WHAT IT COSTS TO FEED THE HABIT

When The People In The Poorest Part Of Canada Have A $140 Million-A-Year
Drug Craving To Support, The Result Is Theft Across The Urban Area --
Stolen Goods That Find Their Way To The Downtown Eastside

A DRUG-CRIME LINK?: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is legendary as a source
of drug-related property crime.

The small office of one of the largest needle distribution centres in North
America faces Vancouver provincial court at 222 Main, B.C.'s highest-volume
provincial court.

Each year, the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society gives out 3.5
million hypodermic needles to heroin and other injection drug users.

John Turvey, the society's executive director and a former B.C. government
social worker who has worked in the Downtown Eastside for a quarter of a
century, offers some simple math when asked about the extent to which
illegal drugs are drivers of crime:

Each addict uses a needle an average of two times. A dose of heroin or
cocaine costs about $10, or $20 of illicit drugs for each needle given out.

That's $70 million worth of injection drugs annually. And Turvey says the
figure should be doubled to $140 million to include smokable drugs like
crack cocaine, the short-acting stimulant that quickly leads to addictions
that cost hundreds of dollars a day.

"And here's where it really turns into black humour," Turvey says. "It's
all taking place in the poorest postal code in Canada.

"We've created an environment that's thriving off the economics of drugs.
And the goods being stolen from your community -- in Surrey, Delta, White
Rock, New Westminster -- are being sold in our community, sold for money
and drugs. If it ain't nailed down, it will find legs."

The drug connection and how it fuels property crime is one of the keys to
crime being examined in The Vancouver Sun's major series, Crime and
Consequence.

According to the Vancouver Board of Trade, the total annual cost of
property crime for city residents appears to be in the range of $50 million
to $100 million. These drug-related crimes add an estimated $150 to the
annual cost of a person's household insurance policy and a further $150 to
the cost of auto insurance, a Board of Trade policy paper states.

Staff Sergeant Chuck Doucette of the RCMP's drug awareness unit says the
national police force doesn't estimate how much money is spent on illicit
drugs in B.C. But he says there's no doubt a lot of illegally obtained
money is involved -- especially when thieves typically get 25 cents or less
on the dollar for stolen goods.

Fewer than five per cent of the 491,150 alleged crimes reported in B.C.
last year directly involved drug possession or drug trafficking.

But neither police nor prosecutors have record-keeping systems that measure
how many other reported crimes or criminal charges are drug-related -- the
crimes committed by people with a history of substance abuse; the crimes
committed while someone is under the influence of drugs or alcohol; the
property crimes committed by drug addicts; or the crimes of violence
committed during a dispute over drug money or turf.

A study that tried to quantify those crimes was released two years ago by
the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, a non-profit organization created
by Parliament. The study was based on information that police in 26
Canadian communities recorded after arresting 2,675 people during one month.

According to the police officers who participated in that study, more than
53 per cent of the people arrested were under the influence of alcohol or
drugs at the time of the offence. One-third of those arrested were judged
by the arresting officers to be under the influence of alcohol; 10 per cent
were said to be under the influence of drugs; 10 per cent were under the
influence of alcohol and drugs.

Doucette says "a good 80 per cent of our calls are related to substance
abuse, one way or the other," but concedes he doesn't have study findings
to prove his point.

"That's just based on my experience," he says. "I've been a cop for 31 years."

At Vancouver provincial court, a sheriff winces when an accused fishes out
five packaged hypodermic needles from a duffel bag, but it's not an
unexpected or unusual disclosure on Skid Road. The accused is waved through
a metal detection unit; the bag and the needles remain with the sheriff
while the accused is in court.

About 25 per cent of the 106,500 court files initiated at that court in
2001 were for violations of federal laws -- mostly drug trafficking and
drug possession.

But Carol Baird Ellan, chief judge of the provincial court of B.C., says
most defendants at 222 Main are either under the influence while they
commit a crime, are committing a crime to obtain money for their
addictions, or have a history of substance abuse.

"Any judge at Main Street could tell you that probably 90 per cent of them
[the court cases] are ones that have alcohol or drugs as a factor," says
Baird Ellan, a former prosecutor.

"It's probably a bit naive to say that drugs or alcohol, either as
addictions or factors, cause crime. It's a much larger issue than that. You
have to look behind, to what causes a person to be substance addicted or to
abuse the substance. And I think you'll find that, at Main Street, more
than any other place, there's a consistent pattern in the background of the
offenders, as a result of which they have become substance abusers and/or
addicts."

Deb Mearns, coordinator of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Safety
Office, says "at least" 80 per cent of the crimes committed there are drug
and alcohol-related. She says local businesses often don't bother to report
property crimes to police, figuring there's little chance the property will
be recovered, so she believes crime statistics don't reflect reality.

The non-profit service, which focuses on high-risk youth, recently moved
its storefront office to 47 West Cordova, across the street from the Army &
Navy department store. A computer hard drive in the office is bolted to the
floor but Mearns says the office, like other Downtown Eastside businesses,
can't get insurance because property theft in the neighbourhood is rampant.

Mearns says police and city officials should be devoting more time and
staff to enforcing existing laws against city-licensed businesses, like
24-hour stores, pawn shops, hotels and pubs.

On the sidewalks, people hawk everything from televisions to skis. A few
years ago, police arrested someone selling grenade launchers. Mearns says a
buyer can find "anything" they want.

