DESPERATE WINDSOR ADDICTS TURN TRICKS TO BUY DRUGS

It's A Miracle I'm Still Alive, Woman Says

WINDSOR, Ont. -- High on cocaine and nine months pregnant, "Michelle"
was pedalling home from a nearby tavern with a 50-piece for a client
when she felt her first contraction.

It was her greatest fear. Michelle's worst secrets -her pregnancy and
her addiction -were about to be exposed. "My whole life was about to
change," she says.

And not for the better.

When she arrived home, she tossed the packet of drugs to her customer
and ran upstairs. As her four children lay sleeping in the rooms next
door, she sat in the bathtub and tried to gather her scrambled thoughts.

"I was just thinking the worst-case scenario: they're going to take my
kids away," she says.

But it was too late to plot an escape, too late to convince anyone
with her lies -not the paramedics, not the firefighters, not the
Children's Aid Society.

Michelle gave birth to a daughter on her couch that night in 2003, and
not long after, all five children were taken away. She hasn't seen
them in years.

"Michelle" is one of the growing number of Windsor women who have
turned to sex work for a living. One of Windsor's most marginalized,
most invisible people, her life is a complicated web of trauma, drugs,
prostitution and crime.

The AIDS Committee of Windsor's Roy Campbell estimates there are about
75 women working the streets at any given time, including those who
pick up tricks on the streets or through phone and Internet chatlines.
The majority of those women are addicts who favour crack, crystal meth
and morphine, he says.

"I've seen girls who are out there to make money to buy diapers
because they weren't getting enough money through their
assistance."

"But we know that most of them are connected to the crack," he
says.

Margaret Bodnar, the executive director of the local John Howard
Society, estimates about 90 per cent of the prostitutes referred to
her agency are drug users.

Deborah Gatenby, the executive director of Windsor's women-only
addiction treatment program at the House of Sophrosyne, says more
women in Windsor are turning to sex work to make ends meet. Windsor's
poor economy has pushed more women into the city's strip clubs, escort
services and body rub parlours, and that influx of new workers means
others are displaced onto the street, she says.

Taking drags on a cigarette outside a downtown Windsor office
building, Michelle shares her tale, quick and raw, laced with
expletives. But as pedestrians walk by, she pauses for a moment or
lowers her voice; the tricks, the johns, the deceit and the petty
crimes are a thing of the past, she says. Nobody needs to know.

After her kids were apprehended and sent to live with their father,
Michelle gave up on life. "I didn't care to live, I didn't care to
die," she says.

Cocaine. Crack. Crystal meth. Speed. Morphine. Dilaudid. Oxy. Booze.
It didn't matter -as long as it blocked the pain.

Cobbling together the cash was easy.

She'd shoplift, taking orders from friends for cologne, perfume, Nike
socks or jerseys. S he'd slip into a store, nick the goods, stash them
in a garbage can outside and then go back in for more. Once, she says,
she waltzed into an electronics store and walked out the door with a
32-inch plasma TV.

She'd steal.

She says relatives had to track her down at a crackhouse to tell her
that her father was dying.

But where others saw tragedy, she saw opportunity. While visiting him
in his hospital room, she took $50 from his wallet. "I was f---ed up.
I just wanted to get high more and more and more."

She'd hustle. "It wasn't pretty. It wasn't nice," she says of the
first time she had sex for money, around 2004. "He was very ugly, very
old and I puked. But I needed the money."

Eventually, though, it got easy to sell herself and support her drug
habit.

"You don't even have to be looking for it. Whereas before I'd be
whistling them down, waving them down, today I'm minding my own
business and I've got them honking." On a good day, she says she'd net
$400 or $500. But not anymore.

"Nowadays, it's sad. If somebody stops me and they want head, for
instance, they don't want to pay any more than $20. It's gotten really
bad. You got girls who suck d---for bags of Doritos. There's been
times where I've done it for less than five f---ing dollars, just
because that's how bad I was craving."

Today, Michelle says she doesn't turn tricks or do
drugs.

"It became life or death. I was on rock bottom." She'd tried every
drug on the market. She'd mixed them, crushed them, injected them.
"There was nothing else left. I just woke up one day and the desire
wasn't there."

Through the help of a methadone clinic, she's been clean for a couple
of months, she says. "It's been a struggle. You go places and
everyone's talking about dope and crack. Just talking about it gets me
wanting to do it. I get the sweats going.

"But I see where it brings people, I see where people are at today,
and it devastates me. It saddens me. I don't want to be there."

There's only one thing driving her to stay clean: her kids, who are
now around 16, 13, 12, nine and seven years old. "I've got five kids,
and one day they're going to come home. I've got to be there."

It's Friday night and "the Circle" is buzzing. At this tiny public
park on Drouillard Road, about 20 people have gathered to sit, chat or
have a smoke following a free weekly dinner at a nearby church.

"Sandy" isn't supposed to be here. She's already been picked up six
times for prostitution, and the terms of her probation require her to
steer clear of certain streets, including this one.

'COPING MECHANISM'

For many, drugs are a way to suppress negative memories. University of
Windsor criminology professor Willem De Lint says there's a strong
correlation between substance abuse and deep trauma. "People don't try
to destroy their lives just for the hell of it. Usually there is a
precipitator," he says. "Many of these people are in distress or pain."

