THEY FIX IN THE STICKS

The drug problem in rural Alberta is as bad as it is in the cities,
say police

It's not just fresh air getting rural folk high these days. Mounties
say it's crack cocaine, synthetic heroin and crystal methamphetamine
putting the buzz into small town life.

"There's a huge problem out there," RCMP Staff Sgt. Doug Carruthers
said yesterday.

"It's pretty astonishing.

"There's lots of cocaine and lots of crystal methamphetamine." Remote
acreages and out-of-the-way farms have long been a favourite spot for
pot growers but Carruthers says a three-year-old joint city
police-RCMP street team is just as likely to find crack in Camrose or
heroin in Hinton.

"Virtually everything is readily available," Carruthers
said.

"People out there in rural areas have good jobs, too, and when the oil
industry is going well, people have lots of money.

"(The street team's) been a tremendous success but the results have
been extremely surprising. Don't think it's not happening. You can
get morphine, Demerol, Talwin and Ritalin without any problem
whatsoever."

An eight-month operation in Wainwright which wrapped up earlier this
year resulted in 159 charges against 16 people, besides seizing drugs,
cash and property.

Another project in Stettler and Camrose led to the arrest of an
Edmonton man and the seizure of four ounces of heroin.

The street team, which typically sets up retail-level buy and bust
stings, works in the big city as well but has made more than 260 rural
busts for everything from cocaine to heroin to morphine since 1997.

Particularly popular has been methamphetamine, which can be cooked up
in portable-but-volatile labs with over-the-counter chemicals.

"You can carry a whole lab around in the trunk of your car,"
Carruthers said. "If you've got the right chemicals you can do it up
in about three hours. We rate (the labs) as extremely dangerous. They
can blow up quite easily.

"Kind of makes it ironic that just anybody can buy these
chemicals."

Intravenous drugs - typically thought of as a big city blight - are
also common and Carruthers said a lot of the people RCMP arrest have
been addicts for years.

Camrose, 94 km southeast of Edmonton, has played host to several crack
cocaine busts in recent months, which Mayor Norm Mayer conceded is a
"fact of life" for any community.

"It probably disappoints me more than surprises me," Mayer
said.

"I don't think it's that widespread. As long as we keep up the
enforcement end of it that will probably keep it small.

"We pride ourselves on having a very safe community and we want to
keep it that way. If that means cracking these guys to keep them down,
then we'll do it."

Edmonton city police spokesman Sgt. Bryan Boulanger said the street
team is available to any small municipal police force on request,
although the town has to pick up the tab.

"It would be naive to think it's not happening in smaller
communities," Boulanger said.

"There's the same vices and the same social ills. If you let the right
people know you're interested and you've got the money, you can get a
spitball of cocaine."