CRACK IS BACK - WITH A VENGEANCE

In the mornings, Mona used to rise at 5 o'clock while her two toddlers
slept, sneak to the laundry room and prepare a crack pipe for the
first of 40 hits she would smoke that day. That was her routine for
the last three years.

"The first hit of the day was the best," said Mona, in her 20s, who
has just marked a month of sobriety. "It's so easy to get. All I have
to do is make a phone call and a half-hour later the rock would be
here."

A decade ago, the Montreal Urban Community police claimed a victory in
the war against crack. But anecdotal information from the city's drug
squad, addicts, sociologists and counselors has shown that the drug is
making a steady comeback.

In Montreal, a crack rock now costs $10, half of what it sold for a
decade ago. Dealers now deliver, and users from all ethnic and
economic backgrounds are as young as 14, police and drug counselors
said.

Today, the stereotype of crack being an exclusively poor, urban, black
problem has been shattered.

"The product is available anywhere," said Michelle Beaudoin, of the
MUC police narcotics squad. "There is a concentration of crack sales
in Montreal's southern districts and certain north-end districts."

The RCMP said a recent flood of cocaine has eased crack's return. In
makeshift laboratories and on kitchen stoves around the city, dealers
boil cocaine and baking soda in water, and end up with tiny rocks that
crack when smoked - hence the name.

The cocaine sold in Montreal now is about 30-per-cent pure, RCMP
informants said. When it's cooked up into crack, the rocks are
100-per-cent concentrated cocaine. The end product is highly potent
and more addictive than cocaine or heroin - which creates special
social problems, as police and judges learned when crack first
surfaced in the late 1980s.

With such a high addiction rate, users often turn to mugging, stealing
and prostitution to support their habits. Crack houses, where most
users buy and smoke the drug, can spring up anywhere, and have come to
be identified with gunfire, noise and strangers coming and going at
all hours of the day.

What frightens authorities further now is that crack has become a drug
teenagers routinely experiment with. In the 1970s, drug-prevention
programs warned parents that their children might try alcohol,
marijuana, magic mushrooms and acid, in that order, Beaudoin said.

"Now they'll go straight to heroin and crack," she
said.

Mona, who lived with a crack-dealer, said the 20 dealers she knew
would not sell to anyone younger than 18. Clients she saw ranged from
welfare-recipients to business-owners.

But doctors and police said the drug has become more available to
users of all ages. Crack-dealers work outside at Berri Park, east of
St. Laurent Blvd. along Ste. Catherine St. and into the Gay Village.

In Cote des Neiges, St. Henri and LaSalle, dealers make house calls.
Crack houses are sprinkled throughout Montreal, police said.

At the busy adult detox unit at St. Luc Hospital, Dr. Benoit Trottier
sees two or three new crack-addicts every week. Over the last decade,
the unit has treated about 250 crack-addicts a year.

Crack never disappeared, Trottier said. And the steady number of
treatments at the detox unit "doesn't mean more people aren't doing
it," he added.

When American media reports on crack first appeared in 1985, MUC
police feared that the drug, and the poverty and crime associated with
it, would come to Montreal. So in 1989, they joined Surete du Quebec
and RCMP agents in raiding crack houses and seizing thousands of
rocks, then proudly announced their success in ridding Montreal of the
drug.

But crack houses have continued to exist, said Danielle Des Marais, a
counselor at Portage Academy drug-treatment centre in Little Burgundy.

"The MUC police did a lot of work to fight this," she said. "A few
years ago, right in front of Portage, there were a lot of crack
houses. Police raided them, but they just moved."

Crack merely went underground, and now it seems to have resurfaced,
drug counselors said.

Joe Tomeo, an investigator with the RCMP's drug section, said one of
the reasons crack has made a comeback is that cocaine is now plentiful
in Montreal. RCMP informants say a kilogram of cocaine sells for as
little as $32,000, compared with $52,000 a decade ago.

Likening the cocaine trade to the stock market, Tomeo said the market
is strong. With lots of buyers, high production levels in supplier
countries and reliable import routes, the drug has flooded Montreal.
That means prices drop for cocaine and, subsequently, for crack - what
he calls a dangerous situation.

"The reason for the drug's comeback is the price," he said. "Once you
start putting the price down to $10 or $15, you're playing with
schoolkids."

Italian crime gangs and the Hells Angels, who have controlled
Montreal's cocaine trade for years, have made it easier for youths to
get crack.

They don't deal with crack themselves; the penalties are higher for
it, in recognition of its addictiveness.

