Pubdate: Sat, 02 Apr 2016
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.ottawacitizen.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Andrew Duffy
Page: B1

THE SURVIVOR

Dave Pineau Is an Addict and Advocate for Harm Reduction, Andrew Duffy Writes.

As Dave Pineau's injection drug use snowballed in the early 1980s, 
harm reduction amounted to a matchbox and a bottle of Aqua Velva.

Pineau regularly shared needles with four members of a close-knit 
group of friends, all of them homeless on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The men were partial to cocaine and speed, a powerful amphetamine 
that jacks up the central nervous system. They'd mix the drugs with 
water, draw the solution into a needle, and slam it into their veins.

They knew the practice came with risks: that hepatitis B and other 
diseases could be passed in a needle tainted with infected blood. But 
new needles cost $10 each, while used ones were $5.

So the men adopted rudimentary safety measures.

They'd buy new needles when there was money to spare, and sharpen old 
ones on the side of a matchbox then sterilize them with cheap 
aftershave. (Sometimes, Pineau would forget to rinse the Aqua Velva 
from a needle and would "taste" the aftershave with his first hit; 
research suggests he likely smelled volatile compounds being 
eliminated through his respiratory system.)

"That was our idea of harm reduction," he says.

On the street, Pineau had heard about a dangerous new threat - 
gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) - but figured he had nothing to 
worry about as a heterosexual. Yet the disease, which would come to 
be known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), was already 
spreading well beyond the gay community.

By the early 1980s, the virus that causes AIDS had infected 
bloodstreams across the Downtown Eastside, including those in Pineau's clique.

The first of his friends to be diagnosed with HIV, Pineau is the only 
one still alive. Two of his Vancouver running mates died from AIDS; 
two others died from unknown causes.

Pineau has lived with HIV since 1985, which places him among the 
small cohort of Canadians who have managed the disease for three 
decades without developing AIDS. He is co-infected with hepatitis C.

Now a leading advocate for a safe injection site in Ottawa, he draws 
on his own experience to make the case.

"I think my life would have been very different if there was real 
harm reduction when I was young," says the 55-year-old Pineau.

The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre recently announced that it 
plans to renew its attempt to open a safe injection site in downtown 
Ottawa. Neighbourhood consultations begin Monday, even though Mayor 
Jim Watson and Police Chief Charles Bordeleau remain deadset against the idea.

Pineau contends a safe injection site would save lives by giving drug 
users a place to obtain clean needles and inject drugs under a 
nurse's supervision.

"This is basic health care for us," he says.

Estimates suggest Pineau is one of about 5,600 injection drug users 
in Ottawa, a population at high risk of death and disease. According 
to Ottawa Public Health, 10 per cent of injection drug users in the 
city have been diagnosed with HIV, while 70 per cent have hepatitis 
C. As many as 50 people die in Ottawa every year from drug overdoses, 
while hundreds more are hospitalized.

During the chaos of his addict's life, Pineau has come close to death 
a handful of times due to overdoses. He has sold drugs and delivered 
them; he has shoplifted and thieved to finance his habit. He has been 
beaten for trying to defraud a drug dealer. Once, he woke up beside a 
dead woman, but he can't remember her name.

"It's surprising I'm still alive," he admits. "But I feel like I'm 
here because there's something I'm meant to do."

- ---

Dave Pineau grew up in a middle class home in Windsor, where his 
father was a federal customs agent and his mother a sales clerk at 
Sears. It was, he says, a loving and stable home.

But as a young teen, Pineau wanted desperately to be accepted into 
his school's fast crowd. He shared his first joint in Grade 8, taking 
such a mighty drag that he fell over and hurt himself.

If it was an omen, Pineau ignored it.

"You had to do what they did to stay in that crowd so I fell into 
that trap," he says.

For Pineau, drugs and alcohol also fulfilled another compelling need: 
medication. Although it would be decades before his clinical 
depression was diagnosed, Pineau remembers the way that hash, pot and 
booze lifted the clouds of despair that darkened his world. Drunk or 
high, he felt normal, like part of the happy majority.

"That was a trap for me," he says.

