HEROIN GLUT HITS HOME

It's just before 1 p.m. on a cool, sunny Monday afternoon in late
November. On a quiet residential street in Montreal, half a dozen
heroin addicts are waiting by office phones and cellphones in a
drop-in centre and residence for opiate users and recovering addicts.

Their fingers are poised to hit the speed dial button. At precisely 1
p.m. each Monday, the phone lines open at the city's main
opiate-addiction treatment centre, the Centre de recherche et d'aide
pour narcomanes.

CRAN is so overwhelmed with demand, only the first caller to get
through each week gets a coveted treatment spot.

For everyone else, the wait will continue another week. CRAN is the
only provincially funded opiate treatment centre in the city where
heroin users even have a shot at help any time soon. At other
centres, the waiting lists are six to 12 months long.

"We have to come up with all kinds of tricks to help our clients
(work the system)," says Guy-Pierre Levesque, Meta d'Ame's director
and a former heroin user himself.

The city's treatment centres are struggling to cope with a surge of
addicts - many younger than ever before - who are hooked on a rising
tide of heroin pouring into Canada from war-torn Afghanistan.

It's a similar story across Canada - and, indeed, much of the rest of
the world. After years of declining use in the 1990s, heroin and
other opiates have made a startling resurgence around the globe -
thanks in large part to a 37-fold increase in Afghan opium production
since 2001, when Canadian soldiers helped the U.S. overthrow the
country's Taliban government. Afghanistan now supplies 92 per cent of
the world's opium.

Increased heroin supply in Canada, Europe and Asia and falling prices
of the drug are the little-noticed side effects of the Western
presence in Afghanistan since 2001. While the Taliban had banned
opium production, the poppy now flourishes in Afghanistan under the
noses of Canadian and other Western officials - and sometimes
directly under the boots of Canadian soldiers who are occasionally
pictured in newspaper photos sauntering through poppy fields while on
the prowl for Taliban rebels.

Opium generated $3.4 billion for Afghanistan's economy in 2008 and
accounted for a third of its GDP, employing about two million
Afghans. It prompted Hillary Clinton to call Afghanistan a
"narco-state" during her confirmation hearing as U.S. secretary of
state last year.

Despite this, critics say Canadian and other Western governments have
entertained close ties with Afghan warlords and officials suspected
or known to be involved in the opium business and have turned a blind
eye to a devastating drug that kills 100,000 people worldwide each year.

These concerns were heightened earlier in December when
whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks released a U.S. diplomatic cable that
said Afghan President Hamid Karzai had intervened in several drug
cases, including one in which he pardoned five Afghan policemen
convicted of transporting 124 kilos of heroin.

Another cable said the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the
most powerful official in Kandahar province where Canadian Forces are
headquartered, "is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker."

Guy-Pierre Levesque knows all about the consequences of heroin
addiction. Now 55 years old, he started doing morphine at age 20,
then heroin a year later. It consumed his life. He lost his job, his
car, his house. He stole for years to support a habit that lasted
until he was 39.

While getting clean, he found a new obsession: helping other addicts.
He spearheaded the creation of the pioneering Meta d'Ame centre,
which opened its doors last summer in the Sainte-Marie district.

Levesque's small office is crammed with books and paperwork. On the
wall in the adjoining meeting room are paintings that clients drew as
part of the facility's art class. He is frequently invited to speak
internationally about the facility - the world's only peer-run
drop-in centre and residence for opiate users and recovering addicts.

The centre offers clients 26 small apartments and works with them and
walk-in visitors to help turn their lives around. Also available are
laundry facilities, computers with Internet access, a rooftop
vegetable garden, cooking classes and warm meals prepared by
residents and volunteers.

The facility also accompanies addicts to appointments and helps them
find one of those ever-elusive treatment spots.

Demand for Meta d'Ame's services has shot up. At the beginning of the
decade, when it operated only as a drop-in centre, four or five
clients would come in per day. Earlier this year, before it moved
into its new digs, 15 to 20 clients were coming in each day.

And the clientele is getting younger. "When I started doing heroin,
people began to use when they were 19 or 20 years old. Today, some
are 14," Levesque said.

Sylvie Des Roches has noticed the same trend. "We're seeing an
increase in abuse among young people, and we're seeing them start at
a younger age," she says.

Des Roches is director of CRAN, the city's largest opiate-addiction
treatment centre, located at the corner of Prince Arthur and St. Urbain Sts.

The growing addiction problems have swamped her centre and others
across the province, she said.

CRAN now has 90 opiate users age 18 to 34 enrolled in its most
intensive treatment program for hard-core addicts. That's more than
double the 34 who were in the program in 2007.

"We find ourselves with clients who ask for treatment whom we can't
help," Des Roches said.

