DRUG USE SOMETIMES STARTS AS YOUNG AS AGE 7 IN NORTHERN B.C., POLICE SAY

Methamphetamines Especially Easy For Children To Obtain

PRINCE RUPERT - Children as young as seven are trying drugs, an RCMP
assistant drug awareness coordinator said this week.

"I've been in communities where it's age seven [for a first drug
experience]," said Const. Craig Douglass during a presentation by the North
District Drug Awareness Service to community members. "But on average it's
12 to 13 years old.

"It's a scary age -- they may try alcohol and then another drug and it
moves on from there."

The average age for kids trying marijuana is 13 to 14, for cocaine it's 14
to 15, and for heroin, methamphetamines and ecstasy, the average age is 15
to 16, he said.

"In Prince George, I can tell you at the Grade 8 level there are kids doing
ecstasy and methamphetamine," said Douglass, calling it one of the areas
where it is easier for youths to find methamphetamines than marijuana.

"We don't come in and do drug talks until Grade 10; they can tell me things."

Anywhere there's cocaine there will also be meth, as it produces similar
but longer lasting effects and is cheaper, he said.

Douglass also warned that young people often move from using ecstasy to
meth, an even stronger drug with the lowest rate of recovery for addicts --
at six per cent. One to three uses can lead to addiction, he said.

"If we have a real big ecstasy problem in the high schools here it will go
to meth," said Douglass. "They will get bored [with ecstasy]."

Along with youth using drugs at earlier ages, kids are also dying younger,
including the recent case of a 13-year-old girl in Victoria who died after
taking what she believed was an ecstasy pill. Autopsy results have yet to
be released, but in all likelihood her death was a result of heart failure
brought on by the combination of drugs, including meth, in the pill, he said.

"You don't know what's in this pill and users generally don't care," he
said, noting that just over 30 per cent of samples seized last year were
pure ecstasy while many others were mixed with more dangerous drugs.

The most disturbing image of the meth addict for the crowd was a photo of a
young person, face blacked out, with two gaping holes in the arms. The
addict had picked through the flesh to the bone while "tweaking," a stage
after the rush of the drug and before the crash, where people become
singularly preoccupied with a task -- everything from repetitively cleaning
an item to causing horrific self-mutilation.

Douglass also warned of the proliferation of two drugs, ketamine and GHB,
which he said are a "sexual predator's dream." Ketamine, a veterinary
anesthetic is often found in ecstasy, as is GHB also known as the "date
rape drug."

"It's a growing trend [and] it's happening in this community and all
communities," he said of people using the drugs to commit sexual assaults,
"but it's under the radar and people don't want to talk about it.