PEDDLERS, PRANK OR JUST POT LUCK?

"I don't know," says Richard Cote, a spokes-person for the borough of
Plateau Mont Royal. "We'll get calls about syringes being found, and
we have blue-collar personnel who are trained in how to dispose of
them.

"But this is the first time I hear about something like
this."

The "something" in question is your average playing card (the four of
clubs, to be precise), stapled to which was a small plastic bag
containing enough marijuana to just about cover your thumbnail. A
pager number was written on the card, and at some point Tuesday this
apparent attempt at direct marketing was left on the doorstep of a
young couple living in the Plateau.

When half the couple got home, he noticed the card, looked around to
see if anyone else was a part of the sampling, so to speak, and
deduced he alone had benefited from what can only be described as pot
luck.

At first, the couple thought about calling the cops. But then they
remembered the sermons on police priorities they'd received when
they'd telephoned to report vehicles parked illegally in front of
their home. They figured the SWAT van wouldn't be sent to check out
less marijuana than a teenager would spill rolling his first joint.

So they told The Gazette.

"We know the Plateau's crazy for drugs," she said, the neighbourhood
being crazy enough that she asked that her name not appear in print.
"But this -"

Over at police headquarters, the suggestion some dealer may be
resorting to the same marketing techniques used to sell cookies,
detergent or shampoo was met with skepticism.

There were no reports of similar incidents, a police spokesperson
said, adding: "Generally, people don't leave drugs lying around unless
they've been paid for. ... This seems more like a bad joke than
anything else."

And maybe it is a bad joke - one played on the couple, or on someone
at the address where the card was supposed to have been dropped, or on
the owner of the pager.

But given the local ubiquity of illegal dope and the extraordinary
efforts police make to slacken, if not stop, sales, you have to wonder
if we've come to the point where there's simply enough product on the
street to make door-to-door marketing a profitable venture.

At this time last year, we were talking to officials in the Plateau
about another kind of calling card from the drug trade: used syringes.
And if these pieces of hazardous medical waste were popping up like
mushrooms after a spring rain, it was due in part to the cops in the
neighbouring borough of Ville Marie deciding to crack down on the
dealers in their territory, an operation that included surveillance
cameras in the Latin Quarter, south of the Plateau.

Cote said yesterday his borough wasn't receiving more complaints than
usual about the drug trade.

"Our police are on the job. We've hired police cadets (to patrol) for
the summer, and it seems that things are pretty well under control.

"Maybe there are some minor transactions taking place a little farther
north because of the cameras, but nothing more than that."

But everything's relative. The local drug market dropped off the media
radar once biker wars for control of that market died down.

But even if most of the crews who controlled those sales are in jail,
there's always someone to pick up the slack - and cocaine and hashish
and marijuana remain immensely popular.

So much so that while it seems bizarre someone might be offering free
samples of dope to randomly selected households, somehow it doesn't
seem surprising.