NEW KIND OF PLAGUE

The People Of Cape Breton Have Endured Many Hardships: Poverty, Mine
Closings, Drug Abuse.

Now, Several Deaths From Overdosing On OxyContin.

GLACE BAY, N.S.--These are the names meticulously penned in the
columns of Father John Graham's big green ledger of death:

Robbie and Jimmy MacDonald -- Jimmy found slumped in a snow bank on
Valentine's Day, Robbie dead in his apartment when they went to tell
him his older brother was gone.

David Sweet died in Ontario, but his sickness started here.

Kenny MacDonald, found dead on the chesterfield by his mother, who
thought he was sleeping.

Darryl Francis Boutilier, who lit a match while sniffing gasoline. The
priest searched hard for a spot of intact flesh to dab the sacred oil
on Danny before he died, and finally found a small patch on his shoulder.

Five men in two years from one tiny parish, all of them victims of a
new kind of plague that has swept across this former coal town,
bringing a new source of sorrow to a land with few jobs and less hope.

Drug abuse and alcoholism are not new to Cape Breton but police,
health officials and political leaders say they have never seen
anything like what is happening here now.

"In 30 years, no other drug has ever had this kind of impact -- not
cocaine, not heroin, not anything," says police chief Edgar MacLeod.

"The problem is symptomatic of the struggling economy, but that is not
the whole answer. The impact is mind-boggling."

The culprit, all agree, is OxyContin, a powerful prescription
painkiller that creates a heroin-like high when snorted or injected.

Twenty-two people have died in the coal towns surrounding Sydney in
connection with drug use in the last 18 months. Not all had OxyContin
in their veins, but MacLeod says they all had it in their lives.

Break-ins have doubled in three years, robberies are up 30 per cent
and the number of arrests related to the abuse of prescription drugs
has soared from zero in 2000 to 19 last year. According to health
officials, the rate of OxyContin prescribed by doctors in Cape Breton
is three times higher, per capita, than the rest of the province.

Some of the numbers are hard to pin down; some even suggest officials
exaggerate the drug problem for political effect, but it is impossible
to discount the personal experience of Father Graham, a 78-year-old
priest who grew up in the town of Dominion just over the hill from
Glace Bay.

Graham himself was addicted to pills 35 years ago and almost died of
an overdose. He has worked in the local detox since it opened, and
ministers at the regional jail.

Suffice to say, he's been around, is no newcomer to the world of
desolation and drug use, knows the smell of grief inside the small
clapboard homes clustered at the head of every closed mine. Yet even
Graham says the scale of the current drug problem is beyond
imagination.

One example: A young man recently held a knife to the priest in the
foyer of his own rectory.

"I can't remember ever having a funeral for an overdose death before
OxyContin came to Cape Breton," he says.

"But in two years, I've had five funerals for men who all lived within
a quarter-mile of here. It's a very small parish, and it's a very big
problem."

They call it Cottonland.

Just a few blocks away from Graham's big, white Holy Cross Church,
across the bridge and past the pizza parlour, is a stretch of pavement
that dealers and users constantly patrol. The nickname -- Cottonland
- -- is a play on the pronunciation "oxee-cotton" of the drug that has
seized so many local souls.

It is not hard to find someone to talk about drugs here; it bubbles up
in conversation instantly, you don't even have to ask.

"It sucks; the only thing to do here is drugs -- alcohol and Oxy." It
is the first thing John Boutilier says when asked about life in Glace
Bay.

Six days out of his second trip to detox, Boutilier, 21, is strolling
through Cottonland with Ryan Gardiner, the only friend he says he
could find this morning who wasn't already high.

They're eager to talk, not afraid of using their names or having their
pictures taken, keen to tell the rest of Canada what it is like when
home feels like hell.

A few details:

The pain in your joints when you start to withdraw from the drug,
stinging, fiery stabs of agony in the elbows and the knees.

The way the drug takes over your life. Boutilier stole $100,000 from
relatives to feed his habit. One man beat up his terminally ill
girlfriend to get her drugs. Another friend stole the money set aside
for his father's headstone.

"It's hard to explain," Boutilier says. "My mother was diagnosed with
cancer, she might be dying, and it was like I didn't even care.

"All I cared about was my next dose."

It is almost impossible to avoid, they say -- Oxy is everywhere.

Last month, the 65-year-old widow of a coal miner was convicted of
dealing OxyContin out her kitchen door.

"My biggest regret is not leaving Cape Breton," says Gardiner, 22.

"My advice to anyone is to get as far away from Cape Breton as you
can. If you're not on Oxy here, somebody is trying to get you on it.
I've been to Halifax and New Brunswick. It's not like that there."

Boutilier started smoking dope when he was 14, moved quickly to pills.
He can't remember when he first started on Oxy, but vividly remembers
when he first shot it straight into his veins.

It was the promise of treatment that led him to "banging," as
injecting drugs is called here.

