Pubdate: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Copyright: 2007, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168 Author: Erin Anderssen Note: Erin Anderssen is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail. CANADA'S CRACKED-OUT CAPITAL 'Just Suddenly Overnight It Seemed Like A Ghetto' OTTAWA - You know you're in Ottawa when the first drug dealer you meet once worked on Parliament Hill. On a cold Friday afternoon, Raymond Lambert leans in his black leather jacket against the wrought-iron gate outside the Shepherds of Good Hope, a homeless shelter on the edge of the Byward Market, a short walk east of the Peace Tower. It's cheque day, so the crack business will be brisk: His regulars will have their personal-needs allowances, $4 for each night spent at a city shelter. Police and shelter staff call it the Personal Narcotics Allowance. On such days, Frenchy - as he is known to everyone, even police - can make $150 a half-hour. In his 20s, he made a living delivering documents for MPs and in his free time played pool on the top floor of the Confederation building. Then he started snorting coke. Now, 20 years later, he's the front man - - "tour guide" in street jargon - for a dealer based in nearby public housing. He gets crack cocaine a few rocks at a time, and walks over to the Shepherds to sell it: $20 for an amount roughly the size of a pea, $5 for a bread crumb. His regulars often pay in loonies and toonies, the proceeds of panhandling. Some days he walks to the change machine at Loblaws with more than $100 jingling in his pockets. He spends most of it on his own $700-a-day habit: He gets high, on average, every 40 minutes. Frenchy's jeans are caked with mud. His face has the same dry, pinched look as his customers, who pace around him even now, waiting for two police officers on the sidewalk to leave. This winter, he spent three months in jail for dealing. Crack didn't just arrive in Ottawa one day, but it seems like it: In the past 18 months, police and outreach workers have seen an explosion in the amount available in the capital, sweeping through a street population that already had one of the country's highest rates of hepatitis C and HIV. It was as if the chronic alcoholics and rambling pot smokers were suddenly replaced, as in many Canadian communities in recent years, with a more unpredictable, reckless kind of addict. "Crack is an epidemic right now," says Constable Mike Stoll, who patrols Ottawa Centre. "The supply has gone through the roof. Five years ago, working down here, you saw crack every once in a while. Now there's not a day that goes by that we don't see crack. . . . They smoke crack right on the corner. They don't care." The high is immediate and intense, but lasts only minutes. Addicts describe sharing their pipes with strangers, despite serious health risks, just to have a taste of the leftover resin. They steal bags of meat from the grocery story to sell for crack money. They convert Tim Hortons gift certificates and bus tickets - thoughtful offerings from passersby - into coins for a crumbly grain of rock. When they get really desperate, they sell themselves. On this particular cheque day, police break up a drug deal not five minutes before a group of schoolchildren parade past on their way to the National Gallery. Ottawa's design is a dealer's dream. Canada's capital has one of North America's most centralized downtown cores, with its main entertainment area, high-end shopping district, historic food market and major tourist attractions all contained in four square blocks. Luxury condos are under construction. The American embassy, the Chateau Laurier and the Parliament Building line up one side. If you're among the 6.3 million tourists expected to visit this summer, you're not likely to run into Frenchy. But his Ottawa sits in the margins of that postcard picture, where the users (who make up only a small portion of the homeless) gather around three shelters and several social-services agencies, drifting like doomed spirits among shoppers and diners and the late-night bar crowd to beg change from sympathetic tourists and government workers - handouts that police are now trying to discourage. "It's a trap here," says Dave M., a 42-year-old from Halifax who, like Frenchy, sells to pay for his habit. "You can spend everything you have and you never have to worry about going hungry and you've always got a place to live. There's no other place like this in Canada. The opportunity to support your drug habit is phenomenal." More crack invariably means more crime, and one drug tends to follow another. Crystal meth is already appearing on Ottawa's streets in small batches. "We're probably still at the state where, if we as a city want to do something about it, it hasn't become an impossible problem to solve," says newly elected Mayor Larry O'Brien. Although he was born here and lives in a condo next to the Chateau Laurier, he didn't know Ottawa had a crack problem until police gave him a tour. "I thought my toonies were going for coffee and food." Sabina Sauter and her neighbours could have told him otherwise. Ms. Sauter owns a 22-room inn a few doors up from the Ottawa