Pineau's addiction flowered quickly. In Grade 9, he dropped out of 
school and began to drink at home. Conflict with his parents 
escalated. They wanted him to get a job, cut his hair, straighten up, 
but Pineau wouldn't bend to their will.

"I was very entrenched," he says.

His spiral accelerated. He was caught shoplifting record albums - 
Pineau was partial to Black Sabbath - and was sent to a group home. 
Later, he was arrested for selling $1 joints to other kids in a park.

In court, he saw his parents walk in with a lawyer and thought they 
were about to ride to his rescue. His father, John, set him straight: 
"The lawyer is for us, not for you."

Pineau was sentenced to time in a detention home, but his addiction 
and depression went untreated. He turned to fraud to finance his 
habit - returning stolen department store merchandise for cash - then 
attempted to rob a local pet store at knifepoint. The woman behind 
the counter refused to give him anything so he fled empty-handed.

"Stupid. Stupid. Stupid," Pineau says of the robbery attempt.

In March 1979, afraid of being sent to jail, Pineau and a girlfriend 
boarded a bus for Vancouver.

They were broke and hungry by the time they reached Calgary.

- ---

In Vancouver, the couple soon went their separate ways and Pineau 
ended up on the drug-infected streets of the Downtown Eastside. 
Eighteen years old, he began to use hard drugs in order to assimilate.

"The unwritten rule was that if you wanted to stay part of a street 
crowd, you had to do what they were doing," he says.

Pineau first tried MDA, a synthetic stimulant known on the street as 
"Sally." He crushed some MDA pills, mixed them with water and 
injected them into his arm in a process known as "smashing." For 
Pineau, it brought psychedelic bliss.

"That was it for me," he remembers. "I fell in love with drugs and 
smashing. I felt like I could be whoever I wanted."

He tried injecting heroin, speed and coke into his veins, and 
eventually fell in with four speed freaks.

The five addicts made money by buying "bathtub speed" from a 
University of British Columbia chemistry student, and mixing it with 
Novocain, an anesthetic used in dentistry. They would upsell the 
mixture on the streets as cocaine - at five times the cost of making 
it - when pure coke was in short supply. (The Novocain fooled buyers 
who tested coke by rubbing it into their gums: Street wisdom held 
that good coke made them numb.)

The group's hand-to-mouth drug trafficking financed a daily ritual. 
One of the five would rent a room, and the other four would sneak up 
the hotel fire escape, armed with what Pineau calls the day's 
"accoutrements:" booze, hash, pot and enough hard drugs to stoke five 
addictions - and forestall a next-day crash.

"At first it was great," says Pineau, "but the more you got involved 
with your habit, the more of a grind it was."

The five became ever more nervous about being arrested or found out 
as fraud artists. It also became more difficult to hold enough drugs 
in reserve each night to avoid jonesing the next day.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Pineau escaped the grind. In October 1984, 
he met a woman, Judy, who owned a car and held a job. They hit it off 
and moved in together.

Pineau stopped using drugs, held down a part-time job, and began to 
take courses towards his high school equivalency diploma.

"Things were pretty good for the first time in a long time," he says.

One day, Judy convinced him to accompany her on a trip to donate 
blood. At the Canadian Red Cross office, Pineau was too embarrassed 
to admit his injection drug use on a questionnaire.

It was the spring of 1985 and the Red Cross had just introduced a 
screening program for HIV.

Weeks later, he received a letter in the mail: "We regret to inform 
you that your blood has tested positive for the HIV virus," it read.

Stunned, Pineau called the number at the bottom to understand how 
long he had to live. "She said three to five years if I was lucky," 
he remembers. "I asked if there was anything to do to improve my 
chances and she told me to stop smoking and take a multivitamin. Then 
she hung up."

Later that same year, U.S. actor Rock Hudson would reveal he was in 
the late stages of the disease. He would become the international face of AIDS.

Pineau was afraid to tell anyone about his diagnosis. His 
relationship dissolved. He went back to the embrace of cocaine and 
speed, but this time, he kept strictly to himself.

"Even though I wasn't gay, HIV was associated with being gay. So I 
was so fearful of people finding out that I was HIV positive. I 
feared I would be bashed. I didn't go out. I had my apartment and I 
self medicated all the time."

