FAST TRACK TO TROUBLE

B.C.'s Building Boom Has Brought Rampant Drug Abuse to the
Construction Industry, With More Widespread Use and More Addictive Substances

Albert Perrin's day used to start at 6 a.m., when he would inject
himself with the first of his three or four heroin fixes for the day.
By 7 a.m., he would be at his job working as a carpenter on a Richmond
highrise condo project on Garden City Road. Perrin had been working in
construction for more than 20 years, first in Alberta and then in
B.C., and he took pride in not being late.

In fact, he worked harder than some other guys because he was using.
One half of his life was a mess, so it was important to him to show he
had a better-than-average work ethic.

At noon, the minute his lunch break came, he would go somewhere for
another fix. Sometimes his dealer, who lived in Surrey, would deliver.
On bad days, especially towards the end, Perrin would leave work to go
to his dealer and not come back.

He would do another fix after work and then again, maybe, sometime
before he went to bed.

He'd tried more than once to clean himself up. Back in the mid-90s, he
went through the special rehab program run by B.C.'s construction
unions at a house in New Westminster, a pioneer program started in
1981 that is one of only two like it in North America.

In fact, Perrin went through twice, the first person ever to be
allowed to do that.

But, working in construction, it was hard to stay off
drugs.

"With the big paycheques you're getting, all the money -- I'd get
drawn in again," says Perrin, a tall, spare man whose lined face with
its deep-set eyes looks older than his 43 years.

At the last place he worked regularly, the condo project in Richmond,
he was hardly alone with his problem.

The company he worked for had 40 men on that site, he recalls. The
guys got paid on Thursdays and would start partying. Sometimes only 25
people would show up the next day.

That all ended for Perrin on Nov. 8, 2006, when he worked his last
day. By then his life was so messed up, he'd had to leave the Richmond
job and was working for cash day to day doing steel-cutting -- and
took his last fix before checking into the Harbour Light Detox in Vancouver.

He's still there, working four shifts a week at the front desk, and
studying Grade 12 math at Vancouver Community College so he can get
into construction at another level, like engineering. He looks a lot
healthier than when he checked in, he got 100 per cent on his last
math test, and he exudes serenity as he deals with the constantly
ringing phone and traffic past his door at the detox.

But, as Perrin knows only too well, there are still hundreds more guys
who are in the same bad shape he was, still working on construction
sites all over the Lower Mainland.

At the Salvation Army's Harbour Light, detox director Nancy McConnell
estimates that anywhere from 50 to 75 per cent of the men they get are
from the construction industry.

A lot stopped being capable of work long before they get to detox
because of their drug problems, but about 20 per cent come from their
job sites straight into the detox to try to get clean.

Illegal-drug use is hardly unique to construction workers. Lawyers,
longshoremen, restaurant workers, miners, doctors, fishermen, and
truckers all have legendary accounts about drug use in their
professions. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Construction has always had a
culture of tobacco, alcohol and drug use. That's typical for any
occupation that employs mainly young, single men who are often working
far from home in high-stress, boom-and-bust, low-skill jobs.

But a long list of reports and surveys from both Canada and the United
States indicates that the construction industry shows up regularly at
or near the top of lists of occupations with the highest rates of
alcohol and drug use.

At the conservative end, a 2002 Alberta report on substance use in the
workplace -- the only study of its kind in Canada -- found that 10 per
cent of workers said they used illegal drugs. Marijuana was included
in that.

"While there was little variation in illicit drug use by industry and
occupation, above-average rates of drug use were reported by workers
in the construction industry," said the report, which relied on phone
surveys and people's willingness to admit their drug use.

The 2007 U.S. Department of Health report on substance use and
employment, which relies on people's self-reports in computer
questionnaires, found that 53 per cent of working adults who said they
had a serious drug habit were working full time. In that survey, about
14 per cent of construction workers identified themselves as heavy
drug users, the second-highest occupation after food-service workers.

Construction is now one of the biggest sectors of the workforce in
B.C. It gained 70,000 workers in the past four years for a total of
about 180,000, so 10 or 14 per cent means a lot of people.

On the ground, local construction workers are the first to tell you
that drug use these days is more widespread, more hardcore, and
involves more serious drugs than in the past.

When workers are asked what proportion of people on their site they
think have a problem with drugs or alcohol, they'll say anywhere
between 40 and 80 per cent.