His brother, Eddie Buchanan, kicked his OxyContin habit with the help
of a methadone program. Boutilier wanted to join the program, too, but
was told only injection drug users were eligible.

"I was dead against it, never wanted nothing to do with it," Boutilier
says of using needles. "But I really wanted help."

Buchanan remembers the night. He promised his baby brother he would go
over and stick needles in his arm to mimic track marks so that
Boutilier could get into the treatment program, but when he arrived,
Boutilier was slumped on the couch. He had done the real thing.

"I tried it once and thought, `Whoa, look what I've been missing!'"
Boutilier says of shooting up for the first time.

"I just looked at him," says his brother. "I said, `John, What have
you done?'"

Buchanan is an icon of hope to the legions of Cape Bretoners who are
slaves to OxyContin.

Buchanan, 26, girlfriend Mary Hurley, and their three children, Brady,
7, Brooke, 3, and Dylan, 6, are survivors of the plague. Three years
ago, Buchanan had lost 60 pounds and was regularly waking up wet with
his own feces and vomit. Relatives, backed by social services, stepped
in and took the kids away.

Buchanan had tried local detox programs five times, but always went
back to the drug.

"I'd get clean, then I'd go looking for work, dropping off hundreds of
resumes, go to job fairs, interviews, but nothing. And I'd go back to
it. Finally I just said, `I've had enough.'"

Two years ago, he enrolled in a methadone program in Halifax. He
returned 15 months ago and, except for the daily dose of methadone he
takes each morning, is still clean.

In Cottonland, Buchanan is a legend, his story offered up to a
stranger again and again.

Buchanan doesn't have a job and his teeth are rotted brown from drugs,
but he once again lives in a home filled with baby Brooke's giggles
and Brady's questions.

The couple has hung a lace canopy over the little girl's pink bed,
filled up the toy box in the boys' room, arranged the stuffed toys
just so. The rhythms of normal life once again prevail.

Hurley has made it her personal crusade to get a methadone program in
Cape Breton like the one in Halifax that saved her family.

"We need help here," she says. "We need a program."

She is convinced that the OxyContin problem is much worse than even
the most anxious officials proclaim. Although only 26, a box she keeps
in her closet is filled with the obituaries of close friends.

"There is not a friend I have who isn't a junkie," she says. "Not one."

Hurley believes that several of them died trying to mimic Buchanan's
success at getting off the drug.

Robbie MacDonald tried to get into treatment this winter, she says,
and was mixing methadone and OxyContin the night he died.

"They try to do it on their own and don't realize that can kill you,"
she says. "Robbie was trying to get off it, I know for a fact that he
was."

Hurley points out that it isn't just those with little education and
little opportunity who have been swept up by the plague. Buchanan's
family is well off, she says, runs its own business. She herself is
the niece of John Morgan, mayor of the Cape Breton Regional
Municipality, which includes Sydney, Glace Bay and other
communities.

The new scourge of drug use, Morgan says, is directly connected to the
devastating impact of the end of the coal era.

Coal was not just the heart of the Cape Breton economy, it was the
heart of the Cape Breton culture for more than 100 years. Miners had
their own music, their own language, even their own unique card games
devised deep underground.

The federal government shut the last mine almost three years ago. The
provincial government shut the steel plant not long after. There are
thousands of new call-centre jobs in Cape Breton, but they pay half
the wages of mining, and unemployment is still near 20 per cent.

"We were betrayed; the provincial government led the stampede out of
here," Morgan says.

"The OxyContin things is really tied into the economy. We need
dramatic change here, or we simply won't survive."

It's hard to find anyone who disagrees.

"Why would anyone be surprised by this?" asks Father Robert Neville, a
Catholic priest who worked in Cape Breton for many years.

"Why would anyone wonder at the increase in crime, in drug abuse,
domestic violence? The coal miners were only one small group affected
by the economic, social and emotional depression that followed the
shutdown of the coal industry."

Even those battling the drug in Cottonland agree.

Gardiner studied metal fabricating, but never managed to get a job in
the field. He has a job lined up at a fish plant this summer, then
plans to move to Alberta.

He says he is one of the few men his age who has resisted the lure of
Oxy, who hasn't succumbed to the addiction.

Still, he doesn't blame his friends, and sees their addiction as a
question of circumstance, not volition.

"If you have work, that's your detox right there; when you go to work,
you feel good," he says.

"If we all grew up in different places, we would all have different
stories. The further you stay away from here, the better."

Hurley is very chipper for a woman who has lost so many friends, who
was on and off the drug herself for years. She has a wide smile and a
deep well of hope. What she hopes is that something is done to help
the people of her home, the people whom she loves.

"If there were a mining disaster and 10 men died, it would be a
national disaster," she says.

"But here we have kids dying every week.

"This is a huge disaster, a huge tragedy, and nobody's doing
anything."