DRUG CIRCUS A DEADLY ACT

John Ferguson still shudders when he sees it: A girl sitting on the steps of
the Carnegie Centre with a mirror in her lap, trying to find the vein in her
neck she'll shoot with cocaine.

Ferguson, the centre's security supervisor, calls this corner of Hastings
and Main a "drug circus."

It's a circus run by drug-dealing ringmasters who sell poison to a sad
audience, more in need of hospital than jail.

And the show is becoming steadily more despairing -- and dangerous.

"For the longest time it was mostly pills that were sold out there," said
Ferguson. "Now in the last year the crack has moved in. Everyone has moved
in. We almost long for the pill dealers to be the only ones out there.

"It's so bad that people are being injected on our steps. They can't find
their own veins and they lie there and have someone inject them in their
necks. It's quite amazing."

There's the brutal degradation that drugs bring --the defecating in the
lane, the overdose deaths.

"It's very disheartening to see what's going on," said Ferguson, recalling a
man he found in a washroom stall, nearly dead from a drug overdose. The man
was revived by paramedics and was back in the same stall two days later,
trying to inject himself again.

And there's the violence the dealers and users inflict on one another.

"We get some terrible bloody beatings out there," said Ferguson. "We go out
into the crowd and try to break up fights quite regularly. They can get
their face kicked in for a $5 debt."

Ferguson said the courts are too lenient on the dealers. "They go to court
and nothing happens to them anyways."

He says he has sympathy for the users. "I really don't want these people
jailed for being drug addicts.

"We don't want to see them hurt. We don't want to see them go to jail. We
want them to go away."