John Brown, a heavy-equipment operator who has worked on sites
everywhere from Squamish to Chilliwack, says when he started working
in construction 20 years ago, most guys just smoked marijuana. Brown,
now 40, did harder drugs, but he was one of the few.

"When I was doing it, no one else was. Now everybody is," says Brown,
a jittery, compact guy with a heavily tanned face and wispy black hair
that curls up from under his helmet. Brown says he's clean now, but he
still didn't want to give the name of the major Vancouver-area site
where he is working.

Gordie Klassen, the manager of the unions' rehabilitation program,
says that 15 years ago, most of the men who came to the rehab centre
had a drinking problem. Now, it's rare that they get anyone with only
a drinking problem. For a few, it's heroin; for some, it's a
marijuana-plus-drinking combination. But the majority of the
150-something men a year who use their service now come in saying
they're addicted to crack.

Vancouver police say they are seeing a phenomenon in the last couple
of years that is new, even for the Downtown Eastside and its endless
variety of human behaviour.

"There's been a regular occurrence in recent years where we see
construction workers early in the morning, in their boots and hats and
belts and vests, and they're in the lanes doing rock and shooting up,"
says Const. Shane Aitken, who has been a beat cop in the Downtown
Eastside for six years. A favoured place is the lane south of 100 West
Hastings, which is within blocks of several of the city's largest
construction sites.

"There's a noticeable increase," said Aitken, who says they are
spotted around 5 or 6 in the morning, before work sites kick into gear
at 7 a.m. "I asked one worker and he said it's the only way they can
get through the day."

The increased drug use is happening for all kinds of reasons, say
workers and people connected with the industry.

Drugs are much more easily available, even in the dinkiest town and
straightest suburb, and there's a general increase in more people
everywhere doing more serious drugs.

The stress in construction is higher than ever, with desperate
developers anxious to get their buildings up before the condo bust
they're always worried is around the corner and, in some cases,
Olympics-related deadlines. So people are working harder and longer
and, for some, a drug like crack helps them keep going.

"All the way down the line, it's 'Hurry, hurry hurry.' The 2010 is
coming up and they want a floor a week, a floor a week, and there's
this push on," says Calvin Bowe, another resident at Harbour Light
who's done everything from working on high-rise buildings to running
his own business doing soffit construction.

Even Heavy Users Don't Get Fired

Like Albert Perrin, Bowe, who is 50, worked many years while
supporting a $100-a-day heroin habit. "People are working longer hours
or they're working at two and three jobs at once."

Added to that, the current labour shortage is so extreme that even a
heavy drug user won't get fired as long as he shows up on time,
doesn't miss too many days, doesn't get caught using on the job, and
doesn't drop anything on his co-workers.

Even if someone does get fired, he can get a job on another site, no
questions asked, within days. Only the ones who spin completely out of
control can't get work and end up on the streets or in detoxes.

Construction companies and temporary-work agencies are regularly
recruiting out of the region's shelters.

The Beacon shelter, on Cordova Street near Main, had a hand-lettered
sign on the door all this week, saying PCL Constructors is looking for
400-500 workers, paying $20.31 an hour for general labourers, and to
call Dave at the number listed. Agencies like Labour Ready and
WorkForce call at Harbour Light routinely, looking for men interested
in work.

And everyone has an apocryphal tale from this new work environment. A
crane operator was using cocaine every day until, one morning, his
detox sponsor found him strung out and stopped him from going up any
more. Dealers hang around the sites, waiting to collect their money
from guys they sold to on credit the day or the week before. People
are coming to work after they've been up all night and, you bet,
they're accidents waiting to happen. The son of a construction company
owner was selling drugs to people on the site.

Those kinds of stories circulating in the industry, plus reports of
exploding drug markets in boom towns like Alberta's Fort McMurray,
have everyone connected with construction concerned.

Industry concerns about drugs have nothing to do with morals and
everything to do with the bottom line. More drugs mean not just money
lost through more absences and more turnover, but through accidents
and even deaths.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that more drug use might
possibly have something to do with more accidents, and accidents are a
big concern these days.

American studies indicate construction has one of the highest injury
rates of all occupations and that workers' compensation claims are
higher by five times the normal rate in the occupations where drug use
is more prevalent. A Washington State study showed that substance
users had an injury rate of 15 per 100, while it was only 11 per 100
for non-substance-using workers.