Mission, a men's shelter. She installed a $5,000 security camera in her front lobby last December. The videos show crack smokers gathering almost nightly and sharing pipes in the small entrance of her inn, where guests buzz to be let inside. One user appears to have hidden a rock under her radiator for later pickup. In the past year, at least 20 would-be guests have refused to keep reservations or checked out. "They say, 'I'm not staying here, there are drug dealers right outside your house.' . . . It is absolutely disastrous for us around here." Across the street, Katherine Gibbs watches drug exchanges from her 13-year-old daughter's bedroom window. Sometimes, users sit and smoke crack on the front porch of her heritage home. The dealers park in black SUV Pathfinders while their go-betweens circle on bicycles; one man she calls Yellow Shoes hands crack out "like Halloween candy" on the sidewalk. Her family always liked the eclectic mix in the area - the students, families, shop owners, even the shelters. Now, they think often of moving. "Those were the good old days, when we used to have drunks," she says. "Just suddenly overnight it seemed like a ghetto." Ottawa isn't alone. In mid-sized and rural communities across Canada, the crack trade is flourishing. Marijuana remains the leader and crystal meth may be the flashy newcomer, but crack has moved in stealthily as one of the most prevalent and addictive drugs. Narcotics are like fashion trends: What's hip in Toronto and Vancouver takes time to filter out into the rest of the country. But eventually, dealers facing competition in major centres look for better profits in untapped markets. And the problem isn't limited to the street: Drug-treatment centres report seeing more patients from all backgrounds with crack addictions, many of them stalled on waiting lists. Geoff Norbury, the executive director of Newgate 180, a private treatment centre outside Ottawa that caters largely to middle-and-upper-class clients, says he has seen a 20-per-cent increase in five years in callers and patients with crack problems. In Sudbury, Ont., Sergeant Peter Orsino, head of the police drug unit, describes an addict who blew his entire $100,000 salary on his crack habit. In 2005, for the first time, Calgary police statistics on cocaine incidents outnumbered those involving pot; crack incidents had doubled since 2001. Last year, the detox at Winnipeg's Main Street Project saw more crack addicts than alcoholics. In Sudbury, the amount of crack seized by police has increased by five times in the past five years. "And I would say we're only scratching the surface," Sgt. Orsino says. What's happened is basic economics: Supply went up and prices went down. In the early 1990s, when crack was headline news, a gram of coke in an American city sold for an average of $275 (U.S.). Fifteen years on, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report, it was a bargain at $104. Cocaine comes to Canada mainly in powder form from the United States and, since the 1990s, the amount has increased significantly - recently, the RCMP has seen a thriving cross-border trade of Canadian pot for American coke. The wholesale price in Canada has dropped by more than 60 per cent in a decade, says RCMP Superintendent Paul Nadeau, national director of the force's drug branch. In the latest survey by Health Canada, the proportion of Canadians who reported using coke or crack in their lifetime tripled to 10.6 per cent from 1994 to 2004. But the homeless don't have phones to answer surveys, and crack is mainly a poor person's drug. It is made by boiling down cocaine powder with water and baking soda so it cools into a solid: The name comes from the crackling sound when it's smoked. It resembles bits of old soap and breaks handily into tiny fragments, or rocks, priced by size. In Ottawa, a bread crumb of crack rock costs less than a $6 bottle of fortified sherry. In her neighbourhood, Ms. Gibbs related in an e-mail last week, "it's got back to how it was last summer." She can track the action in 20-minute intervals: Users gather on the corner, dealers arrive and distribute and then it starts over again. When she turns her lights out at 11 p.m., the street is still active. "We have a whole network of people on the move the whole time." Last week, while her husband was walking the dog before bed, he encountered a man face down on the steps of a nearby church. He was using a small knife to scrape tiny remnants of crack from the grooves in the outdoor carpet. "We'll make an arrest in the first five minutes," Constable John Gibbons predicts from the passenger seat of the unmarked police car. And sure enough, rounding onto Murray Street, on the edge of a parking lot up from the Shepherds of Good Hope, three men are huddled together. Constable Stoll drives the car up on the sidewalk. The two officers leap out and order the men to put their hands on the wall. "I'm not selling," grunts Mohammed, a young black man in a green tuque, as his wrist are snapped into handcuffs. "I'm buying." Constable Gibbons finds a pipe in Mohammed's pants pocket and three folded five-dollar bills. They've met him before - he's what's known