"It's a problem because when a young person wants treatment, they
can't be on a waiting list since they can overdose or commit suicide."

Indeed, that's what appears to be happening. The Quebec coroner's
office has reported a 20-per-cent jump in accidental opiate overdose
deaths since 2006, when the office started to track the data. The
number of deaths went up from 64 in 2006 to 76 in 2008.

The opiate abuse is also leading to other problems. More than
twothirds of injection drug users have hepatitis C, while 18 per cent
have HIV, said the Public Health Agency of Montreal in a report last
week. It said the rates of both infections have gone up since 1998
(although no data was given on how much).

"It's really an epidemic," Levesque said. One cause, he said, is the
younger age of today's users, who are less likely to be aware of the
need to use clean needles to avoid passing on infections. "There's
more contamination among young people."

Another growing problem, he said, is Afghan heroin is often less pure
than the product from other countries. Wholesalers cut - or dilute -
heroin with various products to fatten up their profit margins. They
use everything from benign substances like flour and baby powder to
more dangerous products like disinfectants, plaster and sawdust that
can cause infection, poisoning and even death.

Other Canadian cities are also seeing a resurgence of heroin. In
Toronto, 10,500 students in Grades 7 to 12 - or 1.1 per cent of all
students in those grades - reported using heroin in the previous year
in 2007, according to the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

That was nearly two times the 0.6 per cent of students who reported
the same thing in 2001.

Heroin use among Toronto students is now nearly back at the levels
seen during the heroin heyday of the 1980s and early 1990s. That was
when a global glut of cheap "junk" spawned the undead "heroin chic"
look on fashion catwalks and claimed the lives of celebrities like
actor River Phoenix and Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvion.

In B.C., there is less exact data, but an adolescent health survey in
2008 noted a "small but significant increase" in heroin use among
students in the previous five years. Quebec doesn't publish data on
heroin use rates among Montreal youth.

Canada is far from being the only country hit by the flood of Afghan
opium. Among the worst-hit countries is Afghanistan itself, which has
an estimated one million opiate addicts - eight per cent of the
population. The number of heroin users has doubled in the past five years.

Ground zero of the impacts is Russia, a major transhipment route for
Afghan heroin to Europe. There, the number of heroin addicts has
exploded 10-fold in the past decade. President Dmitri Medvedev last
year called the drug a threat to national security and accused
Western nations of not doing enough to stop Afghan opium production.

A UN report last year put the problems in stark perspective. "The
number of people who die of heroin overdoses in NATO countries per
year (above 10,000) is five times higher than the total number of
NATO troops killed in Afghanistan in the past eight years," it said.

"We need to go back to the dramatic opium addiction in China a
century ago to find comparable statistics."

Heroin in Montreal used to be white - a mark of the highly refined
smack that used to dominate the streets. It came from Southeast
Asia's so-called Golden Triangle - Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and
Vietnam. Montreal's heroin is now a less refined, beige-coloured
product from Afghanistan.

The price has also fallen thanks to Afghanistan's booming opium
supply. A point of heroin (a tenth of gram, the most commonly
purchased quantity for street users) has dropped from $35 to $30 in
the past decade, said Meta d'Ame's Levesque.

Andre Michalski started shooting heroin at age 15 and eventually
turned to smuggling it between Montreal and New York to support his
habit. He lost promising jobs as a network cameraman and film
location scout and was arrested for heroin trafficking in 2005. Now
45, he is on probation and getting treatment while he lives at Meta d'Ame.

He tallies the toll the drug took on his life: "No career, no job, a
lot of broken relationships." He said heroin is now easier to find in
the city and that the wholesale price of heroin in Montreal has
fallen from $90,000 a kilo a decade ago to $70,000 today.

Heroin also appears to be more prevalent nationwide. Canadian police
seized 92 kilos of heroin in 2008, up from 67 kilos in 2001 - a
38-per cent increase, according to Health Canada, which tests seized
drugs for police forces. They also seized 67 per cent more raw opium.

Quebec and Ontario both saw fourfold increases in the total amounts
of heroin and opium seized in each province between 2001 and 2008.

In Alberta, the seizure data has gone through the roof. Police in the
province seized 42 times more heroin and opium each year on average
between 2002 and 2008 than in the 1995-2001 period.

Heroin and opium are also now popping up in parts of Canada where
they were unheard of before, like Nova Scotia, despite the fact that
RCMP reports say the main heroin entry points are Toronto, Vancouver
and to a lesser extent Montreal. It comes in concealed on passengers
and in courier parcels, by air cargo, regular mail and ship cargo.

Nova Scotia didn't have any heroin or opium seizures in the seven
years up to and including 2001. Then, in 2002, the province saw a
whopping 21 kilos of heroin seized, nearly half of the total in the
entire country that year, along with another 52 kilos of opium in
2004. Canada is also seeing new types of opiates for the first time. Like doda.

