ADDICTS NOW YOUNGER: DIRECTOR

Retiring Youth Counsellor Says Client's Average Age Has Dropped

If there's one distressing trend that Gerry Fast has seen in his
33-year career at Kairos, it is that younger and younger children are
showing up with substance abuse and other addictions.

And as he prepares to retire as executive director of the counselling
service for children, youth and provincial jail inmates next month,
Fast says it is a challenge the organization will continue to face.

"When I started, our typical client was about 16-17 and in Grade 11
and they had started smoking up in Grade 9," he said. "Now, they are
14 years old, in Grade 9, and they started smoking up in elementary school."

And he says the agency, which is affiliated with Queen's University
and receives funding from the United Way, school boards and other
organizations, is seeing the problem in even very young children.

"You do deal with the extremes in this job," he said. "I had one
client who started smoking at four and smoking marijuana at five. She
was taking it from her parents who didn't notice.

"But who the heck looks at a six-year-old and thinks their
behavioural problems are caused by marijuana?"

Fast is retiring at 57 after a career counselling people with drug or
other problems both in Kingston and North Frontenac, where he spends
three days a week in schools. (While North Frontenac accounts for
only four per cent of the population served by the agency, it
accounts for 10 per cent of clients, largely with alcohol-related problems.)

He hopes to spend more time with his wife, Anne Peace-Fast, who is
also retiring as principal of Hinchinbrooke and Land O'Lakes public
schools in the Limestone Board. The two are avid motorcyclists. There
will be a goodbye event honouring Fast on Aug. 29 in the Wilson Room
of the downtown library.

The agency deals with people on court-ordered probations that require
counselling and visits clients in their homes where they are most at
ease. It also cousels parents who fear their children may have problems.

The organization, which began in the pre-Young Offenders Act days as
a way to get youths out of jails and placed with foster families, has
gradually morphed into a general substance-abuse counselling agency
that employs six full-time staff and sees 900 people a year. Any
student caught with drugs or alcohol at the two local school boards
is referred to Kairos, and it is one of the few remaining programs
left for Quinte jail inmates. It also sees walk-in clients. Over the
years, some things have remained constant, though, like the fact that
Kingston is much more addicted to the needle than practically any
other city of its size.

While waves of new drugs, such as crack cocaine and crystal meth,
have rolled over the continent, they never gained much of a foothold
in the city, he said, while the use of injection drugs such as
amphetamine and heroin never went away.

"That's always been here, and it goes way back," he said. "It may be
the makeup of the population, it may be the number of released
federal prisoners, but every new drug that's come along, users here
say, 'I've got this, I don't need that.' "

However, due to the successful needle-exchange program run by the
Street Health Centre, he says rates of HIV and hepatitis C in the
city are lower than one would expect given the high intravenous drug use.

Kairos doesn't preach abstinence in all cases and Fast says its role
is, and has always been, to get clients themselves to realize if they
have a problem and to offer solutions to deal with it.

He uses a search of La Salle Secondary School several years ago to
make his point. The OPP used their drug dogs to perform a locker
search at the school and they uncovered pot in 22 students' lockers.
Of those, one refused to have anything to do with Kairos, a few were
occasional users who had the matter dealt with by their parents, and
17 acknowledged that they might have a problem and agreed to further
counselling.

"People don't wake up the morning and decide, 'Hey, I'm going to be a
drug addict,' " Fast said. "Particularly among teenagers - if you're
16 and you're smoking up five or six times a day, it's going to have
an effect on your function. It's like alcohol in a way - the
assumption is that if one drink makes you feel better, then 12 are
going to make you feel great."

His years on the job have given him a pragmatic outlook. Kairos has a
constant presence in the schools, which makes it easy for students to
approach him - as he puts it, "They'll sidle up and say, 'You're the
drug guy, aren't you? I have a friend ...' " - and teachers are on
alert for some of the signs that a student may be dabbling in
recreational chemicals.

Those aren't as blatant as being glassy-eyed and reeking of skunkweed
after lunch or falling asleep in class.

"One of the things teachers know to look for is a sudden dropoff in
math marks," he says. "Math requires a lot of short-term memory,
you're doing a problem and you forget which number you're supposed to
be carrying. If they're doing well in all their other subjects, but
their math marks suddenly drop 20 per cent, that's an indication that
they're smoking up."

While arguments have raged for years about whether drug use is a
cause or a symptom of teenage problems, Fast says there's no question
that its use makes teen lethargy and depression worse and needs to be
addressed regardless.

As he prepares to leave the organization to new executive director
Ric Cox, Fast admits the hardest thing will be losing contacts with
the clients that he sees regularly. Besides running the agency, he
carries a full counselling load.

"It was hard this week, seeing people and telling them that yes,
there will be a replacement, and yes, he's really good, but no, it
won't be me anymore," he said. "I was just asking them, 'You're going
to be OK, right?' I just kept feeling like I should still be there for them."