CRYSTAL METH LEADING TO HUMAN TRAFFICKING

His chin resting on his hand, he shoots a forlorn thousand-yard stare
out the restaurant window and says with a sigh, "It's all about the
meth, bro."

These days all roads lead back to crystal meth. The lethally addictive
drug is increasingly becoming the fuel that drives the city's street
sex trade, but not in the way that most of us would assume.

The conventional wisdom about street prostitution in Edmonton is that
most of the women peddling their flesh are hapless, desperate addicts,
willing to subject themselves to anything in exchange for a little
cash so they can buy another hit of crack, meth, or whatever their
drug of choice might be.

But there's an even more sinister element at work, and its grip is
getting tighter.

Last month the city police vice unit conducted a hooker sweep, which
yielded some shocking results.

Of the 30 women arrested, 24 were aboriginal, a much higher number
than expected. At the time, cops couldn't explain why, but noted that
many were "from out of town."

There's a lot of speculation that young women in small, northern
communities gravitate to the big city in search of opportunity, but
somehow get lost along the way. Uneducated, naive and unprepared for
the faster pace, they get snared in the dual traps of poverty and
addiction.

For many, that's likely the case. But for a growing number, it's not
that accidental.

More and more young women are shipped to Edmonton and forced to work
the streets in order to pay off drug debts they incurred back home.

The man in the restaurant (who didn't want his name used because of
his gang connections) offers up a lesson in street capitalism.

These days "the boys" are heading up north and dealing meth in the
small communities, he explains. The advantage of meth is that it's
cheap to make and portable labs can be set up anywhere, so it can be
produced right there in the community, avoiding the risks of
transporting it. No community or reserve is too small or too remote.

The dealers blanket the community and let people build up massive
debts. When they're ripe for the picking, they demand to be paid back
in full. Or else.

With their very lives at stake, the girls agree to come to Edmonton to
work off their debts. The problem is, they're addicted, so the amount
they owe just keeps growing and they become virtually enslaved.

"And they're getting younger and younger," he adds.

This same game is played on other fields, too. Another gang-connected
source says addicts are coerced into stealing cars and committing
identity theft and burglaries because they owe huge amounts of money.

"You just do whatever you're told," says the source. "If they want you
to knife someone, you do it. Otherwise, you're dead."

It's a technique that's been around for years, says former prostitute
Carol-Lynn Strachan. Years ago, when she worked the streets, she says,
"We all came off the farm. Pimps have always recruited small-town
girls because they're naive and easy to suck in."

But crystal meth is making it even easier.

The only way to break the stranglehold, Strachan says, is to tighten
up the laws around living off the avails of prostitution. Most of
these girls don't even realize that they're being pimped.

They think they're on their own, just trying to scrape some cash
together to cover debt.

Or worse, that the guy feeding her drugs and turning her out on the
street is actually her boyfriend.

Strachan says simply from experience that those kinds of people aren't
their friends, they're just pimps.