as a "crumber," selling tiny bits of crack to offset his habit. One of the others insists this is his first time buying crack downtown. He promises not to return. Patting them down, the officers don't find any crack. Constable Gibbons lets them go with a warning. "Are you going to quit?" he asks Mohammed amicably, handing back the money. "Not today," Mohammed says. Later, one of the men is found smoking in a washroom at Shepherds - he probably hid the crack down his pants, but there's a limit to how far the police are prepared to search. A few hours later, they run into Mohammed hanging out in a known crack house in an apartment building owned by the city. This is how hard it is to police crack. The drug has no smell. Crumbs dropped on the ground are almost impossible to find. It takes seconds to smoke: By the time an officer sees the flame, the evidence is gone. On the street, a call of "six up" warns that police are approaching (and, touchingly, "kids up" means to hide the drugs because children are near). "I can't run fast enough," Constable Gibbons says. He uses a trick called the Johnny Run and Scare: He yells while charging the dealers, exploiting the fact that he's six-foot-three, 260 pounds. That's how he caught Frenchy last winter. When he ran at him, Frenchy tried to swallow his crack (it doesn't break down, so he meant to throw it up later), but in his panic he missed his mouth. The drugs hit his face. "Someone was supposed to be keeping six," Frenchy says wryly. "I don't like seeing you in jail," Constable Gibbons tells him today. "But I liked seeing you when you came out. You put on weight. You looked good." Before he was a cop, Constable Gibbons worked on the front lines at the Ottawa Mission. As a teenager, he volunteered at the Shepherds. He knows the locals by name - the woman who gave up the keys to her apartment for a hit, the teen runaways who ignored his warnings to go home and ended up as prostitutes, the alcoholics who switched to crack. "This drug," he says, "sucks the life right out of you." He's been working the Market for five years, long enough to understand that these people are victims. He likes to promise addicts he'll take them to dinner if they ever get clean. So far, it hasn't happened. A lot of what the police do is maintain a presence, for instance parking a squad outside the McDonald's on Rideau Street where dealers do business. If they are "invited" inside a crack house, they don't need a warrant: While the drugs are invariably hidden or flushed away, their regular visits make the places less comfortable. Constable Gibbons is not shy about making arrests. "Being a police officer is a pretty blunt instrument to solve social problems," he concedes. "But it is highly effective." Though not all the time. One dealer he collared got just 14 days: "If they were selling to kids on a playground, that wouldn't happen. How is preying on homeless people with addictions any different?" Like many officers, he is not a fan of the crack-pipe program Ottawa introduced two years ago. It is meant to reduce the spread of disease among crack users by providing access to safer pipes. With a pipe, crack is smoked by wedging a screen filter into a glass tube and placing a rock on top. Unlike opiate users, who may inject once or twice a day, crack smokers seek dozens of daily hits. Sucking repeatedly on a hot pipe causes blisters and burns in the mouth and on the gums - the combination of pipe swapping and unsafe sex spreads HIV and hepatitis C. Complete crack kits, given free to users, include condoms, antiseptic hand wipes and, crucially, rubber mouthpieces to prevent mouth sores. A survey last fall found that roughly 40 per cent of injection-drug users - an even higher-risk activity - were using needles less since the program started. A majority of users said the program had not increased the crack they smoked and there was a significant decline in reports of sharing pipes. But most users take only the pipes and the filters - over four days of interviews in the Market, not one produced a pipe with a rubber mouthpiece on it or said they used one regularly. Almost all spoke candidly about sharing pipes, sometimes multiple times, to get "seconds" off leftover resin. "I'm the one out there," Constable Gibbons says, "and they are not using it properly. What I see is a lot more people smoking crack - it's become more socially acceptable." "But did you see what they were using before?" asks Andrew Cheam, program co-ordinator at Centre 454, the drop-in centre that hands out kits next door to the Shepherds. With no pipe, addicts will use empty pens or punch holes in dented cans to inhale the smoke of burning crack. A clean pipe, Mr. Cheam says, is still safer than a pop can. And every time an addict comes in, he makes contact. "I might only get seven seconds. If they hear anything, they hear, 'Be safe.' " This is the challenge of any harm-reduction program: How do you get a population with so many social problems to take safety precautions, especially when a bargain-basement drug is widely available? Nick, 16 years old, is panhandling outside the Fresh Fruit store. He has just got a pipe from the program and