JAILING DEALERS WON'T SOLVE DRUG PROBLEM, ADDICT SAYS

Ed's a handsome, articulate, forceful guy in his mid-40s, with neatly
trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and a moustache and deep hazel eyes. And
from the outside, Ed's life looked like the quintessential Alberta
success story. Only the discreet "CA" pin on the label of his leather
coat hints that his story has an unexpected twist.

A bright kid from a small town north of Edmonton, Ed disliked school
and school work. So he dropped out of high school and went to work on
drilling rigs in the Beaufort Sea.

He spent four years in the high Arctic, where he made very good money.
Then, he returned to Alberta, to work on rigs around Lodgepole and
Drayton Valley.

The money was good. But Ed was ambitious. He wanted more. And he
wanted to be his own boss.

So in 1979, he quit the rigs and started his own oilfield-service
business. Business boomed, even through the lean years after the
national energy program.

"I was determined to be successful," he says. "I had a
drive."

By the mid-'90s, he seemed to have it all: a wife, kids, a big new
house. There were deluxe vacations, nice cars and trucks, and lots and
lots of cash.

"Money became my god," he says. "It gave me anything I wanted. It gave
me power. I could buy my friends. I could buy my love. I was a
workaholic. I spent my life making money to buy the things I could
possibly buy to have happiness."

But Ed had a secret. In 1996, at the age of 38, the father and
entrepreneur became addicted. To crack cocaine.

The oilpatch, Ed says, has always been a place where drinking and
drugging are common. Young guys working the rigs, isolated from their
families, in physically risky jobs, with lots of money and not a lot
to do, turn quite often to booze and drugs, just for
entertainment.

Over the years, he'd been one of those guys. He'd drunk too much, he'd
dabbled in pot and acid and regular coke.

Crack was different.

A friend, he says, urged him to try it, as a way to cut down on his
drinking.

"I loved it," says Ed. "It took away all my feelings of guilt or shame
or remorse. It made me feel in control. I used to think I was making
better decisions when I was high. I could do a lot more work in one
day than I ever did. I could work for hours.

"I have a thing about perfectionism in my life. I like to have things
perfect. And cocaine gave me that illusion. It seemed to clear my thoughts."

No one, he says, knew he was using crack -- not his family, not his
employees. He would drive downtown to make drug buys in his new
company sedan, he says. Never did anyone stop or suspect him.

He just didn't "look" like an addict or a criminal -- not even to
himself.

"My idea of a drug addict was someone sitting behind a dumpster on
95th Street with a needle in his arm. To me, if you were a drug
addict, you were a

loser."

But he was addicted. He'd started using crack once a month, then every
other weekend. But after two years, he'd reached the point where he
was smoking crack every day, spending up to $5,000 a month on his habit.

His business was so successful, he could afford to buy drugs without
his wife or his colleagues even noticing the money was gone.

But after three years of heavy crack use, the physical and
psychological toll started to show.

"I was anti-social. I was paranoid. I became a loner, in my own little
world. I wasn't looking after my family. I wasn't looking after my
employees. I was just chasing that high."

Finally, in October 1999, Ed checked himself into an AADAC detox
program. It took almost three months of therapy -- but he's been clean
and sober since January 2000.

"But I'm not cured of this illness. I'm going to have it for the rest
of my life."

So he regularly attends meetings of CA -- Cocaine Anonymous. There, he
says, he feels accepted, and at home. Now Ed volunteers, using his
sales and organizational skills, to set up CA groups in other parts of
the province.

These last four years haven't been easy. His marriage finally ended
under the strain. His children have had problems coming to terms with
the fact that the father they'd loved and trusted was hiding a crack
addiction.

"I put my wife through hell," Ed says softly. "And my relationship
with my kids has been slow to rebuild.

It's not easy for him to talk about any of this. There's just too much
stigma and shame around drug addiction in our culture; that's why
we're not using his real name. But Ed wanted you to hear his story,
and the story of Cocaine Anonymous, in part because of the recent
public discussion about Edmonton's drug-gang violence.

Just putting dealers in jail, he says, won't solve Edmonton's drug
problem.

"There's always going to be someone else to fill those boots. If that
was the solution -- to stop the flow of drugs into this community --
it would have happened years ago. Where there's money, there's drugs.
And there's money here. So we're going to see more and more crime and
violence around the whole matter of drugs. This is a lucrative business."

Nor, he says, does it help when the mayor orders all drug users to get
out of town. Not only is it unrealistic, but it makes the stigma
around drug addiction worse.

What we need, says Ed, is more public outreach to the community, and
more treatment options for drug addicts from every walk of life, be
they lawyers or nurses or rig workers or people living on the drag. We
need to treat addiction like an infection or disease, not a sin, he
says.

We also need a cultural change. It's no accident, he argues, that in
Alberta, where we put so much emphasis on success and hard work, the
drugs of choice aren't "downers" like heroin, but "uppers" like
cocaine and crystal methamphetamine; drugs that, temporarily at least,
give people more energy and allow them to work longer and party harder.

Ed knows he's not your "stereotypical" crackhead. He hopes that's why
you'll listen to him.

"This is a fatal illness we're dealing with and it is progressively
growing amongst our young population, in and around this city," he
says. "Our children are growing up in a society riddled with addiction
in many forms.

"I've seen people come to Cocaine Anonymous who've started using crack
at 10 or 12 years old. So much has changed and we have to change, too."

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GETTING HELP

- - Cocaine Anonymous, or CA, is a fellowship of men and women who try
to help people recover from the disease of drug addiction by using a
12-step recovery program.

- - In the Edmonton area, information about CA or meetings is available
24 hours a day at 780-425-2715 or at www.ca-northab.org.

- - You can also contact Co-Anon, a support group for family and friends
of addicts, at the same number and web address.