DRUGS PART I: DEALING WITH DRUGS

Police Have More Variety To Take Off Streets

Old standbys like marijuana, cocaine and LSD are still the escape of
choice for many, but a new generation has adopted a whole new
generation of pills -- including ecstasy and the date rape drug.

White pills. Purple pills. Prescription pills. Pills like ecstasy
smell like licorice and give the users who take them the urge to hug
everything in sight.

Then there's a capful of salty-tasting stuff to wash it down. Maybe
it's been labeled as "fire water" or "Liquid Ecstasy." These days,
there's a very real chance it could be a concoction of degreasing
solvent or floor stripper mixed with drain cleaner that's sold as GHB
- - the date rape drug.

The face of drugs has changed in the last decade.

"The sky is pretty much the limit," says Ottawa Police Staff Sgt. Marc
Pinault, head of Ottawa's drug unit. "Someone is always coming out
with a new substance to try out. If someone can make money off it,
they will."

Ottawa grew with amalgamation. So has the market for illicit drugs.
Before the Gloucester and Nepean forces became districts within the
Ottawa Police Service, Ottawa drug officers kept an eye on 400,000
potential customers inside Ottawa's former city limits. Within those
limits, the former cities of Gloucester and Nepean each had about
100,000 people.

Four years after amalgamation officially erased all of the old
municipal borders, Ottawa police have a clientele of almost one
million. The potential market has expanded. The number of drug
enforcement officers taking narcotics off the street hasn't kept pace.

There were about 30 drug officers in the old days. After the Ottawa,
Nepean and Gloucester police forces merged, the amalgamated city's
drug unit dropped to 17 officers to cover an area four times as large.

Between 1995 and 2000, Ottawa's drug unit was a combined effort of the
Ottawa Police, the OPP and the RCMP. That partnership also disappeared
in 2000 with municipal amalgamation.

"I don't want to sound like I'm complaining," said Pinault: "Our work has
gone through the roof and our resources have diminished. Our best resource
is vigilant neighbours and people who care about their neighbourhood."

Grow Houses

Marijuana grow houses made their first real inroads in Ottawa about
2001 after Asian gangs got a firm foothold in the greater Vancouver
area and fine-tuned their operations. Many of those grow houses can be
found in Ottawa East neighbourhoods.

The need to keep their plants out of sight of the city police force's
airplane usually means crooks will locate their production to a quiet
home on a dead-end residential street.

Crooks have targeted several Orleans homes in recent years as a part
of a larger city-wide trend toward indoor growing operations.

The last time police closed an east-end grow house, they found 527
marijuana plants at a Notre Dame Street address in downtown Orleans on
Jan. 29, 2003. At $1,000 a plant, police estimated the total value of
the crop at $527,000.

During the 2003 raid, police also uncovered a rat's nest of wires they
labelled a "hydro bypass" and $43,000 of hydroponic growing equipment.

For crooks, a typical marijuana plant produces between two and three
ounces of weed at $300 an ounce. The $1,000 street value police put on
a marijuana plant includes both the leaves and oil that might be
distilled at a drug lab.

Most of the indoor growing operations in Ottawa are run by Vietnamese
criminals who like to keep a low profile, says Pinault. They don't
give themselves a catchy name the way bikers are prone to do.

Besides the high cost to honest customers -- when crooks reroute wires
past the meter to steal electricity -- innocent people are hurt in
other ways. For instance, the high humidity levels in the grow house
usually lead to high levels of mold, rendering a home uninhabitable
should someone be unfortunate enough to buy it later.

Police issued one of their first official warnings about grow houses
on June 8, 2000 about the "risks posed by indoor marijuana grows."
Police blamed rerouted wiring and stolen electricity as the cause of
two house fires in two different parts of the city.

The last large crackdown on marijuana growing operations, Project
MOTA, ran this spring from April 18 to May 31, after an appeal to the
public produced 65 locations of suspicious houses, city-wide.

Ottawa Police teamed up with the RCMP "A" Division drug section to
pull the plug on the hydroponics. Officers executed search warrants at
21 addresses, recovering 5,949 plants, 45.5 kilograms of dried leaves
and $451,000 in equipment and property. They arrested 24 people.

Ottawa police, however, have been fortunate in one way, dealing with
the current drug problem. They haven't had to deal with the booby
traps other police forces have run into as they try to cut down
outdoor pot fields lurking in farmers' corn crops.

In the past, growers have stuck razor blades in the stalks, set up
shotgun traps and laid down spike belts to protect their crops.

Moves by the federal government in recent years to decriminalize
marijuana and turn possession of small amounts of pot into the
equivalent of a traffic ticket won't change the way the police
department enforces the law, at least in the near future.

"I haven't heard anybody prove it's good for you," Pinault says of
marijuana. "If that page is ripped out of the book, we'll enforce
what's still there. We enforce the laws. It's not my call."

Cocaine And Other Nasties

There are plenty of drugs other than marijuana, out there to watch out
for, Pinault says. Cocaine is still one of the city's more prevalent
drugs. It sells for about $1,700 an ounce.

Street level dealers get their cocaine at a purity of about 70-80 per
cent before diluting the contents to about 30 per cent for sale. By
the time the drug hits the street, it has been cut with dextrose,
baking soda or any other kind of white powder that won't change the
cocaine's appearance.

Police have raided a few downtown Ottawa crack houses in the past, but
in the east end drugs are more likely to surface at house or bush
parties. Overall, the amount of crack in the Nation's Capital is on
the rise.

Ottawa is also a "good heroine market," although heroine users tend to
hang around more with other junkies, Pinault says.

Like heroine, ecstasy is another drug that becomes an instant
addiction. For awhile, a Canotek Road store front was one of the
largest producers in Canada. Complaints from neighbours about a
licorice smell led police to the Beacon Hill site on Jan. 7, 2003.

By the time drug officers closed the doors, they'd found enough
chemicals at the inconspicuous Canotek Road warehouse to produce more
than $20 million in ecstasy pills at a retail price of $25 to $35 a
pop. The estimates were based on $50,000-$75,000 in chemicals,
including $14,000 worth of sassafras oil, seized by the end of the
raid.

Ecstasy was first mixed in 1912 as a possible appetite suppressant and
later abandoned before the rave scene adopted it as its drug of choice
in the 1990s. The man who police arrested, six months after neighbours
first reported odd smells to the labour board, told anyone who asked
that he was in the silk screening business.

Another area where street-level demand has gone up in recent years is
prescription drugs like OxyContin, a narcotic approved as a
prescription pain killer when morphine won't work.