Seattle addicts face lower risks: It's easier to buy drugs in the U.S. city
than to find a place to take them, one junkie of 25 years says.

SEATTLE William is cleanshaven and keeps his preppy clothes tidy, so
the waitress is never suspicious when he slips into a restaurant washroom
to inject heroin into his scarred arms.

``Buying a 50cent cup of coffee is a good deal to go into the bathroom and
shoot $20 of heroin,'' says the 43yearold Seattle man who has been
addicted to black tar for 25 years.

For William, who has been homeless for more than a decade, it's easier to
buy drugs than to find a spot to do them. In North America's grunge rock
capital, there is no place like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where addicts
congregate in one confined area and openly shoot drugs.

``Sometimes I go outside, in alleys or under bridges,'' he says in a slow
but steady voice. ``In the last two years I got a little sloppy with
sharing needles. I'm still waiting for my test results. I've had 12 HIV
tests and they've been negative so far.''

William might be more nervous if he were a junkie in Vancouver, where as
many as 50 per cent of injection drug users are infected with HIV, the AIDS
virus. Seattle's rate has been stable at three per cent for a decade, even
though that city has nearly twice as many users as Vancouver.

However, health officials in Seattle are terrified that junkies who
regularly travel between the two cities could eventually spark a similar
epidemic in their community.

They toured the Downtown Eastside this summer, are in constant
communication with their B.C. counterparts, issued 12,000 bright orange
pamphlets warning local addicts about the dangers in Vancouver, and devised
action plans to try to stop HIV from spreading across the CanadaU.S.
border into Washington state.

Dr. Bob Wood, director of the SeattleKing County AIDS Control Program, has
recommended that services for addicts continue to be offered across his
community to avoid creating a Downtown Eastside, where users are crammed in
deplorable living conditions and are more likely to share needles.

In Seattle, druggies are scattered throughout the city in much smaller
groups, mainly because lowrent housing and skid row hotels were wiped out
of the downtown 20 years ago by the tourism industry.

Wood believes Seattle is also less vulnerable to an HIV epidemic right now
because most of its injection drug users shoot heroin, which is typically
taken two or three times a day. In Vancouver, cocaine is cheaper and more
accessible, but must be injected as many as 20 times a day to maintain the
high.

The more people inject, the more risk they could use an infected needle,
noted Wood, a tall bald man sporting one large gold earring.

Compounding this dilemma was a decision a few years ago by Vancouver's
needle exchange to limit the number of syringes customers could get each
day. The idea now reversed was to encourage contact between street
workers and users, but it likely resulted in more sharing, said Wood, who
runs the seven exchange programs in Seattle, which don't set limits.

Besides using more needles, cocaine addicts are also more sexually active
than heroin users, added Dr. Alonzo Plough, director of the Seattle
KingCounty department of health.

``[Heroin and cocaine] have different implications to an AIDS epidemic.
Heroin users inject drugs and go into kind of a stupor. With injectable
cocaine and methamphetamine, people go into a hyper stage which accelerates
unsafe sexual activity,'' Plough said.

Kris Nyrop, executive director of SOS (Street Outreach Services) in
Seattle, believes HIV rates are low in his city because of ``the junkie
culture'' there. Addicts tend to shoot in privacy and avoid sharing drug
paraphernalia such as bleach, cotton and cookers although many still
swap needles.

``There is no history of shooting galleries and widespread sharing of
injection equipment,'' Nyrop, a longhaired, weatheredlooking man, said
from his nofrills office on a dingy Seattle street.

But Nyrop was alarmed this summer when he saw six Seattle drug users in the
Downtown Eastside, despite all the warnings. The users who migrate between
the two cities include native Indians travelling between reserves, seasonal
farm workers, homeless people, youth, and Seattle prostitutes who are lured
to Vancouver by softer antiprostitution laws and cheaper drugs.

William said news of the Vancouver situation only piqued his interest in
the B.C. city. ``I thought that would be the next place to go because of
the availability of the drugs,'' he said.

When asked about the dangers of the high HIV rate, he shrugged and said
that's what clean needles are for.

Both Nyrop and Wood were shocked when they visited Vancouver and saw open
drug use on the streets and in hotels. While they applaud the compassion
Vancouver police officers have shown by not cracking down on addicts and
prostitutes, they said more outreach and education is needed to address
this medical epidemic.

``You have effectively decriminalized drug use and the sex industry in
Vancouver,'' said Nyrop. ``You went sort of halfway there, but not fully
there. And what you've got is a mess.''

Seattle and Vancouver offer similar services but Wood stressed they are
``grossly deficient'' to meet the needs of users. He is calling for more
money in Seattle to improve outreach programs, increase drug treatment
facilities, and strengthen surveillance for HIV.

``The Vancouver epidemic gave us one more example to policy makers about
how urgent our need is to have additional methadone treatment facilities,''
added Plough.

Last week, The Vancouver/Richmond health board allocated $4.6 million to a
range of new services, including hiring 42 more community nurses, street
workers and counsellors, and the expansion of the needle exchange program.

In Seattle, officials want more frontline workers like Spanishspeaking
Julian Laserna and Sonya Gray, a black woman and recovered addict, who set
out on a rainy afternoon this week to deliver clean drug paraphernalia,
condoms, toothbrushes and razors to the city's homeless addicts and to the
drug dealers.

The idea is to keep the users and sellers safe until they decide to seek help.

``The fact is, recovery houses are not working,'' Laserna, a young man with
a university business degree, said earnestly.

They find William and his pals in a rancid, colourless shelter, overflowing
with desperate souls sprawled on grey mats and devouring thin sandwiches
distributed in baggies.

Outside the shelter, a man whom Laserna identified as Seattle's main dealer
of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana estimated the infection rate there would
be much higher without people like Laserna and the needle exchange program.

``It would be a major problem without the free cookers and condoms. Then
people would die,'' the Spanishspeaking man said through Laserna.

The babyfaced 27yearold dealer, who is married and has three small
children, used to peddle drugs in Vancouver until he was arrested and
deported back to his native Mexico.

Another addict wandering Seattle's streets contracted HIV 18 years ago by
sharing a needle with his gay lover who has since died of AIDS.

Chuck is now very careful, he said as he returned 45 used syringes,
packaged neatly in ziplock plastic bags, to the Seattle needle exchange.

A gaunt man with haunted eyes, 40yearold Chuck said his addiction to
speed is more terrifying than living with HIV.