Pineau waited for years to sicken and die. But it didn't happen. 
Thanks to AZT and an early form of the drug cocktail that would prove 
so effective against HIV, Pineau remained remarkably healthy.

He eventually took a full-time job in a Richmond auto parts 
warehouse, but lost it when he was discovered injecting drugs in the 
company bathroom.

When his drug debts piled up, his dealer confronted Pineau at 
gunpoint and gave him an ultimatum. It ended with Pineau working as 
an indentured drug courier.

In 1992, his debt repaid, he bought a plane ticket to Toronto to 
start fresh. But even a five-hour plane ride was fraught with 
difficulty for an addict like Pineau. He asked the flight attendant 
to let him sit at the back - he told her he had diabetes - so that he 
could smash cocaine in the washroom. But he didn't account for the 
altitude and almost overdosed mid-flight.

"All I can remember is people knocking on the door, and I remember 
thinking to myself, 'Where is that sound coming from?' It sounded 
like they were trying to break in the door."

Pineau landed in Toronto, jonesing badly, and walked straight into 
that city's crack cocaine epidemic.

- ---

Within hours of arriving in the new city, Pineau had scored his first 
few rocks of crack in a downtown strip mall. At first, he wasn't sure 
how to use it since he had only ever seen the powdered stuff. Then he 
remembered something he had seen on TV: reporter Geraldo Rivera's 
investigation of New York City's crack scene, which showed users 
smoking crack using an old pop can.

Crack became his drug of choice.

"I came to Toronto and basically traded one addiction for another," he says.

Crack offered a shorter, more intense high than injected cocaine, and 
induced powerful cravings for more. Pineau was once so desperate that 
he tried to scam a street dealer out of a $10 rock while he was 
penniless, saying he would buy more if the "tester" proved 
acceptable. The dealer split his head open with a glass bottle.

Pineau lived in a hostel and suffered his addiction for almost two 
years before turning for help to the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation.

He later joined the foundation's speaker bureau and began to tell his 
story to audiences at treatment centres and high schools. He found 
the work cathartic. "It was the greatest thing I had ever 
discovered," he says. "I felt like I was exorcising my demons and at 
the same time helping other people learn from my experience."

Inspired, Pineau moved into an intensive drug treatment program, and 
in February 1996, he was hired as an outreach worker by the 
foundation. He was promoted and played a key role in establishing a 
needle exchange program.

For four years, Pineau worked and stayed clean - the longest stretch 
of his adult life - until suffering a calamitous relapse.

He met an HIV-positive prostitute at the needle exchange program, and 
invited her back to his apartment in an attempt to dissuade her from 
sharing needles with an unsuspecting client. He was also, Pineau 
admits, interested in sex.

Pineau bought booze and dope, and the two binged for days before 
going to bed together. In the morning, he awoke to find the woman 
stone cold: her lips were purple, he says, and she had defecated in bed.

The woman had been smashing "peelers"- coated morphine tablets - 
while also taking methadone as part of a treatment program. The drugs 
proved a deadly combination.

Pineau panicked that morning. "You know the first thing I did? I 
phoned my dealer for a delivery."

After he started to get high, Pineau called for an ambulance to take 
away the woman's body. He returned to crack with a vengeance. Within 
four months, he had burned through all of his money, and had lost the 
best job of his life.

In November 2000, he moved to Ottawa to reconnect with an old 
girlfriend and escape Toronto's crack scene.

- ---

At 55, Dave Pineau has been living with addiction for the better part 
of four decades. Although he has tried many times to overcome his 
habit, he's not sure anymore that it's possible.

"It's always a goal, but obtaining that goal fades in and out," he 
concedes. "Sometimes, I feel it can be achieved, but sometimes I feel 
I'm just playing around with it."

Pineau says he's better today at managing his addiction: He takes the 
sleep-inducing drug, Trazodone, an anti-depressant, when he's using 
to ensure he goes to bed at the end of the night, rather than 
carrying on for days. "Wisdom does come with age," he says.

He lives on disability support payments, and volunteers with the AIDS 
Committee of Ottawa and with community groups lobbying to bring a 
safe injection site to Ottawa.

He believes it to be his life's remaining purpose: "I know what's at 
stake," Pineau says.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom