DEALING WITH THE DEALERS

When the Vancouver police drug squad seized 24 kilograms of cocaine worth $2
million at the Main Street train station in January, the bust hardly got a
mention in the media.

The police, however, were quite proud of their interception, considering
they only scooped a combined 14.1 kilograms of cocaine from the street in
all of 2002. But as Sgt. Mark Horsley says, busting drug dealers has become
an old story in the city-even the drug squad's record-breaking 509 arrests
last year didn't make the papers.

"It's just not big news anymore, yet we still have a real problem with
people dealing drugs in this city," says Horsley, sitting in his unmarked
pick-up truck awaiting the return of his crew from a heroin sting in nearby
Chinatown.

The shift in media coverage, it seems, began two years ago with the
introduction of the four-pillar drug strategy. Though enforcement was
identified as one of the pillars-as were treatment and prevention-harm
reduction and the need for supervised injection sites quickly garnered the
headlines.

Harm reduction's biggest supporters, former coroner Larry Campbell and the
Coalition of Progressive Electors, were catapulted into city hall on a wave
of public sympathy for addicts. The COPE victory has ensured that
intravenous heroin and cocaine users will likely be fixing in a supervised
injection site by April-which worries many cops, including Horsley, who
believe the three other pillars are being overlooked.

While that debate rages on, hundreds of drug dealers continue to work the
streets.

For the drug squad's 31 members, that means aggressively pursuing
street-level dealers, whose customers earn their money through shoplifting,
prostitution, burglary and robbery.

Though police and health agencies have a handle on who the addicts are-and
recognize they need treatment, not jail time-there is no clear understanding
of who the dealers are, or where they come from.

These are important questions that Horsley's boss, Insp. Kash Heed, is
attempting to answer in a research paper he's writing for a Master of Arts
degree in criminology at Simon Fraser University.

Heed has amassed the names of 600 dealers the drug squad arrested between
June 2001 and October 2002 in the Downtown Eastside, the root of the city's
drug epidemic.

By using the data to create a "statistically-sound" profile of the
street-level drug dealer, Heed hopes his research will give police,
immigration officials and lawmakers valuable information to help curb the
dealing of drugs.

Although his focus group doesn't include dealers selling outside the
Downtown Eastside, Heed is quick to point out that drugs are being sold
everywhere from housing projects on the East Side to the alleys of
Shaughnessy, where cocaine and heroin are delivered faster than pizza.

"These people are the lowest of the low-these are people who prey on the
sick, the people who cause our social order problems, and we need to keep
suppressing and disrupting their lives to make ours better."

The heavy black man in a football jacket shakes a Tic-Tac container full of
crack cocaine before pouring the contents into his hand for me to see.

He's standing outside the Pennsylvania Hotel at Carrall and East Hastings
late on a Thursday afternoon, surrounded by a motley crew of fast-talking
dealers and sniffling, face-scratching addicts.

I'm playing the part of an addict, with a ratty black Harley Davidson ball
cap pulled down over my shoulder-length curly brown wig. I'm dressed in
jeans, a well-worn hooded jacket and fingerless gloves.

"C'mon man, ten bucks, ten bucks-it's good stuff," the dealer says,
oblivious to the fact that I'm standing next to a dressed-down Sgt. Horsley
of the drug squad.

I step a little closer, having been steered to the dealer by the equivalent
of junior salesmen working on commission. For every 10 customers they bring
to the big man, they either get a pebble-sized rock of cocaine or $10.

"No thanks," I say as we continue east along the country's most notorious
drug-dealing strip.

Moments earlier, a few blocks away, Horsley's street crew busted their first
of three dealers in the Downtown Eastside. Word is now travelling like a
wave up Hastings that narcs are in the neighbourhood.

The veteran cop knows this by the whistling and the "six-up" shouts from the
crowd, making the dealers edgy about whom they sell to. Still, I get offered
more drugs as we get closer to the mob of about 200 hard-looking people who
used to occupy the corner at Main and Hastings.

On our way there, an aboriginal girl about 16 years old suddenly appears and
starts asking questions. She wants to know if we're brothers. "We're half
brothers," Horsley says. She looks at us as if she knows us, or wants to
remember us.

Because our faces aren't familiar on the strip, Horsley says, the dealers
often use counter-surveillance techniques-such as young girls asking
questions-to avoid selling to an undercover cop.

As we join the mob, I close my eyes for a few seconds to take in the sounds
of the street. It's as if I'm at the midway at the PNE, except the shouts
are for crack, powder and pipes-not for candy floss, or comers to try their
luck at the ring toss.

The smell of urine is strong.

I'm approached by another young girl. She's white, sickly thin with blonde
hair and shivering as she offers me crack in the fading daylight. I feign
interest and she tells me she has lots to sell. The price, as always, is $10
a rock.

I tell her I'll be back later, if I can get some money. She turns, sneering
at me until she stops another potential customer. Horsley has stopped in
front a pizza shop, where he notices the black man in the football jacket
ordering some food.

"He's probably made his money and is getting his dinner now," he says,
noting some of the dealers can earn $5,000 a day.

I tell him about the young white girl, and how she could easily be one of my
wife's high school students. Teenage dealers are not uncommon down here.
Horsley recalls busting a young Hispanic male, who had immigration papers on
him indicating he was 19 and awaiting a refugee hearing.

Horsley says he couldn't have been more than 13 years old-and here he was,
in Vancouver, selling drugs and sending the profits home to Central America.

"As soon as we arrested him, he peed himself-he was just a young kid. He was
terrified. It's tragic what's happening down here. I've been doing this job
for 17 years and even when I walk through here now, I still feel like this
should be another city."

The drug squad's third undercover buy of the shift goes down near the same
spot where the black man offered me crack. This time though, there's a
marked police cruiser parked on the sidewalk.

Two uniformed cops have parked it there, thinking it will keep the dealers
away from the area. Not likely-the undercover cop buys crack a few feet from
the cruiser.

As Horsley and I round the corner, we see a Hispanic male being pushed up
against the wall of the hotel and handcuffed. In a debriefing later, the
undercover cop says she offered to do the deal away from the cruiser, but
the dealer wasn't interested.

"The guy said he didn't care," she says.

When Insp. Heed took over the drug squad almost two years ago, he wanted to
get away from the traditional "kick-ass-throw-em-in jail" attitude of
chasing drug addicts and concentrate solely on busting dealers.

One of the first projects his squad undertook was a round-up of 300
street-level drug dealers in the Downtown Eastside. It took three weeks and
the work of the entire drug squad.

"It worked because it sent a message to street traffickers in the Downtown
Eastside that we're serious, and if you're a trafficker, we're going to
pursue you," he says, sipping a Coke in his office.

Police then urged Crown counsel to impose "strategic" bail conditions on
suspects. These included preventing them from returning to the neighbourhood
where they sold the drugs, or keeping them in jail until their trial.
Penalties ranged from suspended sentences to two years in jail.

Still, Heed doesn't believe enforcement is going stop the city's drug
problem, especially when a "pathetic" six per cent of the budget for
Canada's drug strategy goes toward reducing the demand for drugs. The other
94 per cent is spent on stopping the supply, which Heed says is not working.

"Whenever we take a dealer out, the gap is filled," he recently told a crowd
at a Lower Mainland Municipal Association luncheon. "Enforcement is-at
best-able to displace the market, and to keep a lid on it. Our priority is
to stop the threats to public order and safety that drug dealing can
bring... however, the increased efforts that we have made to stem the flow
do not appear to have raised the price, lowered the purity or discouraged
the purchase or use of drugs."

Frustrated by what he describes as "an invincible battle," Heed is looking
to the three other pillars of the city's much-touted drug policy to
complement the work of the drug squad.

"Although I advocate a balanced approach, we are still fulfilling our
requirement under the enforcement pillar. I guess we're asking for the other
pillars to be constructed to meet ours. I mean we could hire another 100
drug officers, jack up the stats, but what difference are we going to make?
The demand for drugs will still be there."

While police wait for the day when all four pillars are in place, Heed is
turning to academia to help his squad, immigration officials, politicians
and health agencies better understand and identify the city's drug dealers.

So far, his limited research of 200 of 600 suspected dealers has revealed a
myth-breaking fact: Despite a common belief by some cops and politicians
that dealers in the Downtown Eastside are Hispanic or from other countries,
Heed has discovered the average dealer is 32 years old, white, born in
Canada, lives in the area, collects welfare and has a criminal record for
drugs. He was selling crack, was out of jail on a court order at the time of
arrest and his first offence was likely a property crime. Also, within two
months of his arrest for drugs, he committed another offence, not
necessarily connected to drugs, Heed says.

"With this information, maybe there can be some kind of intervention to
prevent this type of person from becoming a future trafficker," he says.
Though he emphasizes he still has a lot of research and writing to do before
he defends his thesis this summer, he says one option might be to examine
the dealer's first sentence and investigate whether any educational
component was attached to it.

"There could be something missing there that hasn't been addressed, and with
the right education, that person could be steered away from trafficking."

