$600,000 HABIT

One Man's Journey To Hell And Back

His name is Mark and he's spent nearly 40 of his 54 years chasing his
next high.

He started using drugs at the age of 15 and didn't stop until he was
49.

"I've done every drug you can imagine," he says.

Mark's favourite was crack -- the solid form of cocaine. The effects
of cocaine, in its various forms, are being seen increasingly at the
local level.

Trafficking has increased substantially in the past couple of years,
according to Lethbridge regional police. Among clients in drug and
alcohol rehabilitation locally, the proportion of those in for cocaine
addiction is second only to those seeking treatment for alcoholism.

The turning point for Mark came one morning at a homeless shelter in
Calgary. He awoke, his head thick from yet another night of drinking
and getting high, to hear the man next to him vomiting in his bed.

"I asked myself "What are you doing?'," he says. "I was killing
myself. I was dying and I knew it."

He asked for help and eventually came to Lethbridge to get clean and
sober. He has stayed that way for the past four-and-a-half years.

Mark grew up in a home where as a youth he often stepped in to defend
his mother when his alcoholic father would beat her up. By age 15, he
was in youth detention where he learned how to inject drugs using an
eye dropper as a syringe and needles scavenged from infirmary garbage
bins.

While in detention, he trained as a journeyman welder and after his
release got a high-paying job in northern B.C. He bought a nice house
as well as boats and expensive vehicles -- all while financing a
growing crack cocaine habit.

"I would have a big bowl of crack before I went to work and nobody
would notice," he says.

As time went by, however, his problem became harder to hide. His two
marriages to drug-addicted wives failed and he eventually lost all his
possessions, sacrificing many of them for a fraction of their value in
order to make another score.

"We sold everything in the house, and as soon as we got the money, it
was straight to the crack dealer," he says.

He sold all the tools he used for his livelihood, and when everything
was gone, he cashed in his RRSPs. When the bank foreclosed on his
house, he moved into a motel.

"In the end, it came to (the point) I was just working to pay my
dealer," he says. "I would get paid Thursday and I was broke by Saturday.

"I couldn't stop doing drugs. I loved drugs more than anything in the
world, more than my wife and my daughter," he says. "It feels so good,
but you're chasing a dragon all night trying to get the same feeling
again."

He estimates that over four decades he blew $500,000 on cocaine,
crack, booze and an array of other drugs.

Because his skills as a welder were always in demand, he managed to
stay employed despite the fact he repeatedly lost jobs because of his
extended absences during drug binges.

"I would just pull the plug and go work somewhere else," he says.

Eventually, however, he gave up trying to hold a steady job and wound
up living as a homeless man in Edmonton and later Calgary.

For Mark, every day he now lives drug-free is a victory. He enjoys
simple pleasures such as listening to the singing of birds or smelling
the fragrance of lilacs in the early morning.

"Man, I've never felt so good in my life," he says. "Before, the only
time I would be up that early was to go meet my dealer.

"All it took was my desire to quit and ask for help. You have to want
to quit and nine out of 10 people who come in for treatment don't want
to quit."

He now has a steady job locally as a tradesman. It pays him a lot less
than he used to make as a welder, but that suits him fine. He worries
making bigger money might bring with it the temptation to fall back
into old habits.

"I still miss cocaine, even now. I won't lie to you," he says. "But
one's too many and a hundred's not enough. That's what cocaine does to
me.

"It's still scary. I've got to watch what I do every day. I have to be
careful I don't hang around with the wrong people."

His wish for all the younger addicts out there is that they would
decide to seek help and straighten out "before it takes them 54 years,
like me. It's no life to live. It's a shitty life to live."