A SHOCK IN TWO SHOPPING CARTS

Admitting She Was An Addict Was The Hardest Thing Janette Pink Ever
Had To Do

When crack addict Janette Pink came home to find her worldly
possessions in two shopping carts on the sidewalk, she just couldn't
wheel them away.

Despite her blown knees, she just couldn't see herself pushing a cart
like the strung-out Downtown Eastside addicts she'd seen on TV.

"I got my suitcases and hauled them by hand," said the 47-year-old
Duncan native. "Pushing the carts would make me one of them, and I
couldn't be like them.

"But in the end, I am them. It was that day I admitted I was an
addict," she added shakily, covering her face with her hands. "It's
still hard to admit."

Like most addicts, Pink never thought she'd sink to such depths.

She didn't touch crack cocaine until she was 35, a mother of two boys,
aged 12 and 15, and didn't get hooked until six years later, when she
blew her knees and lost her job at the Comox military base.

Pink had defined herself through her work. Being unemployed and on
disability ate away at her.

Depressed, she started using crack daily, missing family functions,
hanging out with a bad crowd, smoking every cent away -- all the while
telling herself she didn't have a problem.

When her granddaughter Danica was born, it was two and a half days
before she visited because she was too busy getting loaded.

Even as she lived in an abandoned building and prostituted herself
twice to earn money to feed her habit, she stubbornly clung to her
mantra: "I'm not like that."

But each failure drowned Pink in shame and guilt, which only pushed
her deeper into the drugs.

The day before she was evicted from a friend's house, she had invited
her family and friends over for a curry chicken dinner.

She had set out to the grocery store to buy ingredients, but ended up
smoking every penny away in the bushes along the Cowichan River -- not
returning home until the next evening, when she found the shopping
carts waiting for her in the rain.

It was a bitter dose of reality, long overdue. The experience -- her
rock bottom -- forced her to look at what was really going on in her
life. "Without it, who knows? I could still be out there."

But Pink also had another reason to get better -- her granddaughter
Danica.

When she checked herself in to the Salvation Army Homestead, a
women-only recovery centre, in Vancouver in July 2007, it was a photo
of the bright-eyed, dark-haired cherub on her bedside table that gave
her a sense of purpose.

"I had nothing inside of myself that was enough to draw me out," she
recalled. "Danica gave me something to strive towards."

Admitting she was an addict was admitting she was powerless, and
"that's the hardest thing I ever had to do."

Today, she lives in a subsidized studio in downtown Vancouver,
volunteers as a receptionist at EMBERS, a Downtown Eastside
non-profit, and has started a new job at a major hardware store. Best
of all, she's been back to Duncan to see Danica three times since May.

Vancouver, compared to Vancouver Island, has so much help available,
said Pink. But she has no illusions about her adopted city. "If I pick
up down here, I'm dead," she said. "This city would eat me alive."

Last week, Pink got off her bus on Hastings and Carrall Streets and
saw a girl light her crack pipe at 9 a.m. "I wanted to join her," Pink
said frankly. "But now there was that bigger part of me that said . .
. Do you really want to go there again?'"

There will always be a "little addict in my head doing push-ups," said
Pink. "I know I have to fight it, sometimes daily, depending on what's
going on in my life.

"And I probably have to fight it for the rest of my life."

What's Needed?

Aside from crack cocaine, Janette Pink also gave up alcohol,
cigarettes, pot, the partying lifestyle, even her hometown, where it
was easy to run into people she'd used with before: "I've learned you
have to be willing to change everything about yourself and your life
in order to stay clean."

Three things Pink said would help addicts in the Downtown Eastside:

- - More detox beds, "because in the moment is all we have."

- - More treatment programs and recovery houses for addicts, rather than
jail.

- - More affordable housing with supports that's not in the Downtown
Eastside. "It's really hard for an addict in early recovery," said
Pink. "It doesn't take much to have a bad day."