"I had one guy come in one day with bottles of Canadian Springs Water from
a truck," she says. "It's done very brazenly. In the last two years, I've
never seen it as bad out there."

About 16,000 people live in the Downtown Eastside, but as reports from
police and social agencies have pointed out, many drug users and dealers
are from other neighbourhoods and cities, and they only visit the area to
buy or sell drugs or to fence stolen goods.

A 1996 criminology study at Simon Fraser University found that almost 50
per cent of the crimes reported to the 911 emergency communications service
occurred within 750 metres of a SkyTrain station.

The 2001 bus strike offered another telling anecdote about regional crime
patterns. During the strike, when only West Vancouver blue buses were
running, West Vancouver police reported a sudden increase of crimes at Park
Royal shopping mall businesses and residential neighbourhoods. Plainclothes
police would follow disembarking bus riders -- most of them known by police
to be intravenous drug users -- and arrest them as they shoplifted or broke
into cars or houses.

Recently, West Vancouver Police Sergeant Phil Fontaine says police have
noticed a jump in the number of methamphetamine users who steal in Surrey,
Vancouver and other communities. They drive to West Van to steal things
from cars in Park Royal parkades before stealing another car for the return
trip home. ICBC statistics show that thefts from autos doubled in West Van
last year.

In January, for example, West Van police recovered a stolen car that
contained five licence plates, stolen property and evidence of
methamphetamine use.

"We're suffering the effects of drugs that are being abused in the Downtown
Eastside, because a lot of criminals are coming here to commit their crimes
and feed their habit," Fontaine says.

No police agency provides precise figures of the number of injection drug
users in the Downtown Eastside and Greater Vancouver, but some estimates
are offered in an annual report that tries to measure the public health
problems faced by injection drug users in major Canadian cities.

The report, titled Vancouver Drug Use Epidemiology 2001, was prepared by
Dr. Mark McLean, an associate medical health officer with the Vancouver
Coastal Health Authority.

The report estimates there are 4,700 injection drug users in the Downtown
Eastside and 12,000 in Greater Vancouver. In other words, more than 50 per
cent of the addicts don't live in Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood.

Overdose deaths also show that injection drugs aren't just an inner-city
problem. In 2001, there were 90 overdose deaths in Vancouver but 222 across
B.C., from Surrey to Nanaimo, from Prince George to New Westminster.

Although the report focuses on illicit drug users, it notes that alcohol
causes more deaths in B.C. From 1990 to 2000, there were an average of 281
deaths related to alcohol each year, compared with 134 deaths each year
from illicit drugs.

Another snapshot of drug users comes from the Vancouver Injection Drug User
Study, or VIDUS, a study of 1,400 addicts being conducted by the B.C.
Centre of Excellence in HIV -- the potentially-lethal, blood-transmitted
virus that spreads when addicts share needles. Since the start of the study
in 1996, more than 100 participants have died, mostly from drug overdoses,
accidents and suicide.

The drug users in the study are mostly men (65 per cent) and Caucasian (62
per cent), with ages ranging from 15 to 58. Many of the women (39 per cent)
are aboriginal.

About three-quarters have been in prison. Almost two thirds are welfare
recipients, and the report pointed to what happens on the street on
"welfare day," the last Wednesday of the month when social assistance
cheques are given out."It has been found that handling money appears to
function as a trigger for substance users to take drugs," the report states.

When addicts run out of money, they do what they need to do to pay for
their habits.

SYNOPSIS: ADDICTION:

It may be the poorest postal code in Canada, but Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside is host to a $140-million industry. Unfortunately it's the illicit
drug industry, and much of the money addicts spend on what they need is
harvested from the unsuspecting residents of other Lower Mainland communities.

FURTHER READING:

Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use, a project by federal,
provincial and community agencies. Produces annual drug and public health
profiles of Vancouver and 10 other cities.

http://ccsa.ca/ccendu/index.htm

The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, a national agency established in
1988 by an act of Parliament. Promotes informed debate on substance abuse
issues and encourages public participation in reducing the harm associated
with drug abuse.

ww.ccsa.ca

The Kaiser Foundation's mission is to assist communities in preventing and
reducing the harm associated with problem substance use and addictive
behaviour. Its Web site includes a directory of addiction services in B.C.
and information about substance abuse.

www.kaiserfoundation.ca

World Drug Report, by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention, Oxford University Press: New York, 2000.

Cannabis: Our Position For a Canadian Public Policy: Report of the Senate
Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, Chairman Pierre Claude Nolin, Sept.
2002, Queen's Printer, Ottawa.

The Impact of Drug Enforcement on Crime: An Investigation of the
Opportunity Cost of Police Resources, by Bruce L. Benson, Ian Sebastian
Leburn, David W. Rasmussen, Journal of Drug Issues, 31 (4) Fall 2001, pp.
989-1006.

Winning the War on Drugs: A 'Second Chance' For Nonviolent Drug Offenders,
by Kwame J. Manley, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 113:1485, April 2000, pp.
1485-1502.

CRIME FEEDBACK:

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would welcome any thoughts or observations you have on the topic.

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E-MAIL: crime@png.canwest.com

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Web site: To review current and archived articles in The Vancouver Sun
crime series go to Canada.com and use Searchword: Crime and Consequence.

Ran with fact boxes "Synopsis: Addiction", "Crime Feedback" and "Further
Reading", which has been appended to the end of the story.