promptly lent it to a friend. Nick has been on the street only a couple of weeks; he left the Shepherds shelter because he was scared, and slept in a parking garage for a couple of nights. Not even old enough to grow a beard, Nick is hard to walk past without pity. After 20 minutes, he has $15 in change collected in a king-size pack of du Maurier Light cigarettes. He plans to use the money to buy a $1.99 hamburger at McDonald's and then score some crack. "I buy as much as I can." Asked about the risk of disease, he shrugs. "I don't worry about that." On a quiet Monday evening outside The Bay in Byward Market, Mark K. is becoming more and more frantic. He darts back and forth across the street, walking up to pedestrians directly and asking politely, "Do you have a minute?" Often, they do. Mark is 20, neatly dressed, tall and blond with a tidy goatee - he could pass as a university student needing directions. An older man in a plaid jacket, riding his bike to buy tomatoes in the Market, gives a few coins. "He had an honest face," he says afterward. Mark used to ask for money for bus tickets, but now he says he needs to buy formula for his kid. How do you refuse a dollar, if there's even a chance that there's a baby somewhere in need of food? As it happens, Mark says he does have a three-month-old son. But he's not buying formula. He has been at it since 10 a.m., so far collecting enough coins for five hits. For food, he bummed some leftover tabouleh salad from a young woman sitting under a tree outside Chapters. The instant he puts together another $2, he sprints off to the McDonald's, where a dealer he knows will sell to him if Mark promises to bring in new business. Then Mark slips into a corner on the ground floor of a nearby parking garage to smoke, unfazed by people and cars passing by. They pretend he's not there, except for one haggard homeless man who wanders over to bum a light. "It's such a small amount," Mark complains, poking the filter into his pipe and carefully placing the crack on top. "It just gets me by." A Barenaked Ladies song plays from a speaker above his head. He takes one long haul. In the shadow of the flame, with his sucked-in cheeks, he is instantly aged 20 years. Mark savours the high for what seems like mere seconds. Then he marches out of the garage to start over again. "It gets pretty tiring," he says. "I don't like what I have to do." His latest stint on the streets has lasted about a week now, since his parents kicked him out: They say he can come home if he goes to rehab in North Bay this month. If he's going into detox, he figures, why bother quitting now? But he doesn't rank his odds of success very high. He had coffee with his mom this morning. She brought him a new jacket because he told her his old one was "jacked" last night. In reality, he sold it for $20. Users like Mark are the reason homeless advocates and police are telling people to stop giving to panhandlers, an act they say unwittingly fuels the crack industry. Jean-Marc Portelance, 22, one of the city's most prolific panhandlers, claims to have made more than $100,000 in one year, sometimes averaging $1 a minute, and spent it almost entirely on drugs. "I make more money panhandling than I would at any job," he says. A government worker might hand him $20 from her car; another vehicle, with a dealer at the window, would exchange it for crack. But convincing the public not to give to panhandlers is a tough sell. For one thing, if you remove one source of drug money, won't petty theft increase? Police can clamp down on the people who approach cars stopped at lights, but there's a lot of compassion for the sad man on the corner with his request for cash scrawled on a cardboard box. It seems inhuman to walk by a panhandler when you're carrying a shopping bag of new clothes, coming from a nice meal or heading home from your government job - and that describes most of the people passing through the Market. "It was kind of sketchy," says Susan Young, 22, who was coming home from work and gave Mark a loonie after he used his baby-formula line. But, she says, "it's just a dollar. When someone comes up to me, what am I going to do?" For Ottawa, this summer will be the test. Mayor O'Brien continues to mull the fate of the pipe program. A coalition of business and social services has formed to address panhandling and safety issues in the downtown. Among the homeless, the problem is the lineups for rehab and affordable housing. But now it's spring. Soon the Market will be humming with commerce of all kinds. It will be easy for the crowds to overlook the desperation a few blocks to the east, or to ease their middle-class guilt by tossing a few coins at it. Which is, at 9 p.m., what someone does once more for Mark K., who continues to deny he even has an addiction. He dashes into the McDonald's, but his dealer has left, promising to be back in 20 minutes. "I gotta go," Mark says, rubbing his hair and bouncing on his heels. "I can't wait that long." He runs off through the now-empty produce stalls of the Market and disappears - chasing, always chasing, the next high. Erin Anderssen is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek