WHEN DREAMS BECOME A NIGHTMARE

Crack City: Part 2

She's been choked nearly to death, beaten and had a narrow miss with
the blade of a drug-crazed john.

The woman's endured more than 20 years working the streets of
Calgary, Vancouver and Edmonton, which pitched her within inches of
an early grave more times than she can count.

"I wanted to be a lawyer, and a marine biologist," she says with
tears welling in her eyes.

Those dreams died long ago, somewhere between old Electric Avenue and
a serial killer's hunting grounds on the East-End streets of Vancouver.

In the past 10 days, the woman, now 42, has been beaten to a bloody
pulp over an 8-ball of rock cocaine, booted out by a landlord and
lost most of her possessions to the hands of greedy crackhead
'friends' enlisted to help her move.

Her name is Susan. She has been a crackhead for the past 23 blurred
years. Susan's tale of torment began when she was 15 years old,
during an horrific excursion to Edmonton where a pimp pummelled her
for more than a month and a half. As she says, she simply got "caught
up with the wrong people." She has never been the same since.

"That sort of changes a person irrevocably, you don't ever go back,"
she says. The lure of money and drugs estranged the woman from the
middle-class life in which she was raised as she spiralled into the
seedy world of hard drugs and cold cash.

As a teenager, she latched on to a drug-culture circle which revolved
around one particular man, a coke dealer who made regular trips
across the border smuggling bricks of cocaine. He was a star in
certain company.

"He made about 160 grand every five months dealing cocaine, bringing
it up from Mexico. We had a lot of cocaine, we had a lot of money, we
had a lot of fun," she says. Her life spiralled and she forgot about
school until she finally left for Toronto. She wanted to get clean,
which she did - temporarily.

At 19, she came back to Calgary and took up work in a bar along the
once-infamous Electric Avenue. "And that's where the party started," she said.

Her first hit on the pipe was handed to her by her then-boyfriend.
Her nose was in bad shape from the coke she was again sniffing and
the pipe, he said, fixed that problem.

The first time wasn't memorable, but the second time, and then third
. "You're numb, your problems disappear," she says. In reality, they
were just beginning.

"It got a lot worse, I couldn't hold a steady job anymore." She began
selling her body in Calgary and then Vancouver.

She worked the streets hard, bringing in $700 or more a night before
retiring home to her boyfriend with a pile of crack, only to do it
all over again the next day.

The addiction was so powerful not even the spectre of a serial killer
swayed her from hooking on Vancouver's turbulent east end. "Everyone
knew there was a serial killer out there, I still worked it," she says.

That serial killer was the infamous pig farmer, Robert Pickton,
arguably Canada's most notorious. He is serving a life sentence for
the murders and gruesome disposal of six women, although he told an
undercover cop he had slaughtered 49, mostly drug-addled prostitutes.

There came a point when she switched gears and, under the tutelage of
a new boyfriend, worked a series of cons that netted thousands of
dollars each week. She doesn't want to talk about those.

They have since parted ways.

Her slightly hollow eyes and sunken cheeks suggest she has been to
hell and back. In a car behind a relative's house, where her
circumstances forced this writer's initial interview to take place,
she breaks down.

"I'm just so sick of this," she says, wiping away tears.

Susan has tentative plans to check in to Aventa, a Calgary treatment
facility for women. She's tried before, for her family.

"Now I'm just trying to do it for myself. I don't want to be high
anymore," she says.

A life too lucrative to pass up

His enterprise employed dozens of people, ran a 24-hour delivery
service, made piles of cash and, by his estimates, afflicted
thousands of lives.

His name, for the purpose of this story, is Kyle. He was a coke and
crack dealer.

Kyle agreed to this interview on the condition his name would not be used.

"I got in it for the money, about 10 years ago," he told the Sun,
fresh from a three-year sentence on trafficking charges. Kyle was
found guilty in 2008 for his role at the helm of a minor drug empire,
which had tentacles across Calgary, stretching beyond city limits
into several southern Alberta towns and cities.

He declined to reveal how much money was made, but at its pinnacle,
Kyle's business of organized dial-a-dopers doled out between 10 and
20 kg of cocaine and crack each and every month. When pieced out on
the street, a kilogram fetches upwards of $100,000, cops say.

"I ran it as a business," he said. "It's not like I set out to hook
people on drugs or (screw) them over."

Instead, he called it basic supply and demand.

His clientele was already there, a steady stream of fiends, each with
their own source of cash, whether they were women turning tricks or
groups of boosters stealing thousands of dollars worth of
electronics, jewellery and countless other items they could pawn or
trade for as little as 10% of market value, so long as they could
fund their next desperate fix.

"Anything and everything ... that's all you can say," he said.

The average crackhead, he said, spent at least $2,000 every week on crack.

"Those are the bottom-end crackheads. A high-end crackhead could
spend $10,000 a week," he said. His life as drug dealer stretches
back nearly 20 years in Calgary, to days when he would sell joints to
classmates at $5 a piece.

He switched over to cocaine and then crack as the market began
heating up to become the rock cocaine prairie capital it is today.
"This is definitely a crack city," he said.

His reign ended at the hands of a small army of RCMP officers who
busted him and several others in an operation that netted several
ounces of blow and thousands in cash.

Kyle spent the next two years in jail with hardened crooks and
various drug-addled dregs of society, time which he spent on
switching gears for a new life. "There was a moment I realized money
wasn't everything," he said.

"I've done lots of vocational training and got my high school
(equivalency diploma) in prison and it's changed my lifestyle to the
point where I just don't want to sell drugs anymore," he said. "I've
learned other ways to make money and I've seen the impact. I have, obviously."

HELP IS HERE - Local recovery centres

Alberta Health Services facilities

Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission Help Line, 1-866-332-2322

Renfrew Recovery Centre (same day admission for detox) 403-297-3337

Adult Addiction Services (no wait list) 403-297-3071

Lander Treatment Centre (two-week waitlist) 403-625-1395

Addiction Centre (addiction and mental health issues) 403-944-2025

Other facilities

For men

1835 House 403-245-1196

Simon House Recovery Centre 403-247-2050

Fresh Start Recovery Centre 403-387-6266

Sunrise Native Addictions Services Society 403-261-7921

Calgary Dream Centre 403-243-5598

For women

Aventa Addiction Treatment for Women 403-245-9050

Servant's Anonymous Society (for women at risk of sexual
exploitation) 403-237-8477

Who's using what?

. Among Canadians 15 years and older, the prevalence of past-year use
of cocaine or crack was 1.2%, comparable to rates reported in 2004.

. Meanwhile, the prevalence of past-year use of cannabis among the
same age group decreased, from 14.1% in 2004 to 10.6% in 2009.

. The rate of drugs-use by youth 15 to 24 years old remains much
higher than that reported by adults 25 years and older: Almost four
times higher for cannabis use (26.3% versus 7.6%), and almost five
times higher for past-year use of any drug excluding cannabis (6.3%
versus 1.3%).

- - Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, 2009, Health Canada