Source: Vancouver Province (Canada) Copyright: The Province, Vancouver 1999 Website: http://www.vancouverprovince.com/ Contact: Thurs, 14 Jan 1999 Author: Steve Berry, Staff Reporter The Province DRUG CIRCUS A DEADLY ACT John Ferguson still shudders when he sees it: A girl sitting on the steps of the Carnegie Centre with a mirror in her lap, trying to find the vein in her neck she'll shoot with cocaine. Ferguson, the centre's security supervisor, calls this corner of Hastings and Main a "drug circus." It's a circus run by drug-dealing ringmasters who sell poison to a sad audience, more in need of hospital than jail. And the show is becoming steadily more despairing -- and dangerous. "For the longest time it was mostly pills that were sold out there," said Ferguson. "Now in the last year the crack has moved in. Everyone has moved in. We almost long for the pill dealers to be the only ones out there. "It's so bad that people are being injected on our steps. They can't find their own veins and they lie there and have someone inject them in their necks. It's quite amazing." There's the brutal degradation that drugs bring --the defecating in the lane, the overdose deaths. "It's very disheartening to see what's going on," said Ferguson, recalling a man he found in a washroom stall, nearly dead from a drug overdose. The man was revived by paramedics and was back in the same stall two days later, trying to inject himself again. And there's the violence the dealers and users inflict on one another. "We get some terrible bloody beatings out there," said Ferguson. "We go out into the crowd and try to break up fights quite regularly. They can get their face kicked in for a $5 debt." Ferguson said the courts are too lenient on the dealers. "They go to court and nothing happens to them anyways." He says he has sympathy for the users. "I really don't want these people jailed for being drug addicts. "We don't want to see them hurt. We don't want to see them go to jail. We want them to go away." - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck