MERCHANTS DECRY SHOOTING-GALLERY PLAN

The hip Plateau Mont Royal isn't a junkie hot-spot that needs an official
drug-shooting gallery, local merchants said last week.

Street worker Normand Senez's solution - a "piquerie" where heroin and
cocaine addicts could inject safely - would only worsen matters and attract
drugs, crime and prostitution, they said.

"We think (Senez is) an alarmist," said Michel Depatie, who heads the Mount
Royal Ave. merchants' association.

"We're not in favour of it," Depatie said of the proposed shooting gallery
where 16 hard-core addicts would be supervised to prevent overdoses.

"Yes, there's a drug problem in some areas. Metro Mont Royal is at the hub
of it, but I'm not afraid to let my 4-year-old daughter play in the back
alley near Brebeuf St."

Dirty needles and empty drug packets are limited to the western part of
Mount Royal Ave., he suggested.

Senez countered that police and merchants are playing down the problem,
even though most toilets in bars and restaurants in the area are equipped
with black lights, which make veins hard to detect, to discourage junkies
from shooting up in the stalls.

"You should know that junkies can find a vein with their eyes closed," said
Senez, a former user turned filmmaker and street worker.

"The time for prevention is now, because (the area is) going to explode,"
he said, just as it did in the Centre Sud area, which counted 684 drug
arrests last year.

Police made 179 drug arrests in the Plateau, which has the second-highest
figures for a Montreal neighbourhood.

The itinerant population is shifting north "because the Plateau is rich,"
said Nicole Corbin, director of CLSC Plateau Mont Royal, which provides
clean needles to about 200 users.

"We're seeing more drugs," Corbin said. "But I don't think it's as dramatic
as Senez says." Corbin said unofficial shooting galleries open and close
regularly in the area.

City and health officials last week responded with a needle "pickup blitz"
on streets, in alleys and parks, she said.

"We're trying to adapt to this phenomenon," said Corbin.

One such effort is a new St. Denis St. cafe for street youth, opened by the
CLSC in cooperation with community groups in April.

Situated just north of the metro, Cafe le Ketch serves up health care along
with the coffee, providing access to social workers, nurses and psychologists.

"There's more drug use, but it's not catastrophic," Corbin said. "But
(Senez) made his point. We've never talked about it as much as we are now."

But it's not up to Senez to decide, it's a societal debate, she added.

"Do people want this next to their homes?" she asked of the proposed
drug-shooting gallery.

For the 50 tenants of a commercial building near St. Laurent Blvd., the
answer is no.

The building is already a shooting gallery, with squatters and dirty
needles on every floor, tenants complain.

They are lobbying for better security after two drug-overdose deaths in
three years.