The B.C. construction industry made headlines earlier this year when
WorkSafeBC reported that there had been a 36-per-cent increase in
construction-related accidents in 2006, with 21,000 accidents reported
for the year, even though the workforce had grown by only seven per
cent. That was a surprise after years of declining injury rates in the
business.

Last spring, for the first time, the Construction Labour Relations
Association ran a pilot training program for construction supervisors
in how to deal with drug use among their workers. It's now planning
more.

"It's a program we're going to need to expand," says association
president Clyde Scollan. "There is a heightened concern everywhere
about the use of drugs and alcohol in our industry."

Those managers are also getting trained because everyone is bracing
for a new work environment this fall. That's when construction unions
and the industry expect to come out with a new, agreed-on policy for
drug-testing, something that companies have been pushing for.

Added to that, WorkSafeBC is about to launch a study, comparable to
the Alberta one, to try to get a handle on the rates of drug use in
the workplace. That's in part because of its own investigators raising
concerns about the effect of drug use, along with companies pushing
for more information.

At the same time, says WorkSafe investigations vice-president Roberta
Ellis, the organization will also be studying the prevalence and
effects of fatigue, which is frequently cited as a cause of accidents
by both investigators and unions.

But all of those initiatives are not as easily carried out as they
might sound. There are complex legal and research issues when it comes
to trying to figure out when a worker is too impaired to work, which
workers really need to be tested, how you tell the difference between
the effects of drug use and fatigue, what drugs need to be tested for,
and what rights both workers and companies have. A major case is going
to the Alberta court of appeal this fall, one being closely followed
by B.C. employers, over some of those issues.

According to WorkSafe reports obtained through freedom-of-information
requests from The Vancouver Sun, there were 13 construction-related
fatalities reported to WorkSafe in 2006 in the Lower Mainland. Four
were due to natural causes. Of the remaining nine, five showed
positive results for drugs.

However, only one investigation report even alluded to the possibility
that drug impairment played a role. That was the case of Mike Greer,
the blaster for Murrin Construction who was killed in June 2006 as he
was trying to detonate an explosion for the Sea to Sky Highway
construction project.

"Some of the blaster's actions are consistent with the indicators of
. impairment," said the report, which blacked out details of the
toxicology report. "He was performing the blasting work in a
systematic way but was missing steps in the process, probably due to
impairment."

The WorkSafe investigator didn't totally discount the impairment
issue, unlike Greer's father, who angrily told a Vancouver Sun
reporter this summer that his son's cocaine use had nothing to do with
the accident.

But investigator Paul Orr did not name it as a definitive cause,
saying in his conclusion that the causes included lack of proper
equipment, lack of control in the operation, ineffective application
of safety policies and, finally, the "possible impairment" of Greer.

That kind of caution is typical of WorkSafe.

Ask Ellis what WorkSafe knows about the relationship between drug use
and accidents and she'll be frank.

"The frustrating but honest answer is 'We don't know,'" says
Ellis.

Hard to Pinpoint Effect on Performance

Even when a toxicology report shows the presence of a drug, that
doesn't tell the investigator what effect, if any, it had on the
worker's performance. That's especially true for marijuana, which, as
Olympic medallist Ross Rebagliati knows, isn't flushed completely out
of the body for weeks.

Added to WorkSafe's difficulties in figuring out the drug-accident
connection, it can get toxicology reports only for deaths, not for any
of the other thousands of accidents that happen in construction every
year.

Even if investigators could order toxicology reports for living
workers, though, the current debate over drug-testing suggests that
the answers would still be unclear.

"The problem with drug-testing is that it's not identifying whether
people are fit for work," says Scott McDonald, a researcher with the
University of Victoria's addictions centre. Testing only shows what is
in someone's system, not what their performance level is. "Whether it
achieves the goal of improved safety, I'm very skeptical."

People who know the construction industry say what would work better
is if companies invested more in their workers -- watched out for
signs of drug problems and tried to persuade them to get help.

But for many stressed supervisors, it's a lot more tempting to push
their teetering-on-the-edge but still-productive guys to stay on the
job, instead of taking time off to go to rehab, or to fire their
worst-case drug users. They can always hire a new batch off the street.