YOUNG TEENS HOOKED

Heroin Takes Off Because It's Cheap, Potent And Easy To Get

About one-third of the city's 6,000-odd homeless under 25 are reported to
be heroin users.

Used needles picked up recently in a downtown park on Hotel de Ville Ave.
illustrate a growing problem.

Buy a $10 bag of heroin. Cook it up, fill a needle and find a vein.

There is a warm rush, from inside out. The warm rush of nothing.

That is how several heroin users in their late teens describe their
experiences with heroin, also known as jazz, smack or H.

"It takes away all your troubles," says one young man. If someone came and
gunned down your family right in front of you, you wouldn't care; you'd
just sit there and nod.

Vancouver's heroin scene, with its high purity levels, and overdose deaths
averaging one a day, may dwarf the situation in Montreal.

Still, heroin's widespread availability, lower prices, and higher potency
here since the early 1990s are alarming health officials, police and
community workers.

"In one year, Montreal will be like Vancouver," says Bernard Lamoureux, who
has worked with itinerant youth for three years at Dollard Cormier Drug
Addiction Centre. "There are now youngsters of 15 doing smack."

Popularized in the '60s by musicians like the Doors, Janis Joplin and the
Rolling Stones, heroin was replaced by cocaine as the drug du jour in the
'80s.

But smack is back.

Since the early '90s, with more people sniffing, smoking and shooting
heroin, the drug has once again hit pop-culture heights.

Films like Trainspotting, about five Scottish addicts, and Web sites like
the Crazy Heroin Chicken have reached cult status.

Emaciated Calvin Klein models have personified "heroin chic" though the
advertisements, then spawned an anti-heroin move in the fashion industry.

In Montreal, alleys from Ste. Catherine St. E. to the Plateau are littered
with used syringes, and cafe-owners have installed blue lights in their
bathrooms to prevent users from seeing their veins and shooting up. The
blank stares of young people high on heroin are often nearby.

Teenagers have been adding cocaine and heroin to their drug experiences
with marijuana and hashish, says Joseph Piscolla, who records admissions to
the Portage Academy for adolescent substance-abuse treatment.

"For a lot of kids, heroin is an opportunity to escape from the pressures
of society and feeling alone," he says. "For $10, they can get a hit of
heroin."

Since last year, 70 per cent of Portage's admissions have been 14- to
17-year-olds using cocaine or heroin or both. Last month, Piscolla admitted
two teenagers who had used heroin since they were 14. Piscolla said he used
to just read about youths injecting heroin, but now it is happening here
partly because of its availability.

"Street trade is much more open than a few years ago," says Gerald
Marsolais of the Montreal Urban Community police drug squad. Ten dollars
will buy one-10th of a gram, called a point, which fills two syringes.

The scene is also more organized. Corner dealers now include heroin in
their market calls of "hash, pot, acid." Dealers establish turf, maintain
regular customers and change shooting-gallery locations almost monthly to
avoid detection.

Lamoureux, who works with itinerant youths downtown, says heroin dealers
worked six hours a day in 1995. A year later, they were dealing 12 hours a
day except weekends, and now heroin is available 24 hours a day, seven days
a week.

"I'm expecting a war," Lamoureux said in an interview. "Like corporations,
all the dealers want to control the market."

In 1993, the Montreal Regional Health Board reported that almost 19,000
Quebecers had tried heroin. In 1996, community groups estimated that 5,000
Montrealers were regular heroin users.

"Heroin use has been growing in the last 10 years," said RCMP spokesman
Bill Taylor. "Like cocaine in the '80s, heroin has become more socially
acceptable."

Friday Night At The Needle Exchange

"Thanks for the syringe, but I've got a problem," said a man in his 30s. "I
just shit in my pants."

The man was standing with a friend at a counter inside the Sanguinet St.
CLSC, which houses the Cactus nightly needle exchange from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.

"You can't use the bathrooms here," said Roxane, 22, who has worked at
Cactus since 1996. "Sorry."

Visitors to Cactus can get alcohol pads, condoms, cigarette filters for
preparing a shot, and clean syringes, from the 3-cubic-centimetre size for
shooting steroids to the popular 1-cc for smaller doses.

