CRACK COCAINE SEDUCTIVE, DEADLY

Three days into a crack binge, her eyes red and wet and sad, "Lisa"
cares little about her rotting thumb.

Blackened by an embedded glass shard from a chipped pipe and worsened
by embers from the frequent lighting process, Lisa doesn't want
medical attention for a lousy finger.

"I'm an addict," she deadpans, firing up her next fix. "Hey, I'm
honest." Lisa's partner in crack, "Cathy," electrified by a blast of
the rock moments ago, explains in manic speed about crack cocaine --
the free-based form of powdered coke, or cocaine hydrochloride --
which she swears might be mentally but not physically addicting. She
should know, she says. She has consumed coke almost daily for much of
the last quarter century -- when she's not in jail.

"I don't know what the f---it is," she muses, unable to sit still,
unable to clearly explain herself. "It's a serotonin thing. It's how
happy your body feels.

"It's a sick love."

Use of some illegal drugs like marijuana has dropped in recent years.
Yet abuse of harder narcotics remains a stubborn problem, say police
and street workers.

According to Health Canada's Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Survey
from 2009, among Canadians aged 15 and older, the past-year use of
alcohol decreased from 79.3 per cent in 2004 to 76.5 per cent in
2009. The past-year use of cannabis decreased from 14.1 per cent to
10.6 per cent. But the use of cocaine or crack has remained steady at
1.2 per cent of the population.

Also remaining stable was ecstasy (0.9 per cent), speed (0.4 per
cent) and hallucinogens (0.7 per cent).

The record $4.1-million drug haul by Windsor police in 2010 shows the
grip narcotics still have in Windsor.

"Crack's a huge problem for us," said Staff Sgt. Jim Farrand, of the
Windsor police drugs and guns unit. "It's very steady. We're seeing
crack as much as we ever have."

Roy Campbell -- sometimes called Reverend Roy, for his willingness to
preach the benefits of 12-step programs -- has toiled on the front
lines of the AIDS Committee of Windsor's needle-exchange program
since it began in 1993. Campbell has witnessed drug culture up close.
He has arrived at a home moments after a window was shot out. He has
found a junkie in mid-overdose. He has helped a client whose
needlework went so awry, his vein splattered blood around the
interior of a car.

The 56-year-old outreach co-ordinator has seen the destitute, extreme
poverty, and at least one home so acrid with the stench of cat urine
that it literally took your breath away.

The AIDS Committee started exchanging needles with a few addicts 17 years ago.

Last year, with more than 250 clients, it distributed 224,000 needles
and collected almost as many.

Campbell thinks drug use has remained relatively constant in recent
years, but that more dangerous drugs are making inroads: crack, and
more recently, opiates and crystal meth.

He says narcotics take their toll on the users, of course, but also
on the community, affecting family, friends and neighbours.

With the oddly sweet smell of crack smoke hovering mid-air, two
outreach workers with the AIDS Committee of Windsor's needle-exchange
program gently urge Lisa to have her thumb checked out.

Just a few weeks previously, they note, after trying unsuccessfully
to get another client to seek medical attention for his infected
thumb, they came in one night to find the battle was lost.

"One of our clients had a thumb abscess," said Campbell. "We told him
to get it checked. Two weeks later, we came in and it was sitting in
the ashtray."

Drug addicts often aren't eager to visit hospitals. They don't want
to sit too long without doing drugs, for one. Worse, they fear being
identified as a drug abuser, which can bring a host of complications,
including having prescriptions -- the lifeline of opiate addicts --
cancelled. Many fear that police will be alerted or, in the case of
parents, the Children's Aid Society.

Outreach workers often recommend a program called Street Health,
where society's down-and-out, the addicts and the homeless and the
streetwalkers, seek medical treatment without an OHIP card -- and
without questions.

Lisa's thumb eventually healed, though health care didn't seem
important to her the night a reporter visited.

This night, they sit around a coffee table littered with the
accoutrements of a hazy drug blowout -- glass jars with scorched lids
that serve as makeshift bongs, a tin container holding bits of crack,
Brillo pads to scrape the drug, scraps of aluminum foil and lighters
and ashes and a glass vial for smoking.

"I've been on a f---ing 25-year bender," Cathy says, putting this
three-day binge into context. "This is nothing, man. A couple of
eight-balls, like, three, four grams, that's like f---all."

Everything out of her mouth this night is misery: the death of a
loved one, missing her child, having boyfriend problems, fighting
depression, wanting to quit.

"I went to rehab and sh--," Cathy says, breaking into tears during
her high-octane conversation, what front-line workers call a
crack-and crystal-meth induced Crack Rap. "But I'm not there, really,
to say I'll never do it again. Honestly, I know I can't quit. I'd be
lying to myself."

Cathy has sold drugs and done "whatever" to make money for her
expensive addiction, including theft -- spending up to $1,000 in a
single day on crack cocaine.

She has lost her child, freedom, jobs, friends and self-respect. But
never her taste for sick love.

"One day I want to go to jails and talk to people," she says. "I want
to go to high schools and talk to kids about drugs. I started using
because it was trendy, man.

"But crack kills. It kills the quality of life."

DRUG IS CHEAP, INTENSE AND HIGHLY ADDICTIVE

Dr. Peter Selby, the Torontobased director of addiction programs at
the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, says drugs can be so
seductive because they tap into the brain's pleasure centres.

"Our desire for food, water and sex can be hijacked by drugs," says
Selby. "The drug provides a high or euphoria by releasing dopamines,
or the pleasure chemicals of the brain. These lead to complex changes
in the body that cause the person to continue using the drug.

"Even if you get over the first hump of withdrawal, it creates other
changes in the memory parts of the brain that keep drawing the person
to the drug.

"So people continue using the drug despite the harm it's causing them
physically, socially, psychologically, legally."

The brain's nerve cells communicate via the release of chemicals
through synapses. The mini-electrical current releases dopamines and
other chemicals associated with pleasure, such as endorphins,
adrenalin and serotonin.

One wrinkle for addicts is that the body soon develops a tolerance.

"Over time, the body develops a new level of normal in the brain, so
the person keeps wanting to chase that high," Selby said.

"After a point, you can't get any more pleasure."

Crack is particularly dangerous.

Small "rocks" of crack, about a tenth of a gram, sell for between $10
and $25. A larger rock, about a quarter of a gram, sells for perhaps
$40 -- making it popular with low-income users.

The intense high, however, lasts only five to 10 minutes, so frequent
users often expend time and energy thinking about doing more.

A gram provides only five or six hits.

"Crack makes cocaine more smokeable, and smoking a drug is the most
addictive form," Selby said. "Crack goes into the system very rapidly.

"Crack can also cause problems with the heart. Bigger harm comes from
what it makes people do, such as unprotected sex and crime."

Police say the drug most associated with crime is cocaine, or its
freebased form crack, where impurities have been cooked out.

Selby believes society must take a double-pronged approach to tackling drugs.

But there's no quick fix, he says.

"First, we must reduce the demand for drugs," Selby said. "The
healthier and more educated and richer society is, the less people
use drugs. We have to educate people about the effects of drugs and
we have to make sure people get treatment.

"The key is to get help and stick with it, even if you're relapsing,"
Selby said.

"You need to be persistent."

MONDAY

In this four-part series, The Star examines the toll drug abuse takes
on addicts, their families and the community. On Monday, read about
the short life and tragic death of Courtney Kalyn.