DRUGS READILY AVAILABLE ON STREETS

This is the first of a six-part series on Sudbury's thriving illegal drug
culture. Today, Sudbury Star reporter Rob O'Flanagan explores the city's
street-level drug scene.

A major section of the "no pain highway" runs through Sudbury. On it, you
can find apple jacks and purple haze, ecstasy and Snow White.

You can travel the highway in a comatose state of relaxation, bothered by
nothing, oblivious to pain. Or you can drive it hard, fast and paranoid,
with hallucinatory phantoms to accompany you on your trip.

Whatever your preferred mode of travel, someone will be there to provide
you with the pharmacological fuel.

Like all other Canadian urban centres, Sudbury is home to a thriving drug
culture - perhaps more thriving than other cities its size. Troubled
children, wealthy professionals, destitute drift-ers, ailing grandmothers
and competitive athletes belong to it. It is multicultural, socially
inclusive and, despite the shortened life expectancy of drug users, it is
growing.

According to Greater Sudbury Police and front-line workers in the field of
addiction, all of the major, illicit street drugs are available in Sudbury,
if you know where to look and who to ask.

Intravenous drug use is higher than average, and former junkies and drug
counsellors say there are a lot of addicts in Sudbury. We have our own
"crack houses," our own "crack whores." We have a needle exchange program
that serves hundreds of addicts. And we have drug dealers who are making a
fortune off the human inclination to avoid pain and experience a brief
moment of euphoria.

Insiders say cocaine (including crack cocaine), marijuana and prescription
medications are the drugs of choice in Sudbury. A smaller number of users
inject heroin, which is harder to come by. MDMA, known commonly as ecstasy,
is readily available. Favoured by young drug users, it is said to induce
overwhelming states of bliss, love and tolerance. Scientific research has
recently found that chronic ecstasy use causes brain damage.

A number of Canadian youth have died under its influence. In Vancouver, a
17-year-old stabbed himself to death after consuming ecstasy at an
all-night rave party.

Sudbury's strip joints and bars, according to Sgt. Dwight Teeple of Greater
Sudbury Police, are fertile ground for drug deals, and if you have the cash
in your pocket (and if the slang term "narc" is not stamped on your
forehead), you can purchase whatever your heart desires.

A lot of people involved

"There are a lot of people involved in the illicit drug trade in Sudbury,"
said Teeple, a 20-year veteran of the police drug unit. "We're fairly
certain that it's the Hells Angels and other outlawed biker gangs that run
the trade. They have a number of associates locally who sell the drugs at
the street level. It's not hard to purchase drugs, you just have to ask the
right questions. Representatives from the Angels are here weekly."

Crack is a distilled form of cocaine that comes in small, crystalline
chunks, or "rocks." Known on the street as ice cube, apple jacks, beemers
and bad, it is used by the city's hardened addicts, many of whom congregate
in a notorious rooming house on the fringes of the city's downtown.
Throughout the day and night, heavy crack smokers, some of them teenaged
prostitutes who work the red light district of nearby Elgin Street, move in
and out of the building in various states of impairment. A recent police
crackdown landed three of the rooming house's residents in jail, a source
said, and a new lock has been installed on the front door to control the
flow of traffic - human and narcotic.

Nick is 21, and a recovering drug addict. He was initiated into his habit
at an age when a large number of Sudbury youth begin experimenting with
drugs. He was 14.

At 15 he acquired a dependency on prescription drugs and alcohol, having
cut his pharmaceutical teeth at the age of 10 on Ridalyn, a mood-enhancing
drug used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder.

The drug is highly valued on the street, Nick said. "There is a big drug
culture here in Sudbury," he said. "I think it is far bigger than most
people think. I could make a call right now and get coke, pills, cannabis. "

In the culture Nick was once an active member of, there are 13-year-old
heroin addicts and girls who "should be home playing with Barbie dolls but
are selling their bodies on the streets for drugs."

In that culture, he explained, kids snort Ridalyn, pop Adavan, Gravol and
Sinutab and wash them down with hard liquor.

"I can see why kids love it - why they love smoking pot, drinking, popping
pills," said Nick, who enrolled in a 12-step program to clean himself up.

"Kids are depressed as hell these days, especially in Sudbury, which can be
a very depressing place, a place that puts the accent on the negative.
Drugs are the great escape."

Nick's addiction was, like all addictions, a progressive one, moving
rapidly from pot and alcohol, to pills, cocaine and crack. A friend
intervened to prevent him injecting heroin, the same friend who later died
of a cocaine overdose.

"It's a fantastic rush when you're high," he said, trying to explain the
psychological effects of drugs - the stimulant that gets you hooked.

"You float. Everything out there that could get to you, can't touch you.
Discovering the power that drugs have, well, it was a fantastic feeling.
But the effect wears off; it takes more to get the same rush.

"So you move to something stronger, and before you know it, you lose
everything and your body can't go without it. That chemical escape, sooner
or later it is going to kill you."

Nick said he never once said to himself, "I want to grow up to be a drug
addict," and he worries that Sudbury's young people are naive about the
life-controlling potential of drugs. When he sees 14-year-old girls smoking
pot near the area's high schools, he shakes his head.

Teeple has seen many Sudburians ruined by drug addiction, their families
destroyed, their property and bank accounts whittled away, their health
damaged or lives lost.

"It's the way of society today," he said. "People are looking to get more
out of life and leisure time.

Drugs give them a higher level of experience - takes them from depression
to thrills. But I don't know why anybody would put some product in their
system that would alter their minds. It baffles me." The life of an addict
is a life of misery and shame, said Satch Pearson, a risk reduction worker
with The Point, Sudbury's needle exchange program run by the Sudbury and
District Health Unit.

It is extremely rare, Pearson said, to meet an old addict; most die young.

'That next fix'

"Not only are you addicted to this substance that rules every aspect of
your life, but you are a criminal on top of it," he said. "Life is about
your next fix. To be OK, you have to have that next fix, and to get that
fix you need money. Some people will do anything for that money. That's why
so many addicts steal or get into prostitution."

The human body is both very fragile and very resilient at the same time,
Pearson said. "We can abuse ourselves to no end. But eventually, drugs get
the best of you. Most drug addicts in this city are in their 20s and 30s.
There aren't too many old drug addicts around."

There are "so many drug addicts in Sudbury," said Pearson. But in one
fundamental way they are no different than addicts anywhere else in the world.

"The drug addict is an extremely self-centred person," he said. "Because of
that self-centredness they are not able to acknowledge the pain their
addiction causes. It screws up their existence, puts them on a fast-track
to suicide, infections and overdoses, and it is heartrending for families.

"The one question the serious drug user needs to ask, is the hardest one to
ask: What is this activity doing to my relationship to myself and my
family, what's it doing to my health and to the community?"

- -- Tomorrow: The stakes are high and police are in pursuit.