At 10 o'clock on a recent Friday night in Cactus, two teenage women dressed
in black walked in, one with dyed cherry red hair, the other a bleached
blonde.

"Hi, how are you?" asked Darlene Palmer, working behind the counter.

"Not bad, thanks. You?" the cherry-redhead answered.

"Don't forget to bring them back," Palmer said, handing over four syringes.

"How's the little one?" Roxane asked a young woman who came to get condoms
on her way to pick up her child from the sitter.

"Oh, he's growing so fast," she replied. "Next time I'll bring pictures."

Two club-bound men in their 20s dressed in Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts
exchanged two needles each. Another man in his 20s with a mountain bike
dumped a bundle on the counter. Some clients keep needles bunched together
with elastic bands.

A man in his late teens with a goatee, an arm covered with tattoos and a
squeegee dangling from a belt loop unzipped a pocket sewn onto the leg of
his shorts and plunked two used syringes on the counter.

A woman in her early 20s pulled five needles from her purse and asked for a
dozen condoms.

"The non-lubricated ones make excellent arm bands," said Palmer, former
client and current Cactus worker.

Palmer, 41, stopped shooting heroin four years ago and now helps users feel
the way she did when she visited Cactus to exchange syringes.

"With all the chaos in my life, this was a place I could come and I knew
they cared," she said. "They remembered what kind of needles I liked to
use. People come here because it's a caring ear that will listen. These
people are really alone."

Palmer remembers wanting to block out her feelings with alcohol and drugs
after she was abused at the age of 11.

After 27 years of drinking, sniffing and injecting, she decided to stop.
Her withdrawal symptoms lasted 42 days. During the first three weeks, her
muscles were so cramped she couldn't walk or sit.

Lately, Palmer said, all the Cactus clients' faces look lonely, anxious and
sad.

Each year, Cactus exchanges 400,000 syringes. With support from police and
health officials, it was the province's first needle exchange, set up in
1989 to prevent the spread of AIDS and HIV among drug injectors sharing
syringes.

The idea is still controversial in some cities, with some believing it
encourages drug use. But in Montreal now, seven more exchanges operate
downtown and dozens of pharmacies sell or exchange syringes.

Each week, Cactus records 600 visits, some regulars, some vacationers, some
new faces.

In the winter that number drops, Roxane says. People exchange more syringes
per visit, and more people visit indoor shooting galleries to buy and use
heroin - where the drug dealers who operate them often provide clean
needles. More organized than individual drug users, dealers often pay
someone to drop off nightly bins of 500 used needles and pick up clean
ones, specifying how many 1-cc and half-cc syringes they need.

In the summer, alleys become outdoor shooting galleries. A maintenance
worker at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal usually starts his shift by
collecting used needles scattered across the Berri campus.

Roxane of the Cactus says summer is also the season when young people
gravitate to Montreal to live on the streets.

About one-third of Montreal's estimated 6,000 homeless people under 25 use
heroin, the regional health board reported in 1997, and 5 per cent use the
drug every day. The board is currently crunching numbers during its
summertime homeless population census, scheduled for publication this fall.

Palmer said she sees heroin addicts as young as 14, and many itinerant
youth make nightly pit stops at the clinic. Some just want to talk, some
want to get high, and others want to get out of the scene.

Palmer belongs to a committee lobbying the government for more methadone
program funding. Right now, she said, the system is flooded.

"There's a lot of pain out there," she said. "A lot of people are crying
out for help."

Marketing 101

Imagine a product with an 800-per-cent profit margin, an established
market, a reliable distribution system and an enthusiastic sales department.

Points of sale are carefully mapped out and protected. If competition tries
to enter, security forces annihilate it.

Such, said RCMP spokesman Taylor, is the well-organized, intricately
structured and unbelievably hierarchical heroin market of Montreal and most
other North American cities.

"To capture your market you have to improve the product, raise the purity
and lower the price," Taylor said.

Colombian and Mexican drug producers did just that in the late 1980s,
Taylor said. They copied heroin refining techniques from Asia, where heroin
has been refined from poppy plants for more than a century.

