FROM COCAINE TO INCARCERATION

Convicted Of Cocaine Trafficking, West Coast Teacher Gives His Side
Of The Story

All Eugene Cook ever wanted to do is teach. But today, after 20 years
of teaching high school English, Cook sits in a jail cell, behind
high walls and barbed wire.

It's sadly ironic that his denim shirt has an open book, pencil and
apple embroidered on the front, he's got three days worth of growth
on his face and his brown eyes are dull sitting under the watchful
eye of a lieutenant at Her Majesty's Penitentiary in St. John's.

But when he speaks, he does so with his hands, confident and
intelligent, as a high school teacher should.

That is until, he's asked about his students.

"If I talk about that I'll probably shed a tear," he
says.

The most important lesson ever taught in Cook's classroom at
Templeton Collegiate in Gillams was respect.

Every year on the first day of school, he would spell out the word in
capital letters on the blackboard and explain why the concept was so
important.

"Respect is foundational to everything that goes on in the classroom.
Everything that goes on in life," he says.

Now, more than ever, he hopes his students have respect for
him.

He says he hopes their parents, who may be judging him following
media attention about his case, can still respect him, too.

"I'm just trying to put myself in the parents' heads. When you see
this, you know, they had kids that had come through me and I'm sure
that they have thought about whether or not I had crossed any
boundaries with their children, and I just wanted to assure them that
that was never, ever the case."

Of the thousands of students who passed through his classroom, he
says, not one will be able to go to their parents and say he was ever
inappropriate.

He says when he's out of jail and clean, he'd like to go back to
teaching and, as far as he's concerned, there's no reason he can't.

"I do not deserve to have my licence taken away," he says, adding
that even the judge presiding over his case felt that children were
not involved with the drug abuse or trafficking.

Cook is also inviting parents, former students and the public to
write to him and tell him how they feel. Take him to task or support
him, he says he doesn't care, as long as people say what they will to
his face.

With a weak smile, he says the first time he ever snorted a line of
cocaine was when he was completing his master's degree in teaching at
Memorial University in the early 1990s.

After that, Cook used cocaine sporadically, as a recreational drug,
something, he says, that never interfered with his life.

"I graduated in 2003. I graduated to smoking crack," he says rubbing
his hands on the back of his neck. "That's a quantum leap. Or a
quantum fall."

For a year and a half, the addiction consumed him.

"There were times," he says, hands in a praying motion and eyes to
the ceiling, "I said you're really, really testing me to see what I'm
made of.

"It was just one bad thing after another. Nothing seemed to go right,
and I sought refuge and found refuge in a pretty powerful drug called
cocaine."

In fact, Cook, 52, says he's always had an obsessive
personality.

He's a smoker and a workaholic, and was always an overachiever in
school, and during the past 34 years he has played soccer.

"If I take something on, it's not halfway," he says. "I worked very
hard at my job - too hard … my job consumed me at times."

He says he sometimes reminded himself of the story of the shoemaker,
the man who made the best shoes in the world, while his own children
went barefoot. Cook, too, says he didn't spend enough time with his
own two sons.

"When I was under the influence of cocaine, I would not take my kids.
I would rather not see them," he says, adding that "they're aware"
their father is in prison, but that he and their mother have agreed
that until he's dealt with some other issues, they will wait to talk
to their sons about why.

He says he's ahead in his child-support payments and he's given his
ex plenty of money to cover the collect calls he'll be making to his
sons from prison.

High-end drug

Cook says he can't be specific about when his addiction got out of
hand, because other people are involved, but as far as he's concerned
it could happen to anyone who finds themselves in the same position.

"It just happens. … I don't think anybody has ever tried this
drug and didn't like it," he says, adding that cocaine is a high-end
drug that is also highly addictive. "It transcends all social strata."

In February 2005, Cook said, he'd had enough and asked a friend to
take him to Humberwood, an addictions-treatment centre in Corner Brook.

From that day until his arrest in July, Cook says, he was
clean.

When he was charged, and later in court when listening to the
conversations police obtained from a tap on his phone, Cooks says it
was like the past was coming to haunt him.

Listening to the 95 or so tapes of wiretap evidence was hard, he
says, compounded by the public attention.

"It took me back to a time in my life that I would just as soon
forget. … I could just see and hear the desperation, the
greater desperation, just creeping into my voice," he says. "I could
hear it in my voice, the words, the tone, that I had had enough of
this."

He started using the drug again.

"It's that magnetic, and it's that alluring, but it's a big lie.
Cocaine is a big lie," he says.

"You get your feeling of exhilaration and all is well and, 'gee, what
problems?' When you come down, the devil rears its ugly head."

While awaiting trial on the cocaine charges, Cook was caught with 2
1/2 pounds of marijuana in his car when he was pulled over for a
broken taillight.

In the end, Cook was sentenced to serve 12 months, less one day, on
the cocaine charges and 10 months on the possession charge. He was
also given two months for each of the four breaches of an undertaking
related to his cocaine arrest.

"There's a law that says you're not supposed to traffic in cocaine,
well OK. But there's trafficking in cocaine and then there's
trafficking in cocaine," he says. "You're looking at two months when
there was no cocaine to be fetched in Corner Brook or Stephenville,
but there was some available very close to my house."

Takes responsibility

While he says he takes responsibility for what he's been convicted
of, Cook would like to see a distinction in drug laws and sentencing
for people who are shipping in crates of the drug and those who "run
down the road and get it for you and a handful of your own friends."

Of the 20 or so others who were charged in the RCMP trafficking sting
called Operation Bitten, Cook says, his charges were the most minor,
but his name was the one splashed in headlines.

Cook, who was suspended from his job when he was arrested, continued
to use cocaine throughout the time he was waiting to be sentenced.

"It's a very tough drug to kick. It is incredible."

He says he identifies with another public addict, actor Daniel
Baldwin.

Cook says he recently heard an interview with Baldwin, where he
described himself as a die-hard cokehead.

"It may as well have been me talking," Cook says of the interview
where Baldwin talked about his nine stints in rehab, overdoses and
multiple arrests over the 18 years he's battled addiction.

Cook says he last got high about four weeks ago.

He requested that he serve his jail time in Nova Scotia or
Stephenville, where addictions programs are available.

"Do I feel the tug? Sure I'd be lying to say that I wasn't …
that'll probably always be true," he says.

"When I look around at where I am, where would I rather be? Would I
rather be in behind bars here at Her Majesty's Penitentiary or would
I rather be high on cocaine, you know ..."