"It became settled in the early 1990s that the courts have said they
would give out extremely severe sentences for cocaine in this form,"
said federal prosecutor Richard Starck. "A person with crack would get
a more severe sentence than someone who had 10 times the amount of
cocaine."

So the crime gangs sell cocaine to associates, like the Rockers outlaw
motorcycle gang, who in turn sell to the Scorpions, one of the street
gangs police have identified as crack-dealers.

The street gangs then convert it into crack and sell directly to users
or to the next level of dealers, said Andre Bouchard, former commander
of the MUC police specialized-crime unit.

Crack-dealers usually pay Hells Angels, or their rivals in the Rock
Machine gang, to sell on their turf, he said. A year ago, police
seized from a Lincoln St. apartment more than 3,000 rocks, the city's
largest crack bust, Bouchard said.

But that was just one bust. Crack is still easily found along Ste.
Catherine St. from Hochelaga-Maisonneuve to the downtown club scene,
Bouchard said.

Andreanne Sasseville, an MUC police spokesman, would not confirm that
a recent rash of burglaries and muggings in west-end Montreal is
related to a rise in crack use.

"District commanders don't want to alarm the public," she said. "They
don't want to scare people into thinking it's a big problem."

When asked for figures on arrests, she said the police do not compile
separate statistics on crack.

That is part of the problem in determining how widespread crack use
is, said Serge Chevalier, a sociologist who studies addiction for the
Montreal regional public-health department.

Among the stack of studies for yearly health-board reports on
substance abuse that are piled in Chevalier's office, there is not a
single statistic on crack. Police, hospitals, the coroner's office and
drug-treatment centres lump crack with cocaine in their statistics, he
said.

"Crack is something that exists, but we don't have a clue about it. We
still think it's marginal. But the emphasis is on 'we think' because
we just don't know. Crack-addicts are not very likely to answer
questionnaires."

Patricia Messier, a counselor at the Dans la Rue centre for youths,
said once any of her 200 clients start smoking crack, they stop visiting.

"They shut everybody out of their life," she said. "When we see
someone who starts doing crack, we try to help. But it's difficult.
They become so aggressive and almost violent."

Dr. Elise Roy, of the Montreal regional public-health department,
managed to get some addicts to talk. For five years, 926 homeless
youths between 14 and 25 have discussed their drug use.

While Roy said the study does not represent youth in general, last
month's survey shows that 57 per cent of respondents tried crack, 20
per cent used it in the previous 30 days, and 4 per cent use it more
than twice weekly.

But homeless youths are not the only kids using crack. Johanne Beaulne
counsels parents of young crack-addicts at a program at the Dollard
Cormier Centre. She said in a group of 10 crack-addicts at the centre,
only one lives on the street.

After her five years of feeding her addiction, Mona cringes at the
thought of teenagers trying crack.

"I always thought the Year 2000 kid would be smart, with their books
and computers," she said. "But they're not. There are all these drugs
out there that can kill you the first time you take them, like heroin,
crack and Ecstasy. They might as well get a gun and shoot themselves
right away."

Chantale Lapenser said many addicts get their first taste of crack in
high school. She is a spokesman for the Centre de l'Equilibre, an
adult drug-treatment centre in the Laurentian town Val-David, where 95
per cent of the 28 residents are crack addicts.

"Like fashion, it goes in style and out of style," she said. "It's
like miniskirts. Kids today are part of a culture that has easy access
to crack. Very, very easy access."

What to look for, where to get help

Crack and heroin have recently joined the list of drugs teenagers are
experimenting with. On the street, one hit of heroin sells for $5 and
crack now costs $10 a rock, police say.

For parents, teachers and friends who suspect someone they know is
addicted to crack, the warning signs are easy to spot, said Dr. Benoit
Trottier. He sees about 250 adult crack addicts a year who come for
treatment at the St. Luc Hospital detox unit. Recently, he said, users
have been getting younger.

Warning signs of crack-addiction include:

- - Enlarged pupils.

- - Chronic coughing and sometimes the appearance of
asthma.

- - Weight loss, appetite loss.

- - Nervous behaviour leading to alternate periods of agitation,
irritability and depression.

- - Missing money or valuables at home.

- - Girls may spend a lot of time out, some prostituting themselves to
get money for drugs.

The sudden appearance of a pager or a cell phone can also be a sign,
Trottier said.

"When they need money, an easy way to get it is to sell drugs
themselves. Someone who wouldn't normally need a pager who suddenly
needs one should be a sign."