HOW A POLITICAL STAR CRASHED TO EARTH

Cabinet Favourite's Journey Through Addiction Hell To Redemption

He was one of the legislature's brightest young political staffers
during Premier Gordon Campbell's first term in office: Smart, popular,
good-looking, a sharp dresser and a sharper talker, Marshall Smith
seemed to have it all.

Cruising the corridors of power with an easy confidence that belied
his 28 years, he'd whisper advice to cabinet ministers one minute,
spin a scrum of reporters the next, then crack up his fellow Liberal
insiders with an always-ready joke.

"The Minister of Social Planning," they nicknamed him, because Smith
was the guy who organized all the after-work parties. In any number of
bars near Government Street, you'd find the ministerial aide whooping
it up long after the legislature had shut for the night.

"I was on top of the world and having a blast," he recalls now, even
travelling to Prague with Campbell for the announcement of Vancouver's
winning Olympic bid. He was introduced to Henry Kissinger and
hob-nobbed with Olympic glitterati.

Then it all came crashing down, starting one fateful night in
2004.

"I was in a bar and someone offered me a line of cocaine," said Smith,
now 36. "I did it, I liked it and I wanted more. But it was the
beginning of the end." He had managed a serious drinking problem for
years, but the cocaine was different. Its grip was instantaneous;
relentless. And it soon led to an even more vicious drug: crystal
methamphetamine.

"I was hooked and couldn't stop," he said. "It was too powerful and I
wasn't interested in getting help, only in getting drugs." Quickly
enslaved to a $2,000-a-week habit of cocaine, meth and booze, his once
promising career unravelled rapidly. He was fired, lost his apartment
when the rent money ran out, lost the many friends who couldn't
believe his sudden and shocking transformation.

One night, he slung a napsack over his shoulder and drifted through
the streets of Victoria in a drug-induced haze, snorting coke and
smoking meth all night, ending up sprawled in a doorway as the garbage
trucks rolled by. It was his first night as a homeless addict -- a
cycle that would go on for the next three years.

>From 2004 to 2007, the one-time rising star of government became a
sketchy street-level hustler, dealing drugs to get the money to feed
his habit, sleeping in Vancouver parks and alleys and playing
cat-and-mouse with police who knew all about his former life in the
loftiest circles of political power.

He lost count of how many times he was arrested, eventually doing two
stretches in jail for trafficking. He got mixed up in the most
dangerous side of the drug world and several times feared for his life.

"I passed out in a house one night and four guys burst in with
crowbars to rob the place," he said. "They broke my knee, cheek and
hand. One guy jammed a crowbar right through my foot and into the
hardwood floor. I barely managed to pull it out and I went running
down the street at 5 a.m., bleeding on a broken knee." He was free on
bail at the time. Picked up by police again, the incident led to his
first drug conviction and a seven-month stretch in Victoria's
Wilkinson Road jail, where another former iteration of his life
ironically circled back on him.

Before he got into government work, Smith had pursued a career in law
enforcement. He studied criminal forensic science at the B.C.
Institute of Technology and worked for several years as a prison
guard, including at Wilkinson Road.

"Now the guards I used to work with were guarding me," he said. "And
the prisoners I used to guard were my fellow inmates." Some of the
more hard-core prisoners didn't take kindly to a former "hack"
suddenly appearing on their side of the bars. One of them broke his
jaw. But even that didn't shock Smith out of his ruinous cravings.

"When I got out, I went straight back to the street, right back to
using and dealing," he said. "I lived for six months in a steel
shipping container under the Granville Street Bridge. Dropped down to
125 pounds. Some people reached out, but I was beyond help." Those
people included his well-to-do parents, who worked in the B.C.
film-production business and provided what Smith calls a loving,
stable upbringing in an upper-class Victoria neighbourhood and a
private-school education.

"They tried, but I told them not to try. I felt guilty and ashamed and
didn't want to see them. I saw everything on the street when it comes
to family: From people with no family at all, to parents putting
themselves in danger trying to rescue their kids. In my case, I told
my parents to stay away." He describes his life of addiction on
Vancouver's mean streets as a surreal and dangerous mix of violence
and tenderness; withering hunger and ravenous consumption of drugs.

"I stayed away from the shelters," he said. "Any time you have a tight
concentration of desperate people, that's how you get robbed and
assaulted. The streets are full of predators who will lie, steal, beat
you up -- anything to get their next fix. You're better off to spread
out, and I preferred sleeping at the corner of Nelson and Granville to
at a shelter." But interspersed with the rip-offs and punch-ups, Smith
said he encountered moments of genuine human bonding, and he formed
deep friendships with other homeless addicts.

"I spent many nights huddled in doorways, talking to strangers. That's
when I'd open up about my own life, my own downfall and discover I
wasn't alone. I met doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers -- people
from every walk of professional life who became addicted to drugs."
Most of his former friends and associates deserted him, though he'd
occasionally bump into them on the street -- even provincial cabinet
ministers.

"Some would avoid me. Others would stop and talk. But I was in too
deep and my life was becoming like a Quentin Tarantino movie." He said
the lowest moment came during another botched robbery in a Vancouver
apartment.

"These guys came in and I had something they wanted. One held a
shotgun to my head. That was the bottom for me. I thought, 'I can't
live this life any more.'" Smith is now grateful he was sent back to
jail shortly after that, this time for eight months in a series of
Lower Mainland prisons, where he finally decided to get help. He spent
his prison time filling out applications for rehab and entered the
Maple Ridge Treatment Centre in 2007.

It was also around that time he contacted then-Liberal MLA Lorne
Mayencourt, who'd been pushing his own government for more
addiction-treatment programs, and offered to help him in his efforts.

"We loved him [Smith] at the legislature," Mayencourt said. "He was
outgoing, fun-loving and extremely talented. To see him so thin,
scurrying around the streets dealing drugs, was just heartbreaking.
Then he phoned me and said, 'Look, I'm in this recovery program' and I
said, 'Thank God.'" In December, Mayencourt offered Smith the position
of director of the Baldy Hughes Addiction Treatment Centre, a
nonprofit "therapeutic community" Mayencourt founded in Prince George
17 months ago.

Smith, who has now been free and clear of drugs and alcohol for two
years, accepted the post and is now helping other addicts to recover.
He has also re-bonded with his parents and some of his old
aquaintances, though many broken friendships will never be repaired.

"I lost many wonderful friends and fantastic people in my life," he
said. "Hopefully, I can one day earn their respect again."