It was a matter of cutting risks and costs. Ten kilograms of opium yields
one kilogram of heroin. Grow it and refine it in the same place, and cut
shipping costs and trafficking risks drastically.

South American drug producers now distribute heroin through established
cocaine shipping routes. And dealers, to attract customers, offer quality
products at bargain prices.

Unlike in the '60s when street-sold heroin tested 20-per-cent pure, Taylor
said, heroin now is usually more than 35-per-cent pure, often cut with
glucose or lactose.

Purer heroin means the user gets high faster, for longer, and the rush is
more powerful, outreach workers say.

Yet for the inexperienced, using purer heroin may lead to an overdose,
Taylor said. In a Dallas suburb in 1996, 14 teenagers died of overdoses
linked to potent Mexican heroin.

That same year the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reported 29,000
acres of poppy fields in Mexico, and last year two-thirds of U.S. heroin
seizures came from Colombia.

In Canada, the RCMP's chemical analysts rarely link heroin seizures to
Colombia or Mexico because South American and Asian refinement techniques
are so similar, Taylor said.

Most of the heroin in Montreal comes from southwest Asian trade routes.

RCMP and MUC police seizures continue to rise, as both law-enforcement
agencies plan more stings on heroin smuggling, representatives say. Last
year, the RCMP seized 141 kilograms of heroin, up from 88 kilos in 1985.
MUC police seizures have risen to 2.9 kilos in 1997 from 1.06 kilos in 1996.

"Montreal and Vancouver have historically been the heroin capitals of
Canada," said Neil Boyd, author of the 1991 book High Society, about
illegal drugs in Canada.

Since he wrote the book, Boyd says, lower prices and higher purity levels
have been contributing to high rates of overdose deaths in both cities.

This week, B.C. chief coroner Larry Campbell said there had been 224
cocaine- and heroin-related deaths so far this year, meaning the final
death toll could reach 400 by the end of the year - 100 more than in 1997.
Drug addiction in that province is the leading cause of death among adults
age 30 to 49. And a 30-page report by B.C. health officer Dr. John Millar
says the drug epidemic is tied to an HIV/AIDS epidemic because of users
sharing needles.

Heroin overdose deaths in Montreal rose from seven in 1990 to 23 in 1996,
the last year for which figures are available, Quebec's coroner's office
reports. This excludes related deaths such as suicides, car accidents and
homicides.

Heroin overdose and related deaths now number between two and four each
week, said Dr. Pierre Lauzon, who in 1986 started the city's first
methadone clinic, the Centre for Drug Addiction Research and Assistance,
known by the French acronym CRAN.

Lauzon said overdosing is completely avoidable if more money is available
for treatment. "The health system is responsible for those deaths."

'The best drug in the world'

Every Monday at 12:30 p.m. the telephone at CRAN's Parthenais St. office
rings incessantly. The secretary tries to ignore it while she eats lunch at
her desk.

Three phone lines ring or blink until 1 p.m. That is when she begins taking
appointments for new methadone patients. In one minute she says she fills
the two to four slots available each week.

Reduced working hours during the summer months limit appointments for new
patients to one a week. Last Monday, she told 12 people to try again next
time.

"It's not easy to say that to them," she said. "Usually once they've
decided to call us, they're really desperate."

Unlike psychologically addictive drugs like cocaine or marijuana, heroin
produces a physical addiction. Heroin works like the body's endorphins that
reduce the sensation of pain - except a heroin high is more intense.

Lamoureux of the Dollard Cormier Centre says heroin users can get
physically addicted after one month of daily use.

At that time, the body stops producing endorphins and the addict craves the
drug. Withdrawal symptoms include nausea, hot and cold spells, diarrhea,
vomiting and severe muscle cramping.

Since the 1960s Canadian doctors have prescribed methadone to treat heroin
addiction. Taken daily, methadone replaces heroin's effects without the
euphoric high.

In the last decade, the average age of users at methadone programs has
dropped from 40 to 28, said Lauzon, who began prescribing methadone 20
years ago.

