DRUGS AND SEX NEEDLE FERNWOOD NEIGHBOURS

The trouble started a few months ago. All of a sudden, dirty needles were
turning up by the dozens in Fernwood and furtive couplings were being
spotted in strange places as a burgeoning sex trade took hold in the
residential neighbourhood.

Creole Carmichael, whose Princess Avenue home is in the middle of it all,
knew things had changed when her teenage son was solicited one day near the
Belfry Theatre while on a driving lesson. Her neighbour Vida Waltz tells a
grimly amusing story of following a trail of lingerie in the playground of
George Jay elementary to a little pile of three used condoms.

The most recent stories are of children finding needles in the sandboxes of
local playgrounds, and of a rising number of petty thefts. Neighbours
aren't sure who to blame, but they suspect it has to do with the new
tenants living at two weary-looking apartment buil-dings on Spring and
Ridge roads.

Fernwood is proud of being "a bit of a hippie neighbourhood," stresses
Carmichael.

It's not a place that gets uptight easily, which is why residents never
took issue with the owner of the buildings back when the apartments tended
to attract "potheads."

But the tenants aren't just potheads any more. And as Victoria council
learned when angry residents arrived at a meeting last month with hundreds
of discarded syringes, used condoms and needle wrappers from their
neighbourhood, funky Fernwood isn't feeling quite so tolerant these days.

"Addiction is an illness, and being a smoker, I can empathize," says Waltz.
"But it's the crime that comes along with it that's the problem."

The manager of the Holiday Court Motel knows the Fernwood newcomers well.
For a number of years, they lived at the motel he runs on Hillside Avenue,
until he squeezed the last of them out this summer amid mounting pressure
from his own neighbours.

The loose collection of drug traffickers and users, bound together by their
addictions to methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, first drifted to Speed
Street across from Mayfair Mall. But when a demolition crew of fed-up
neighbours forced them out soon after by tearing their house apart, they
relocated to two apartment buildings across from the Fernwood Community Centre.

Discarded syringes began piling up soon after. Then came the influx of drug
couriers, the teenage boys who shuttle drugs to buyers by bicycle.
Injection-drug use was suddenly so prevalent in the neighbourhood that the
community centre had to start locking its washrooms to keep people from
using them to inject.

"I walked by a park the other day and there was two prostitutes working at
the gate and a guy on a bench waiting for his drugs to be delivered," says
Carmichael. "I thought: Is this my neighbourhood?"

It hasn't helped that the city's social services have been concentrated in
the Fernwood area, says Carmichael. There's a methadone clinic and an AIDS
support group on the main street, she notes, and now the city's needle
exchange has relocated on Fernwood's border.

"The last straw was the detox centre," she says, referring to the Pemberton
House facility that recently opened in the old youth custody centre on
Pembroke Street. "They didn't even consult us on that."

Waltz sees the problem as just more evidence of the folly of Canadian drug
laws, and Fernwood as just the latest neighbourhood to bear the pain.

"They need to decriminalize the whole thing so people can buy their drugs
at a safe-injection site," she says. "They have to put the dealers out of
business."

The recent problems have little to do with the 10-year-old methadone clinic
on Fernwood Road, which doesn't dispense drugs and operates more as a
counselling and referral centre. But manager Brian Oswald is feeling the
heat nonetheless as tense residents look around for someone to blame.

"It's definitely causing some problems for us, this being an election
year," says Oswald. "And sure, we've got two or three clients who might
cause some trouble. But most people don't even know we're here."

Oswald noticed a sharp increase in the number of discarded syringes in the
area around February. The mood in Fernwood has gradually grown uglier as
the problem has worsened, but Oswald doubts that anything will be solved by
simply forcing the addicts into a new neighbourhood.

"These people are suffering," Oswald says. "Nobody likes being wired. Half
the people using heroin stopped getting high years ago."

Inderjit Gill, who owns the two apartment buildings at the centre of the
storm, didn't return a call for comment.

But Carmichael says the elderly Gordon Head man has received death threats
from a competing drug gang demanding that he evict the new arrivals in his
Fernwood apartments before the gang's sales are affected. So he was
reportedly happy to accept a Fernwood resident's recent offer to act as
property manager for the sites.

Several eviction notices have since been issued. Police and city bylaw
enforcement officers are also working with the community to help the
landlord regain control over his buildings, says Victoria Police Insp. Bill
Naughton.

None of it will do much beyond shifting the problem to another
neighbourhood, everybody concedes. But at least it won't be Fernwood's
problem any more.