KAMLOOPS BLAZERS TAKE A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

The smell of urine is strong.

Atop the bare brick walls, rows of barbed wire are draped in years
worth of garbage.

On the ground, discarded needles outnumber cigarette butts and empty
drug packaging sits in piles alongside fast-food takeout bags and
shattered crack pipes.

Other than the random shouting from down the block and sporadic wails
of distant police sirens, the only sound is the squeaking of rats
beneath a dumpster.

This is Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and it's a far cry from the
halls of Interior Savings Centre - or anything else the six Kamloops
Blazers who took a tour of the notorious neighbourhood this week had
ever seen.

"It's crazy," said 20-year-old defenceman Giffen Nyren while walking
along East Hastings Street on Monday night.

"You see it happen in a movie, but you never see it first-hand. To see
this happen upfront, it's crazy."

Nyren, alongside teammates Jimmy Bubnick, Josh Caron, Justin Leclerc,
Linden Saip and Zak Stebner, visited the Downtown Eastside with a
handful of Kamloops Mounties as part of Project Edge, a program that
will eventually see the players take their message to local schools.

The aim of Project Edge is to keep children in Kamloops from becoming
addicted to drugs - which, the players heard, can happen quite easily.

Chip, a 27-year-old heroin addict, can't remember what he ate for
dinner, but he clearly remembers his first time using drugs.

"It was between Grade 7 and Grade 8 and it was at the PNE," he said
openly, wearing a Vancouver Canucks T-shirt sporting the name and
number of goalie Roberto Luongo.

"I started smoking pot."

Soon, Chip said, his drug use made him an outcast at
school.

"All it was, was just curiosity and rebelliousness," he
said.

"In high school, I became a loner and I just smoked weed by
myself."

Now he "cranks" - or injects - about $100 worth of heroin each
day.

And how does he pay for it?

"I sell dope and I steal," he said.

"It's as simple as that."

After telling his own story of drug addiction, Chip agreed to show the
Blazers how he shoots up.

Reaching into his pants zipper, he pulled out a "point" of heroin -
roughly a tenth of a gram which, Chip said, costs anywhere from $10 to
$20 on the Downtown Eastside.

He opened the bag and showed the players what the drug looks
like.

Then, desperately patting his pockets, he realized he didn't have "a
rig" - the term addicts use to refer to a needle.

"I'll go find one," he said, disappearing down the dark alley a
half-block north of East Hastings.

In a few minutes, he was back, rig in hand and obviously ready to
shoot up.

His hands quivering, he took the needle out of its bright orange
packaging, prepared the drugs and found a vein.

The Blazers looked on in wonder as Chip injected the heroin into a
vein in his hand.

When he was done, he snapped the needle in half so as not to leave a
hazard for the "binners" - the street term for people who search
through dumpsters.

Chip said the high is instantaneous - and it was obvious in his facial
expressions he was feeling the effects of the drug.

Within seconds, however, he had a sobering message.

"I just want to let you know just what a shitty life you end up with,"
he said.

"It's a lifelong sentence, basically, because for someone, once you're
addicted, it's every day."

Chip was one of many addicts the six Blazers encountered on Monday
night.

They were all different, but their message was the same - "Don't end
up here."

When a group of Blazers happened across Melissa, a 23-year-old crack
addict from New Westminster, she appeared to be passed out on the
filthy pavement in an alley behind the Balmoral Hotel. She then rose
slowly to her feet and engaged the players with her message.

"You have to be strong enough to just not want to make the choice to
use in the first place," she said.

Melissa told the Blazers that, like Chip, her first drug experience
was also with marijuana.

"It is so easy to subconsciously get sucked into something."

She said she graduated from pot to cocaine as a teenager.

But the quick progression didn't stop there.

"At first, you're just snorting it on the weekend or whatever," she
said.

"Then it's not just a weekend thing - it's an everyday thing. Then
you're not snorting. Now you're smoking because you're not getting
anything from it. Then, all of a sudden, you're banging [injecting].
"Just don't make a choice where it can lead to something more than
you'll know. It's that first time."

The Blazers thanked Melissa for her time and began to walk away, but
she wasn't done talking.

"Thank you - and I hope it changes and helps a lot of people," she
said, encouraging the players in the talks they will soon give to
Kamloops elementary-school students.

Kamloops RCMP Insp. Yves Lacasse, who spearheads Project Edge
throughout the year, said the message that gets back to the Kamloops
community makes the annual trip worthwhile.

"The two-or three-day investment in Vancouver will go such a long way
in this community. The experience and the learning will be shared with
young children here in Kamloops," he said, noting many children look
up to Blazers and Mounties.

"So, when they hear this message coming from these young hockey
players and police officers, it has a very strong impact on them."

Lacasse said the players are eager for the presentations at elementary
schools, which will begin in October, to get begin.

"These kids have been sponges," he said.

"They're asking so many questions, they're absorbing so
much.

"And I know that they've got a thirst to share that experience with
the general population."

The success of Kamloops' Project Edge program is evident in the
interest it's attracting from other police forces across the province,
Lacasse said.

"When you see people like the Kelowna detachment wanting to model
themselves after the program that we have here in Kamloops, and when
you see the phone calls I'm getting from other locations in B.C., and
they want to see what Kamloops is doing and why our program has been
so successful, it's really rewarding," he said.

"And I think we are making an impact."

Lacasse has witnessed that impact firsthand during the
trip.

"I know they [the Blazers players] made many, many phone calls and
they sent many text messages during this trip, of different things
that they saw and their experience," he said.

"I think it was good. I think it was a good trip."