Only 100 doctors approved by the Quebec College of Physicians can prescribe
the synthetic heroin substitute. Lauzon said 500 doctors are needed to help
the estimated 2,000 addicts who want treatment.

"Swiss and Dutch methadone programs reach about 60 per cent of addicts," he
says. "We are reaching just 15 per cent."

Guy and Lyse Levesque waited 18 months to get a methadone prescription,
which they fill at a local pharmacy.

That was in 1994, when the couple quit a four-year-long addiction. They
used to snort grains the size of matchstick tips and spend hours listening
to Supertramp and Pink Floyd songs.

"If I did a little dose, I'd nod," said Guy, 43. "I always had the
impression I was in my own little world."

At first, one-10th of a gram would last overnight, but soon they needed a
quarter-gram a day just not to get sick. Guy lost his job in construction
and the $1,500 he earned each week dealing in hashish supported their habit.

Between calling a clinic and the day they filled methadone prescriptions,
the couple could barely take care of themselves and their two children.

"Every morning we would send the kids off to school, go steal money from a
store, come home to make lunch for the kids and go rob again," said Lyse,
42.

Guy now is a computer technician and Lyse spends time at home cooking and
reading.

"Heroin is the best drug in the world," Guy said. "It's also the most
addictive."

The regional health board is asking the government to add $260,000 to its
annual methadone program budget of $400,000, which pays for the heroin
substitute and services for 600 patients. Denis Boivin of the board said
extra funds would provide treatment and launch programs specifically for
young users. There are no age limits for methadone treatment.

"I get so many phone calls from addicts wanting to get into programs,"
Boivin said. "I'm obliged to say we have no room."

Methadone programs - operated through CRAN, St. Luc Hospital and the Jewish
General Hospital - are overbooked. Boivin said the Jewish General has 300
people on its waiting list. The other two no longer compile lists, and now
operate on a first-come, first-served basis.

Even with more funds, Boivin said, programs would not begin until April 1999.

Day 1 at Artoxico

"I have a vision," says Normand Senez, a film-maker whose 1995 documentary
Mess, on drug use among youth, shocked police narcotics officers and
community workers.

"Heroin is here to stay. I'm looking for a solution in an area where
nothing's being done."

Senez created Artoxico to raise awareness about drug addiction through
films. Since January, Artoxico's staff has been preparing a new project
called Squeegee to teach methadone patients basic
documentary-film-production skills.

In Artoxico's office in the former psychiatric ward of Ste. Jeanne d'Arc
Hospital on St. Urbain St., Senez explained his goal.

"Heroin and methadone deaden the emotions and dull the senses," he said.
"Society is happy when addicts go get their methadone and sit quietly in
front of their television sets. With Squeegee, I want to reactivate the
machine of their minds."

The first day started a half-hour late. One participant had to get
methadone at a pharmacy.

"Try to arrange with your pharmacist to get your doses after 5 p.m.," Senez
told the first group of seven methadone patients.

For some participants, Squeegee was their first paying job, at $6.40 an
hour, five days a week. For others, the six-week project will teach them
new skills.

At 9:30 a.m. five women and two men started taking careful notes in yellow
or pink notebooks to remind them how they will write a script, work a video
camera, set up lighting and edit what will be a 20-minute-long story of
their lives.

Artoxico will train four more groups of participants until 2000 with a
grant from the provincial government's anti-poverty program, set up in 1997
to promote job-creation.

Forty people applied for 35 openings at Squeegee. Senez said he hopes to
show the films to police and community workers to raise awareness about
youth and drugs.

"Fads come and go, but drug abuse seems to be here to stay," said Taylor of
the RCMP. "Marijuana use has not lessened in the last 30 years. Neither has
cocaine use. Will heroin use lessen in the next 20 years?"

Taylor couldn't answer his own question.

So Senez tried.

"Heroin is a big product,'' he said. "The market has already been
established. What disturbs me is that youth are being used as pawns. Wait
for two years. We're underestimating by ignorance the power of heroin."

Darlene Palmer, who quit heroin in 1994, said she still gets cravings.

"It's a dangerous drug," she said. "I know if I did it again, I wouldn't
stop until I died."

(c)1998 The Gazette, a division of Southam Inc.