HELPING BOTH DRUG ADDICTS AND DRUG SQUAD MAKES GOOD SENSE

Call it the drug that puts the traffic in trafficking.

Whatever these guys are shooting up seems to draw them straight into the street--like moths to a flame--where they play a wild-eyed, whooping game of dodge 'em with Ma and Pa Victoria driving home from Costco.

Four times in recent days some drug user has gone berserk in the roads of Greater Victoria. One half-naked guy tried to hug a bus. "Holy moley! Tell my mother I love her." exclaimed another after going snaky on Quadra Street. A woman found punching parked cars on Balmoral tried to chew through her oxygen mask as they hauled her away. And one man died.

Where I a better person, I'd show more compassion. Were it little kids, or soccer moms, or guys with mortgages going into cardiac arrest and dying on the side of the Trans-Canada, as happened to 33-year-old Mladen Cujko last week, I'd be upset.

But it's just another druggie checking out, so I mutter "that's odd" and turn to the sports pages to see how badly Tiger Woods is beating the rest of the world today.

In my better moments, I ponder the aborted existence of people like Cujko and chide myself for not attaching as much value to their lives as to others. But that's only in my better moments. And I suspect I'm not alone.

Sixteen-year-old Jessamine wishes I would have more such moments. The way guys like me dismiss, stereotype and vilify addicts bothers her.

"Let people know that not all users are these horrible, slimy people who steal from their mothers," she says. "Users are not bad people... They just made some bad decisions."

Jessamine speaks from experience. She started doing heroin when she was 14, but stopped seven months ago. She's in a methadone program now.

She argues that addicts are people first, users second, but they get shoved in the gutter by a society that wouldn't treat other health issues in the same manner.

When she landed in hospital after an overdose, "I was treated like someone who had just crawled from under a rock."

You can argue that other patients don't bring on their own illnesses, but sneering at addicts isn't going to make them better, or stop them from using drugs. Marginalizing people only drives them into the margins, and into the seductive acceptance found in the community of fellow users.

If society really wanted to help addicts, there are lots of ways it could, say Jessamine. A shortage of funding means Victoria's needle exchange isn't open until mid-afternoon. Addicts won't wait that long, and some pharmacists won't sell them syringes, so they end up using dirty ones--and that brings disease.

A recent sampling of local intravenous drug users found up to 85 per cent had hepatitis C. More than 20 per cent had HIV.

"I kind of wish more people cared, because these aren't addicts, they're humans."

There's only one youth detox bed in Victoria. A two-week waiting period to get into it is two weeks too long for someone who is ready to quit right now, but maybe not tomorrow.

There could be an expanded methadone program, or safe shooting galleries overseen by nurses. The latter would remove much of the allure for kids: "It would just not be as romantic if we were using it in a staffed place."

As it is, homeless addicts shoot up in places like public washrooms. Overdose on heroin in a washroom cubicle, and no one may find you until you're dead.

(There are about 50 drug-induced deaths in Greater Victoria and its environs each year, about three-quarters of them accidental.)

This isn't a problems that's going to go away. There's a steady flow of both heroin and cocaine into Victoria, says Staff-Sgt. Pat Convey, head of the local RCMP drug section.

There's a glut of heroin on the world market, pouring out of Asia's Golden Triangle, and that's driving the price down, which is driving usage up. Fifteen years ago heroin that was 70 to 90 per cent pure sold for $20,000 an ounce. Today's price has plunged to about $2,500 to $3,000, and the heroin is 80 to 90 per cent pure.

Of course, no one knows how strong it will be, or what it will be mixed with, by the time it courses into a user's veins. Every time it changes hands on the way down the chain offers an opportunity to dilute the drug and increase profit. The most common cutting agents are caffeine or milk sugar, though sometimes it's mixed with another drug, maybe PCP or MDA.

"At every level of a narcotic coming in, you're going to have somebody stepping on it," says Convey.

Which means we'll see more people going berserk in traffic, more people overdosing in the washroom, more guys like me turning the page.

I don't pretend to know the answers, though it's hard to argue against giving the health system what's needed to help 16-year-old girls recover from their mistakes.

And there shouldn't be a conflict between that and giving Convey and his people the resources to crush the drug dealers like bugs. And there should be nothing from preventing people like me from having more compassion.

I'll leave you with one last thought from Jessamine: "Have you noticed that the people who need help the most in this world are the people who are getting the least?"