A TIME NOT TO SHARE

Tracey Young has been an intravenous drug user since she was 15. She's
decided she's going to be one for life.

The 41-year-old St. Catharines woman doesn't believe she'll ever be able to
stop taking the high-strength painkillers doctors first gave her as a
teenager to treat her rheumatoid arthritis.

She hasn't injected in eight months, but said she can usually coast through
the warm season when her joints don't ache as much. She knows she'll be back
at it when autumn turns cold.

But Young is worried about the kinds of needles she'll be shooting up with.
The region's StreetWorks needle exchange program she's relied on for the
past eight years is running dangerously short on resources.

She's been a user long enough to remember the AIDS scare of the mid-1980s
and said ever since, cleanliness often comes hand and hand with addiction.

"Nobody ever liked the idea of sharing a needle," Young said. "It's a very
personal thing. It would be like using somebody's toothbrush or razor."

But with shelves at StreetWorks getting as bare as they are, she said people
are preparing for the worst. She knows of a few users squirrelling away
supplies like bottled water for the winter.

"It's horrific. We're worried. We're really worried," Young said. "I know it
will come to sharing syringes. You won't always have enough to buy the drug
and the needle. And it will come full circle and it's a vicious circle.
History will repeat itself."

Under the umbrella of AIDS Niagara, StreetWorks distributes clean needles
and other drug equipment to users across the region, either at its Church
Street office or from a van which is out four nights a week.

But in recent years, the two-employee operation has had a hard time covering
the ever-swelling need with the $113,000 budget provided by the regional
government.

In 1996, StreetWorks handed out nearly 28,000 needles. This past July alone,
it distributed 23,000. The more than 120,000 given out in the first seven
months of 2003 puts it on pace to far surpass last year's total of 158,000.

Program co-ordinator Rhonda Thompson said financial constraints have forced
them to cut certain services, no longer handing out tourniquets, filters or
alcoholic swabs. They can now only spare two or three needles each time they
see a client.

AIDS Niagara swallowed the program's $16,000 deficit last year, but can't
keep that up for long. It plans on making a presentation to the Region's
community and health services committee Monday to request a budget increase.

"It's a different thing to try to get money for, because the overriding
tenet is harm reduction. There always have been drug users and there always
will be drug users," Thompson said. "It's a very difficult thing to muster
up a warm and fuzzy feeling for in other people."

She said Niagara has become "saturated" with drug use in the past few years
and has heard it's easier to score crack on the street than it is to acquire
marijuana. A trend towards intravenous crack and cocaine use, which are
usually injected far more often than other drugs, is one of the reasons for
the strain on services.

Thompson worries that if there are fewer and fewer clean needles out in the
population, desperate users will turn to dirty syringes.

"When you're in that place, your mind is not giving a lot of consideration
to what's outside a six-foot circle around themselves," she said. "If they
need that fix, they're not doing economics on the spot to figure out how
much they need to buy a syringe. It's just the drug."

A 24-year-old St. Catharines man, who's been clean for three months and
doesn't wish to be identified, said the stigma of purchasing syringes is
another reason why a service like StreetWorks is greatly needed.

"You get that funny look when you go in and ask for it," he said. "It's
known that if you're going into a drug store to buy needles, you either have
diabetes or are a heroin user. And they tend to know who is who."

He recently returned to the area after four years in Toronto and said from
what he's seen the drug culture in Niagara has tripled while he was away. He
said he is "genuinely scared" to consider what the future holds.

"It's an ugly problem and people don't want to look at it," Thompson said.
"But either look at it now or wait and see what happens. And I don't think
anybody wants to do that."