Vicky Dhillon is a limo driver-turned-city councillor in the Toronto
suburb of Brampton. He first heard about the doda coming to Canada
when his teenage son told him kids were using it in his high school
and buying it openly.

The highly addictive brownish powder, made by grinding the seed pods
of opium poppies, is mixed with tea or hot water and is known as
"poor man's heroin" because it's so cheap. Last year, police arrested
22 Toronto-area doda dealers and seized 432 kilograms of suspected
doda - enough to get 432,000 people high.

Doda has now spread across Canada and is available in Montreal,
Quebec City, Edmonton and Vancouver, Dhillon said.

Addiction workers in Vancouver said in a CBC report this year that
doda is as common today as marijuana in some city neighbourhoods and
that doda abuse has become a "big problem" in the city's South Asian community.

The face of heroin traffickers is also changing. In Montreal and
elsewhere, new Southwest Asian-linked crime groups now dominate
heroin and opium smuggling and have elbowed out Italian and East
Asian organized crime that used to dominate the heroin market,
according to former users and RCMP drug situation reports.

Their methods are innovative. Canadian police have found heroin and
opium hidden inside cricket bats, the inner lining of briefcases,
hollowed-out women's shoe soles, chocolates and a tombstone.

In Vancouver, Indo-Canadian crime gangs that sell Afghan heroin are
fighting a violent war over drug turf that has seen 100 shootings.

Indo-Canadian gangs have also branched out to become involved in
smuggling prescription opiates into Canada, like oxycodone and
codeine, RCMP drug situation reports say. That has helped feed an
explosion in prescription opiate abuse among Canadians. The profits
from all this heroin are fantastic. Cocaine pales in comparison as a
money-maker.

A kilo of heroin that goes for $2,500 U.S. in Afghanistan wholesales
in Montreal for $70,000 and has a street value of $300,000. It's six
times more valuable than the same amount of gold.

By contrast, cocaine selling for $2,000 in Colombia wholesales for
about $40,000 in Montreal and is worth $120,000 on the street.

But little of that profit goes to the Afghan opium farmers who tend
all those poppies. Even the Taliban rebels, who are widely accused of
profiting from the opium trade, make only about $110 to $150 million
a year off taxing opium farmers and shipments, according to UN
estimates - small change compared to the $3.4 billion that opium
generated in Afghanistan in 2008.

Much of those profits go into the pockets of Afghan warlords and
officials allied with Canadian and Western forces, said one Canadian
government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said the Canadian government has done little to curtail
the Afghan warlords' drug activities or even question Afghan
politicians thought to be involved with drugs. "We've been very
passive. We haven't taken controversial positions on these kinds of questions."

The official tells one particularly grim story. In one province, an
Afghan district chief convinced the British to send him troops,
saying he needed protection from the Taliban.

Right away, the British soldiers who arrived faced withering attacks
and were forced to withdraw. They later learned that the district
chief was actually an opium trafficker and that he had merely wanted
the Brits to help him fight a rival drug gang. The attackers weren't
Taliban after all; they were the rival gangsters.

"The British ended up intervening in a gang war. This happens all the
time," the Canadian official said. "We're propping up crooks." Amir
Attaran agrees. "Opium is the problem in Afghanistan. A corrupt
narco-elite runs the country," he said.

Attaran is a University of Ottawa law professor and development
expert who has studied Afghanistan's drug trade.

He said both sides in the country's war have an interest in
perpetuating the conflict because of their involvement with opium.
"You cannot grow opium and traffic it on a large scale in peacetime.
You need a fog of war," he said.

"If you want to understand the conflict in Afghanistan, you have to
understand this is a gang war."

Attaran's solution: Legalize Afghan opium and sell it for medical
uses, joining countries like India and Turkey that grow legal opium
crops for the pharmaceutical market.

The result, he thinks, would be to turn warlords into regular
businessmen and reduce the country's violence and corruption. "I
don't really see an alternative that would succeed," Attaran said.

Halfway around the world, back at Meta d'Ame, Levesque is on the
receiving end of Afghanistan's problems and is also trying to come up
with answers. He and other treatment workers would like a supervised
injection site to be created in the city where users can get clean
needles and meet intervention workers.

With heroin users waiting six months or more for a place in a
treatment program, Levesque says new solutions are needed in Canada, too.

This story was done with research assistance from the Canadian Centre
for Investigative Reporting, a charitable non-profit dedicated to
producing investigative reporting. Alex Roslin is the CCIR's
president, and Bilbo Poynter is its executive director. Read more
about Afghan opium and its impacts at the CCIR's site:
www.canadiancentreinvestigates.org/afghandrugs