CITY SERGEANT PATROLS HIS 'PRISON'

It's his home turf, but Vancouver Police Department Sgt. Mark
Steinkampf is far from proud.

"People think it's all peaches and cream down here, that it's just a
great big love-in," he said while leading a group of Kamloops Blazers
around the East Hastings Street area.

"That's just a load of crap. Basically, what it is, it's palliative
care."

As a police officer, Steinkampf is bound by his duty to protect the
residents of the Downtown Eastside.

But how can he care for them when they don't care for
themselves?

"These are the people I'm sworn to protect and I choose to work here,"
he said.

"But is it frustrating? Yeah, it's incredibly frustrating."

Traditional policing strategies have become ineffective on the
Downtown Eastside - which VPD cops refer to as "The Skids" - with
addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes and thieves all doing business in
plain view 24 hours a day.

"So, what do we, as police, what do we do?" Steinkampf asked
rhetorically.

"Do we put them in prison? They're in prison. Is this not
prison?"

According to Steinkampf, the answer lies in harsher sentences for
those at the top of the drug world.

"Those who are keeping them in here, those dirt-bag drug dealers, they
need to be in the pen," he said, describing B.C.'s justice system as
"a revolving door of probation.

"As a policeman, I've detached myself from the court system. I even
tell my young officers, I tell them to go testify but don't stay
around to see what happens, because it's disappointing."

He might have given up on the courts for the time being, but
Steinkampf isn't giving up on The Skids.

Not yet, anyway.

"You just keep coming out," he said.

"What else can you do?"

JOSH CARON RECALLS SURREAL TRIP

The moral of the story for Josh Caron after his trip to the Downtown
Eastside is simple.

"Don't do drugs," he said. "Don't even try.

"Stay away from that stuff. Don't get peer-pressured into that kind of
stuff."

Caron said the entire trip - a two-and-a-half day whirlwind that
included police lectures and training demonstrations in addition to
the East Hastings tour - felt a little bit surreal.

"It was wild," he said.

"I never imagined me being down there and witnessing that, and being a
part of that. It just opened my eyes up to - I just couldn't imagine."

Seeing the junkies, drug dealers and prostitutes of the Downtown
Eastside was completely foreign to Caron, a native of Campbell River.

"It was quite a good experience."

JIMMY BUBNICK READY TO SPREAD THE MESSAGE

If the interest of his teammates is any indication of what to expect
when he takes his message to Kamloops classrooms in the coming months,
Jimmy Bubnick will have no problem spreading the word about what he
saw on the Downtown Eastside.

"They sounded really interested in it," he said.

"There were quite a few questions - you know, 'What happened? What
were some of the key points of the trip?'"

The Blazers winger said the tour of East Hastings Street brought home
the fact addiction can happen to anybody.

JUSTIN LECLERC SEES ADDICTS IN A NEW LIGHT

Having spent Monday night on a tour of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside,
Justin Leclerc looks at drug addicts in an entirely new light.

"I think the biggest thing for me was the fact that the people were
actually smart people that were out there," the Blazers goalie said.

"A lot of them weren't too into the drugs to talk to you and made a
lot of sense about the things they were saying, and they could give
you some pretty good insight about the life they live there."

Leclerc said the eloquence with which many of the addicts told their
stories made them easy to relate to.

"It just kind of makes it scary because, you know, it makes it more
real," he said. "Anyone could kind of fall into that trap with a
series of wrong decisions."

Now Leclerc is eager to get the word out to Kamloops
kids.

"It could happen to anyone," he said.

"If you get that message across, that it can happen to them, then,
hopefully, they'll make better decisions."

"Every one of those people, we carried on a pretty good conversation
with most of them and they all said not to take drugs," he said.

"So that was definitely the main thing, and I'll take that back to the
classrooms and definitely share my experience."

LINDEN SAIP GETS A REAL EYE-OPENER

For Linden Saip, the trip to the Downtown Eastside was almost a
sensory overload.

"They really kind of prepared us to give us some insight on what we'd
see down there but, once you get down there and see it first-hand,
it's a lot more than you expect," the Blazers defenceman said.

"Because you get visual, you hear it all, you see it all - and it's
more intense than what you think you're going to be seeing down there."

The sheer numbers on the Downtown Eastside were overwhelming to
Saip.

"You go down there and there's thousands of people down there," he
said.

"You don't expect there to be that many people. You don't expect to
see the things you see happening, like drug use and so on. It's a real
eye-opener."

Saip said he thinks the stories from the area will resonate well in
Kamloops classrooms.

"I think the stories that we tell them about the people down there are
going to be a lot more effective than just telling them, 'Don't do
drugs'," he said.

"I think the kids will get a lot stronger message from that."

GIFFEN NYREN RUMINATES ON A HARSH WORLD

Knowing what to expect isn't enough to prepare you for a trip to the
Downtown Eastside, according to Giffen Nyren.

"I knew we were going to see some very challenging and rough stuff,"
the Calgary-born Blazers blueliner said, explaining that 2008's
Project Edge participants warned this year's group of what they would
see.

"You see this in the movies all the time.

"You're almost de-sensitized to it in some ways. Then you get three
feet away from a lady shooting herself up in the arm with a needle and
it's reality.

"It's the bitter reality of the harsh drug world and the slippery
slide people can fall into."

Nyren said he's anxious to get into local schools to spread the
overarching message from addicts he encountered on Monday night - if
you don't do drugs, you won't end up here.

"These people do not choose to be there," Nyren said.

"They don't like being down there. You have to understand that they
don't like doing those drugs. They don't like it.

"They got trapped in it and they can't get out."