DO WE HAVE A DRUG HABIT?

Recent High-Profile Crimes Turn Attention To Metro's Drug
Underworld

There are 'pharm parties' where bowls of prescription pharmaceuticals
are passed around like candy, but cannabis use is down.

Addiction Services offered in our region are seeing 300 requests for
help per month.

The RCMP is linking a pair of violent area crimes to the drug
trade.

It's difficult to get a sense of Metro Moncton's illicit drug
scene.

However, some of those who would know best suggest that though the
nature of drug use in our area has changed a bit and is at the root of
much of our relatively rare major crime, the size of the drug problem
has at least stayed relatively constant.

The arrests of five young area men in connection with a homicide last
week in Shediac and a violent robbery in Moncton have people in the
community talking, and what they are talking about is drugs.

The pair of middle-of-the-night home invasions, just 90 minutes apart,
were enough to make most in the public jump to the conclusion the
violence was somehow connected to illegal drugs. Now the RCMP is
officially saying the same thing, that investigators believe the
motive in the two home invasions was the robbery of drugs and cash and
all five accused are known drug users.

Though those allegations have not yet been tested in court, they
nevertheless lead to questions about the size and nature of Metro's
drug culture, especially when so many have been troubled by the youth
of those implicated in these two high-profile crimes.

Crime overall has been dropping in Metro Moncton for a number of years
- -- by 16 per cent between 2006 and 2007, for instance.

However, Codiac Regional RCMP spokesman Cpl. Mike Gaudet believes he
can't honestly say drug crime has gone down, because crime statistics
in general have a way of being unpredictable and full of sudden spikes
and troughs. Gaudet said small annual increases and decreases in drug
crime statistics may not exactly signal larger trends.

There are other problems with tracking drug crime. If a house has been
broken into, there's clear evidence a crime has been committed whether
police make arrests and prosecutions are obtained or not.

However, if a drug transaction is made and police don't learn of it,
the crime, of course, does not get recorded. Conversely, if police
happen to make an increased number of drug arrests, their good work
has a way of making a problem seem bigger.

Corporal Gaudet suggested there's yet another problem with drug crime
statistics. They don't account for all the other crimes that have
their roots either in the drug trade itself, the efforts of users to
get money to feed their addictions, or the crimes they commit that
they might have refrained from had they not been under the influence
of drugs and alcohol.

"We don't always have hard facts and statistics behind it but, in my
18 years as a police officer, I can say a high percentage, if not most
of our crimes, have a relation to the drug world," Gaudet said.

He said most of our major crimes especially have drug implications,
even if, "at the end of the day we don't necessarily have (arrested
individuals) make a statement about why they committed crimes."

All those provisoes notwithstanding, the most recent crime figures
from Statistics Canada, from 2007, show drug crime below the national
average in Metro Moncton.

Ultimately, though the drug problem is certainly real and the public
would be naive to think otherwise, it is also probably not as bad as
some people imagine it either -- thanks, in Mike Gaudet's estimation,
to the dedication of numerous social agencies in our community.

There are many people doing great frontline work in confronting drug
abuse, crime, poverty and homelessness in our community, so it's hard
to single anyone out as a leading expert.

However, Normand Blais has seen the conditions on the ground in Metro
from a number of perspectives. Recently hired as a community program
officer for the Codiac RCMP, he came to the job after a decade of
working with Metro at-risk youth through organizations like the YMCA,
YouthQuest and the Dieppe Youth House.

Blais said this week that alcohol, cocaine and prescription pills have
been the leading culprits in the problems community outreach workers
are seeing.

Whether they are causes or symptoms of wider social issues is, as it
is everywhere, the great chicken-and-egg question, though Blais tends
to see things like abandonment and abuse leading to drug use among
youth rather than the other way around.

Blais said while people might be surprised to learn that the
relatively 'new' drug crystal meth has actually been around since the
First World War, he noted contemporary drug use here and elsewhere can
have a multi-generational facet. The flower children of the 1960s are,
in some cases, still using and abusing drugs and alcohol, and they are
now the parents and grandparents of youths experimenting with drugs
today.

For instance, "marijuana and alcohol are more socially acceptable
today, and that's an issue," Blais said.

He has a point. They are so socially accepted, that when Blais refers
to them as gateway drugs that can lead to an even more damaging
lifestyle, the post-Cheech & Chong generation might be tempted to roll
its eyes at what seems today an earnest "reefer madness" cliche. But
then you consider his decade spent working with troubled youth in
Metro Moncton, and you decide he and his colleagues in the social
safety net trenches just might know more about gateways than the rest
of us.

Blais sees abuse of prescription pills as a current problem, "because
Mom and Dad have them in the medicine cabinet." While he suggested it
wasn't an epidemic in our area, he did speak of pharm parties in which
"everyone puts Mom and Dad's pills in a bowl and everybody takes
some," a particularly dangerous approach because the sort of safety
information about dosage amounts and interactions that might challenge
a pharmacist is left to random chance.

Gaudet expressed a similar view about the appeal of pills, both the
legitimate ones being abused and the designer highs created in drug
labs.

"Prescription pills and methamphetamines and the new flavours of the
week, there has been an increase in the last 10 years, according to
our drug section," he said. He suggested young people especially get
interested in pharmaceuticals because you're not smoking anything or
snorting something up your nose.

"You're taking a little pill and you feel funny," he said, suggesting
how easy it can be to get interested and then hooked. "You're taking
one hit of ecstasy and going to dance, and next week you're taking two
because that one didn't last long enough. That initial high is the
best high a person gets, so they turn around and want to reach that
high again and they won't, so they're taking more."

Jean Daigle, the regional director of Addiction and Mental Health
Services for Regional Health Authority B, agrees prescription pill use
has increased in the last eight years, but alcohol is still the drug
that leads to their greatest intake of clients. Meanwhile, he says the
demand for addiction services in Metro Moncton "is greater than ever
before -- not that we necessarily see that as a bad thing."

While they are now getting a staggering 300 requests for service each
month, he says they are happy to try to help as many people as they
can.

While a growth in service requests can represent a growing problem in
Metro, it can also be attributed to overall population growth in this
bustling corner of the province. It's to be hoped it's also the result
of more people trying to take control of their lives, which is
certainly a positive for all of us. Daigle notes a 2006 study found
addictions cost the Canadian economy about $8.2 billion per year.

Against that backdrop, the public would be wrong to think the drug
problem in our community is insignificant. On the other hand, Daigle
said, "there's this great perception that nine-year-olds are out there
getting high and we don't really see that."

The trick to successfully dealing with addiction is, "if you can get
at them within the first week," they come seeking help.

Sadly, that isn't always possible because of caseloads. Addiction
Services has however reduced wait times recently by introducing more
group counselling over one-on-one counselling.

Meanwhile, Daigle shared his service's philosophy of harm reduction,
which is to understand that not everyone will succeed in beating
addictions on the first try and that no one should feel it's useless
to seek help again or that they are somehow disqualified from further
help.

"Always know that you can come back."