Some addiction treatment counsellors say drugs and alcohol -the very
demons they seek to expel from their clients -can offer lifelines to
addicts. "We talk about the tombstones in their eyes," says Deborah
Gatenby, the executive director of Windsor's women-only addiction
treatment program at the House of Sophrosyne. "They sort of disconnect
to the point where their despair overwhelms them and they're almost
not able to connect with you.

"Sometimes their substance abuse saved them. As maladaptive as it is
as a coping mechanism, this reaching for substances enabled them to
sort of survive intact enough that once we reach in and move all that
other stuff out of the way, there's a really whole, fairly
well-developed and wonderful person inside that's just been crippled
by the trauma."

As she settles into a bench and pulls her long brown hair into a
ponytail, she keeps one eye on her paper plate, piled high with
potatoes and salad, and another eye on the road. If a police car
cruises by, she may have to scram. There's a warrant for her arrest.

She hasn't paid her recent $300 fine for prostitution and she missed
her court date because she couldn't drag herself out of bed after
staying up late the night before, getting high.

Drugs came early into Sandy's life. Her father died when she was just
an infant, and she later witnessed her mother suffer physical abuse at
the hands of her stepfather. Just a medicine cabinet away was an
escape from her troubles. At 10, Sandy was already overdosing on her
mother's sedative prescription pills -Serax, Valium, Mandrax. But it
didn't take long for harder drugs to follow.

Two weeks after her 16th birthday, her mother died. Sandy says she
wasn't close to her siblings, so she struck out on her own. But when
she applied for a job at McDonald's and the manager asked for her
social insurance number, she simply left, embarrassed. She didn't know
what that was. "I had no income, nowhere to live, I had nothing. I
didn't know my head from my butt."

She turned up at her sister's home to beg for a place to stay. But
that bed came with a price. She says her sister, a cocaine and crack
user, "sold" her to men in order to feed her habit. "If I tried to
sleep, one of the guys would come in, and I had to do it. All I knew
was, OK, if I have sex with this guy, my sister would love me and I'd
be OK. She'll look after me. I'm OK."

Her days quickly became a cycle of crack and cocaine use. Her sister,
she says, gave her cocaine in exchange for babysitting her infant
daughter. Sandy's attendance at Assumption high school grew more
sporadic. And at night, there were the men.

Eventually, Sandy says she realized that working under her sister's
roof wasn't working in her favour. "I just had sex with three guys,
but I'm still having to ask for a cigarette? I'm still having to beg
for food? I'm not getting nothing out of this," she says.

So, she hit the streets. Sixteen years old, a prostitute and a crack
addict, Sandy's chances at a normal life were quickly slipping away.
She hadn't finished Grade 9. She'd never had a regular job. She'd
never even had a teenage sweetheart. For Sandy, sex was a means to an
end, and the end was crack.

"After being sold, it was like, what is sex? No big deal, just open my
legs and that was that. It didn't mean anything to me. I figure I must
have gotten raped 100 times, and it's no big deal to me."

After a couple of years working the streets, Sandy went to rehab, got
off drugs and moved to Alberta, where she says she worked three
part-time jobs at Zellers, the post office and a restaurant. Though
she admits she drank heavily during that time, she says her employers
valued her. "Although they knew I was a drunk, they knew I was a hard
worker, ambitious, and I made people laugh," she says.

Eventually, homesickness got the better of her, and at 30, Sandy sold
everything, came back to Windsor and moved in with her sister.

It didn't take long for her old habits to return. "(It was) welcome
home, put a crackpipe in my mouth and I started smoking crack ever
since," Sandy says.

Now 36, she's leading much the same life she led at 16. Two decades
later, her body tells the story of the intervening years. Her cropped
tank top and capri pants reveal tanned skin that's mottled with scars.
When she's high on morphine, she scratches her arms and legs until
they bleed. Among the white blotches are countless small red sores;
her sister's dog has fleas.

Today, Sandy is trying to chart a different course for her life. She
just left a bad relationship and moved to a new apartment, and she
says one week ago, she walked into a methadone clinic to start
addiction treatment.

When she leaves the Circle tonight, though, she'll still pace the
sidewalks, waiting for the johns to roll down their windows and slow
to a stop. Methadone or not, she still needs cash, and sex is the way
she'll get it.

"I need a flea collar, bread, milk, juice, body soap, shampoo. It all
comes out to $40. That's going to be my first trick," she says.

She lists her prices: $60 for oral sex, $100 for intercourse, $10
extra to touch her breasts, more to touch her genitals and a premium
for anal intercourse or anything else. "I try to get what I can out of
them."

On an average night, Sandy says she makes $500 to $1,000, and all of
it goes to crack and morphine. "I'd be lucky to wake up with $5 and a
pack of cigarettes," she says.

Her second trick tonight will leave her with a bit of cash in her
pocket for the morning.

Her third and final trick tonight will be for "a treat" -a toke or two
of crack for her and her new roommate.

It may be a slow start to recovery, but at least it's a
start.

"I'm still able to hold my head up," she says. "I know it doesn't say
I love myself because I'm out there doing what I'm doing, but I like
myself a little more than to be going under just yet. I'm not ready.

"To be walking and living, I'm so thankful.... It truly is a miracle
that I'm here."