ROCK BOTTOM

Once A Rarity On Winnipeg's Streets, Crack Cocaine Has Become The
Second Most Common Street Drug In The City, And The Victims And Their
Crimes Are Starting To Pile Up

WHAT catches your attention is how small and fragile she looks.

The woman -- who appears to be in her early 20s -- sits with her knees
pulled up to her chin, as if trying to hide her grim, ashen face. The
dark circles under her eyes are as big as saucers. She looks up, but
you have no idea what she is seeing.

Then there's the smell of urine. She wet herself hours ago and hasn't
bothered to change her clothes or take a shower. She had more
important things to do.

A city police undercover unit arrested her about an hour earlier after
spotting her as she stood on a snowy street corner near McGregor
Street and Selkirk Avenue. She jumped into a vehicle being driven by
an undercover male officer, who was posing as a "john" seeking to buy
sex.

She was picked up at about 6:30 on a Monday morning, working the
street to service men heading to work.

She's a prostitute and a crack addict. There's a good chance she has
hepatitis C or is HIV-positive.

Crack pretty much rules a large part of the city's drug trade, police
say. It's cheap, easily available and produces a powerful jolt that
rockets to the brain, releasing a flood of chemicals, principally
serotonin. It delivers an intense pleasure outside the normal range of
human experience.

On the street, it's also known as hard rock or pieces. It's a drug
that was virtually unheard of in Winnipeg 15 years ago, but has since
become the second-most common street drug in the city next to marijuana.

Crack now fuels much of Winnipeg's crime as many addicts steal or
prostitute themselves to pay for their next high. Then there are the
drug gangs, including the Hells Angels, believed to be behind the
importation of an estimated 100 kilos of crack and powdered cocaine
into the city each month.

"It's unbelievable what crack can do," says Det. Sgt. Kelly Dennison
of the Winnipeg Police Service's morals unit. "That's why most of the
girls are out here."

Dennison gestures towards the young woman and says she is one of
dozens working the street to maintain their habit. She and two other
girls, also in their early 20s, are sitting alone in tiny police
interview rooms at the Public Safety Building. None of them has any
identification. Their only possessions besides their clothes are
cigarette lighters.

They were each arrested within a half-hour in the same area of the
city. One is five months pregnant.

"The crack has everything to do with what the johns are paying: $20,
$40 or $60, depending on the sexual act," Dennison says. "As soon as
the girls get the money, they buy crack to keep going -- $20 for a
20-piece, $40 for a 40-piece, and so on.

"When the crack is gone they're back out on the street."

Crack, like pizza, can be delivered to your door. You just need the
right phone number.

On any given day, there are about 100 dial-a-dealers driving around
Winnipeg and the surrounding bedroom communities, hand-delivering
crack. They work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Winnipeg police drug unit Det. Sgt. Chris Humniski says police believe
one those dealers recently handled 16,000 calls on his cell phones,
which police were monitoring, during a two-week period. That's how
busy he was responding to new and repeat customers.

Many dial-a-dealers are armed with handguns, knives or pepper spray so
they can protect their cash and drugs from people looking to rip them
off.

The rise of crack has also had an impact on street crime. Many gas bar
robberies, break-ins and prostitution-related offences can be traced
to crack addition. There are no statistics on crack-related crime, but
police say front-line officers investigate drug-related violent and
property crime almost every day.

Privately, police will say they confiscate just a trickle of the crack
and powdered cocaine that's out there. A year ago, drug investigators
seized about two kilos of crack cocaine from a mid-level dealer. Sold
on the street, it would be worth about $274,000. It was one of
Manitoba's biggest single crack seizures. There have been other,
larger drug seizures -- Mounties snagged 37 kilos of pure powdered
cocaine Jan. 12 -- but they were headed somewhere else, not for Winnipeg.

Police admit they're up against it.

There are only a handful of city police officers dedicated full-time
to combat the drug trade. There are also a handful of Mounties, too,
but not enough to begin to make a significant dent in the business.

Police also say they do not have the resources to go up against larger
drug dealers, who are often connected to organized crime groups based
in British Columbia.

Police also complain that drug peddlers have the upper hand -- they
have the money, manpower and client base to continually thwart
enforcement.

Police have focused on catching the people running the drug gangs, but
admit it's not an easy task. These are people who insulate themselves
from the dirty work, leaving it to others to move and deliver the drugs.

If caught, they do get federal jail time, an average of seven years,
but they're often out on parole after two or three. Small-time dealers
and users get less time, and sometimes conditional sentences that can
be served at home.

Users can be found everywhere -- not just in the inner
city.

"That's the one thing about crack and cocaine," says Dr. Wes
Palatnick, medical director of the emergency medicine program at the
Health Sciences Centre. "It's equal opportunity."

One south Winnipeg mother said in an interview she was so fed up with
her 18-year-old daughter's crack use that she turned both the daughter
and her dealer boyfriend in to police./

In the process, she said she also gave police $8,000 that the
23-year-old boyfriend had bankrolled selling crack.

