DEALING WITH DRUG DEALERS

A Chilliwack woman says she and her neighbours have been standing their
ground against some methamphetamine dealers in an attempt to get some peace
and security restored to their downtown neighbourhood.

"Crystal meth is almost an epidemic around here," says Teresa Chomsky. "What
I'm living right now is the undeserved consequences of these circumstances."

Since she moved in to a heritage house on First Avenue in July, she's been
sworn at and confronted a number of times, she adds, and a vehicle was
vandalized. She's suffered sleep deprivation and often worries about her
family's security.

"Within a couple of weeks of moving in, I observed there was drug
trafficking going on in the upstairs suite," she says.

Some of Ms. Chomsky's neighbours, who are in fact Block Watch members, have
approached the people arriving at the house to buy illegal drugs, as well as
the dealers, telling them to stay away.

RCMP were called to attend the residence at least a dozen times and
gunshot-type sounds were heard on the weekend of July 25. Police and fire
officials were on scene then as well, she remembers.

"When the fire department attended in July, they discovered an illegal
suite. So the whole household was evicted as a result," says the 33-year-old
resident. "I think it has a lot to do with the nature of the activities in
the upstairs suite."

She says she's under an eviction notice and had to go through an arbitration
process recently to get a brief reprieve.

"But I have to move by the end of the month. My time has been lost over
this. Sleep has been lost. But if any of these people cleaned up their lives
in the end, then all of this would have been worth it," she says. "I decided
it was time to communicate with a trumpeting voice to the community about
this. The answer isn't, 'Let's fight back,' against the dealers, it's more
about getting more proactive to address the real problems."

Going public is not a vindictive act in any way, Ms. Chomsky underlines, and
she's considering starting up a mission to help people with drug addictions.

"Through this experience, I've learned to love my neighbour as my self in
greater measure but I don't know how much further that will be tested.
Awareness and confrontation are effective tools in bringing something into
the light," she says. "What I'm discovering as I'm working with police, the
courthouse, the Tenancy Act, is that everyone points to the other guy. In
the time it takes to accomplish things, there's a real bureaucracy
breakdown."

Ms. Chomsky says she's being robbed of the peace and quiet she truly needs
as a young mom. She even called the parent of one of the tenants when she
was at the end of her rope.

"More than the police, the parents are the governing forces in these
people's early lives," she says. "They're the ones that need to passionately
rise up and fight for the lives of their children."

Her impression is that the meth dealers are not afraid of the police.

"It's a game and they know how to play it," she recounts. "The best-case
scenario is that a buyer would come, fix the minor details and make it a
legal suite.

"But it looks like nothing can be done about this right now. The landlord is
desperate because she can't do anything and the police have told me that
their hands are tied because they've changed the investigation protocol and
have had their powers restricted. She (the owner) even turned off the gas
(last week) to try and drive the other tenants out of the building."

Methamphetamines are highly addictive and can lead to drug-induced
psychosis. The nasty street drug is also known as speed or crank. Although
Ms. Chomsky says she never even heard of crystal meth until this past
summer, the phenomenon of speed addiction affected her early life when her
own father chose the drug lifestyle, leaving the family over it when she was
two.

She says as a practising Christian, she has tried to help the other tenants.

"There's no turning back. How do you see something like this and turn your
back? You can't. My life is changed now. It's become a cause," she says. "I
don't walk in fear because I believe in God. I care about these people, I
pray for them and I wish for them an escape out of the lifestyle. I just
don't know what else can be done."