SOUL-STEALER INVADES CAPITAL

Chemical Cocktail Called Methamphetamine Is Cheap, Easy To Make And Ruins Lives

We'll call him Captain Kirk, because he's the kind of drug user who boldly
explores strange new narcotic worlds.

"I'll try pretty much anything," says the Victoria man. But there's one
chemical he won't touch any more: methamphetamine. "It's gar-bage," he
says. "It's a soul-stealer."

Yes, but it's a soul-stealer that's appearing more and more frequently
around the capital, particularly among street kids and the rave crowd.

Vancouver Island is not yet like the U.S., where they've been flooded with
the drug. But the tide is definitely coming in, chemical waves lapping
farther and farther across our shores.

"Lots of the kids who we're working with are definitely doing meth," says
Mark Timmermans, who cruises the streets of Victoria in the Y's street
outreach van. "It scares me because a lot of the kids are not afraid to try
it and they're quite young when they do try it."

What's worrisome isn't just that they're getting stoned.

Nor is it that methamphetamines are so addictive. It's that the drug is a
chemical nightmare, its ingredients including and drawn from sources as
diverse as hydrochloric acid, paint thinner, Drano, household cleansers,
lithium batteries and battery acid. It can mess you up beyond the
recognition of anyone but your weeping mother.

"I won't do it any more because of what it's made of," says Kirk, who has
agreed to lend a user's perspective to this column.

According to the Greater Victoria Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Society,
the long-term effects can include fatal kidney and lung disorders,
permanent psychological problems, hallucinations, depression, liver damage,
stroke and behaviour resembling paranoid schizophrenia. Other than that,
you should be just fine.

Great. Just the kind of sphincter-tightening news a parent wants to hear.
This must be karma for every Baby Boomer whose mother found his hash pipe
in the laundry back in 1973. Now it's your turn, pal.

An indication of the drug's emergence came a couple of weeks ago, when
Victoria police busted a Rockland man with a collection of club drugs:
Ecstasy, which has been around these parts for a decade, GHB and ketamine,
which debuted locally a few years ago, plus a couple of ounces of crystal meth.

American cops wouldn't blink at that quantity of methamphetamine, but it's
more than the law is used to finding here in the City of Grow Ops.

"Within the past 24 months, it's become more and more prevalent," says
Const. Tam Bui of the Victoria police strike force.

Cpl. Doug Culver of the local RCMP drug unit concurs. "There's as much meth
at the raves now as there are Ecstasy-based drugs," he says. "Four or five
years ago you never found meth. Now it's commonplace."

So, what's the attraction of this new generation of speed? Well, it's easy
to make, relatively cheap and will keep you wired around the clock. "For
$10 you're high for 24 hours," says Kirk. "It's a bargain."

It is sold in a variety of forms -- pills, capsules, powder, chunks -- and
under a number of names -- ice, crystal, jib, crank (the latter name
supposedly coming because the outlaw bikers who made it would hide it in
their crankcases). You can smoke meth, shoot it, wrap it in a cigarette
paper and eat it. The result is euphoria and an intense alertness. "It's
like acute awareness," says Kirk.

It can also make you hallucinate like crazy, says another user who we'll
call McCoy. "When you're really high on it, it's pretty hard to function."

It has advantages over cocaine, says McCoy. "It's a lot longer lasting and
a lot cheaper" -- at least in the sense of giving bang for the buck. He
says it's easy to find.

But the more you take meth, the more meth you have to take to get high.
"When I first started doing it, it would keep me going for two days." No
more. McCoy increases his consumption, but still "it's nothing like the
first time."

There's a temptation to keep stoned for days on end, which messes with your
mind, says Kirk.

That thought is echoed by Timmermans. "People will go on these amazingly
long runs with it where they don't sleep for weeks," he says. "I'm
convinced it does some serious mental damage to people."

McCoy says that kind of non-stop abuse plays hell with the body. He
describes the results of a friend's long meth binge: "He ended up shitting
out part of his intestine because he wasn't eating enough." Dunno what a
doctor would say about that but, you know, yeesh. McCoy says serious users
emit mysterious chunks when urinating and defecating.

Barely into his twenties, McCoy's been shooting meth for three months. He
also does heroin, but says it's time to stop them both. He worries about
his health, noting that the chemicals have eaten the numbers off his
syringe. "I'm always coughing up brown stuff and green stuff."

Timmermans also raises the spectre of hepatitis C being spread through
shared needles. "A lot of kids are shooting it."

Adults, too. Hard-core coke users are switching drugs. "People that would
previously go looking for cocaine are looking for methamphetamines," says
Culver.

Oh, well, at least it's not as prevalent here as across the moat. On a
clear day, you can see Port Angeles from Victoria, but it's a world away in
drug use. They have tar heroin, we have the powdered variety. We've got
cocaine, they've got meth.

"It's way past cocaine here, probably 100 to one," says Det. Jesse Winfield
of the Port Angeles police department.

Winfield says the modern meth migration started in Mexico about a decade
ago. Mexicans who distributed cocaine into the U.S. for South Americans
found they could make more money with easy-to-make meth. They could cut out
the Colombians, but retain existing distribution networks.

By the mid-'90s, methamphetamines outsold cocaine in California. Now
they're so widespread that American consumers are restricted in the amount
of "precursors" they can buy. An example is cold and flu medications such
as Sudafed, from which pseudoephedrine is extracted in meth labs. "If
people try to buy more than two boxes, stores won't sell it to them," said
Winfield. (It takes about 1,000 pills to make an ounce of methamphetamine.)

No such restrictions exist in Canada, resulting in a cross-border flow of
pseudoephedrine to the U.S. (And they thought softwood lumber was a threat.)

Capt. Ron Cameron of the Clallam County Sheriff's department recalls a
recent bust of a "superlab" on the Olympic Peninsula. "We found very few
containers of Sudafed, but the ones we did find said right on them 'product
of Canada.' "

Bui advises parents and landlords to look out for unusually large
quantities of Sudafed, or of matchbooks. (Red phosphorous is extracted from
the torn-off striker plates.) If you find those things, or road flares, or
lighter fluid, "then you just might find yourself a meth lab."

Such labs can be set up just about anywhere, even in a bathtub or trunk of
a car. Organized crime is muscling in in B.C., which Culver says has the
highest incidence of clandestine drug labs in Canada. "It wasn't enough
that we grow the best pot."

Still, police say we're not swamped with methamphetamine to the same degree
as the States. That's reflected in the price. An ounce of cocaine sells for
about $1,000 in Victoria, while meth goes for $1,400. They trade places in
Port Angeles, where cocaine goes for the equivalent of $1,100 to $1,200
Cdn, but meth costs $800 to $900.

No matter what side of the border they are on, police say methamphetamine
carries terrible consequences. "I think it's the worst drug," says
Winfield. "It just destroys people. They don't eat, don't sleep. They lose
a ton of weight, get paranoid and are walking zombies."

"It's super-addictive," says Bui.

"It's probably more addictive than cocaine," says Culver. "It's a really
ugly drug."

But that's just the cops, and cops always come across like extras from
Reefer Madness. Police give warnings; kids hear instructions.

So let's conclude with a note of caution from McCoy, who says there's no
point doing drugs if you're not having fun. That might not be the way Nancy
Reagan would put it, but she'd doubtlessly agree with the meth user's final
piece of advice: "Just stay away from it. It's not worth it."