem to another neighbourhood, everybody concedes. But at least it won't be Fernwood's problem any more. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D