"I'm at a point where I'm ready to deal with the Hells Angels myself,"
she says. "I don't know what to do anymore."

The mother recently said she's now resigned that she's lost her
daughter to the drug and the criminal justice system.

Palatnick said the HSC emergency room is seeing more people come in
with crack and cocaine overdoses.

These people have racing heartbeats, chest pains and high blood
pressure. They're sedated and then given the chance to talk to someone
from the hospital's addictions unit.

The province's chief medical examiner said two people died in 2003
from a cocaine overdose. In 2002, there were five deaths.

Barry Fontaine, an intake worker with Pritchard House, says the number
of cocaine abusers coming into the residential treatment program has
increased about 50 per cent in the last five years.

Treatment is difficult, he says, because hardcore users know they need
help getting off the drug, but they're too bent on getting their next
fix to do anything about it.

"It's very difficult for them to just sit down and listen," he
says.

Crack is so addictive because it's a purer from of powdered cocaine.
Crack is also known as cocaine freebase.

Smoking crack causes a strong, short-lived peak of pure bliss for
about three to five minutes. Snorting cocaine provides a milder high,
with major effects lasting closer to 15 to 30 minutes.

Smoking crack also delivers a large quantity of cocaine to the
vascular bed of the lung, producing an effect similar to that
triggered by an intravenous injection. It's the intensity of the high
that makes it so addictive.

A daily, heavy user can spend between $500 and $1,000 a day on
crack.

"It's complete euphoria," is how Dan, a 37-year-old former user,
describes the crack high as he fumbles with one of his crack pipes, a
metal tube with a piece of steel wool shoved inside.

"Some people throw up the first time they do it and your mouth really
waters. The high is really intense the first couple of minutes and
then you start to come down over a couple of hours.

"That's when you start to want more, and you'll do anything to get
it."

Dan, who is also a former dealer, says he recently stopped using
because he didn't want to endanger his children.

"It's a terrible lifestyle," he says as he lights a cigarette. "It's
horrible. I'm trying to keep my kids away from it, but it's hard. They
tell me, 'We love you daddy, even though you do drugs.'

"I shouldn't be telling you about them, but I want the public to see
what's going on. So they can see there's a lot of people suffering.

"It's a shitty life, man," he sighs. "It really is."

After a binge last fall, Dan walked outside his home in the middle of
the night and lay down in a snowy field, hoping to freeze to death.

"My kids came out and got me. They took me inside. I haven't touched
it since."

The first crack seizure in Manitoba was made Aug. 18, 1989, at a house
in Winnipeg, just off Maryland Street south of Sargent Avenue.
Officers seized just one gram of crack cocaine, and 10 grams of
powdered cocaine.

At the time, Ray Johns was the inspector of the Vice Division. His
concern then was that the highly addictive street drug led to crime,
as users had to sell sex or steal to buy it.

Fourteen years later, Johns says police made every attempt to stop the
flow of crack into the city to avoid the massive social and crime
problems seen in the United States.

"We we're hoping to make a dent in it, but then the bikers came in and
that was the end of that," he says.

That's because there was just too much money to be made, he and other
officers say. The higher-ups in the drug world deal in kilos, not grams.

Dan, the former dealer, says a young dial-a-dealer can make up to
$2,000 in one night by selling chunks of cocaine for $40 each --
so-called 40 pieces. (One ounce of crack costs about $1,200 to $1,400
on the street; an "eight-ball," or one-eighth of an ounce, costs $350
to $400).

"You show me a 12-hour shift where you can make that much money," Dan
says.

And despite the relative peace on the street now between drug gangs,
Dan says dealers are still doing what they can to undercut
competition.

He says they rely on basic economic principles -- selling crack for
less to hook a wider customer base and lessening the purity of the
drug so users have to buy more to stay high.

Police and addiction counsellors caution that it's not just the poor
or disenfranchised who find themselves hooked.

"Poorer people have poorer choices," says Zenon Lisakowski, a
prevention education consultant with Addictions Foundation of
Manitoba. "The families in Whyte Ridge would have better financial
resources to 'cover and hide' as well as pay for drug debts of a
family member using."

More recently, a Winnipeg lawyer was recently arrested in Kenora,
Ont., for being in possession of a small amount of crack cocaine.

Police and addictions counsellors also say they hear almost every day
about how crack ruins lives and families.

Their focus is arresting the people who are bringing it in while at
the same time chipping away at the dial-a-dealers, like the two who
were arrested Dec. 10 in Osborne Village.

No one knows how many users there are in the city, but it's estimated
to be in the thousands.

For many, the addiction is so powerful that virtually nothing will
deter them from crack use. Rock bottom is just a way of life.

"I just want money. I'll do whatever it takes," said one street
prostitute recently as she stood on a frigid corner at Jarvis Avenue
and Powers Street.

Of the young woman arrested at McGregor Street and Selkirk Avenue,
Dennison says: "You want to help get a girl like this into a
transitional house and a program to deal with their lifestyle. You
want to help them quickly. In six months she could be dead."