Despite the focus of his study and the police's enforcement in the Hastings
corridor, where the largest concentration of traffickers are located, Heed
points out that there are more drug dealers working outside the Downtown
Eastside.

"It makes sense to work that area, but that doesn't mean the public should
think we've forgotten about the rest of the city."

It's a late evening in February in a supermarket parking lot off Commercial
Drive and Broadway when confirmation of a drug deal crackles out of Sgt.
Horsley's police radio.

He speeds across the street in his unmarked pick-up to another parking lot,
where he spots a Ford Taurus station wagon moving slowly up a narrow alley.
Suddenly, two unmarked police cars bump the unsuspecting driver-one from
behind, one in front-before police draw their guns on the station wagon.

"Vancouver police, get out of the car, get out of the car!" shout the
plainclothes cops.

Horsley jumps out of his truck and hops a fence to cover the rear of the
car.

Sitting behind the wheel is 22-year-old Anh Quang Loi, who has two
19-year-old Asian females with him. They appear stunned as they're
repeatedly ordered out of the car with their hands up.

The shouting rouses some of the residents in the area, who watch the
commotion from their balconies and backyards. A homeless woman wanders up
the alley to ask if there's been a car accident.

Seconds earlier, Loi allegedly handed a half gram of cocaine and a quarter
gram of heroin to an undercover cop in a parking lot behind Shoppers Drug
Mart on Commercial Drive.

A drug dog's search of the Taurus allegedly uncovered more drugs concealed
in the driver's seat, bringing the total amount of cocaine to 9.1 grams and
heroin to 1.8 grams. Police also allegedly seized a wad of cash totalling
$1,460 from the driver's sun visor.

For the first time in his life, Loi-who lives with his parents-will be going
to jail for the night. He'll be released the next day, will have to adhere
to a 7:30 p.m. curfew and is not allowed to possess a cell phone or pager.

He has been charged with two counts of trafficking and two counts of
possession for the purpose of trafficking. It could be a year or more before
he goes to trial.

It's the drug squad's third "dial-a-dope" bust of the night-the others
occurred in front of a 7-Eleven near Joyce and Kingsway and on the street at
Keefer and Dunlevy in Chinatown.

Loi's passengers claim they just met Loi at a birthday party and he was
driving them home. Police don't find any drugs on them, but one cop gives
them a lecture before releasing them from handcuffs.

"This is what your little friend was selling-poisoning people on the
street," he says, showing them a duct-tape pouch full of heroin and cocaine.
"Don't do drugs-bad, bad, bad. And don't hang around with people who do
drugs, either."

Unlike the undercover operations run the same week in the Downtown Eastside,
where dealers were randomly picked in walk-ups, the "dial-a-dope" scheme
targets specific dealers.

Police dial phone numbers of known dealers in an attempt to meet them at a
neutral spot where they can buy drugs. Depending on how much drugs the
dealer can supply, police might make several buys before busting him.

The deal could occur at an East Side SkyTrain station, a McDonald's
restaurant, a high school parking lot or an alley in Shaughnessy. Once a
location is determined, police set up in the area to watch the designated
undercover cop as he or she makes the exchange with the dealer.

When the deal is confirmed, police swarm in.

"The housewife who smokes crack while her husband is at work-this is how she
gets it," Horsley says. "This is the type of trafficking that penetrates
your neighbourhood and my neighbourhood."

The marketing of the drug trade still amazes Horsley. A product such as
crack cocaine, which is extremely addictive, is packaged to sell for $10 and
delivered to your door-making it easy for a person to acquire a drug habit.

Still, Horsley believes his mandate to "suppress and disrupt" drug dealers
is making a difference. Heroin, for example, isn't as prevalent on the
street and the grade is low compared to the 90 per cent purity levels in the
1990s.

Even though the price has remained the same-$10 for a dose of heroin-Horsley
says price can't be used as a true measure of the drug squad's success or
failure. After a dealer has been busted, he or she will simply sell less
potent doses of heroin to spread out the supply, he says.

"So I think we are having an effect, but profits are that huge that they
won't change the price."

And after 17 years on the job, Horsley is not giving up on what could be
described as a futile battle. The lax sentences handed down to drug dealers
have also not dissuaded him from going to work.

"If I was to become discouraged because I wasn't satisfied with the
sentences handed down in the courts, and used that discouragement as an
excuse not to do my job, then I should leave policing. The bottom line is,
we take these dealers' drugs, we take their money, we take their cars-and by
doing that, we change their behaviour."

Dubbed Project T-Rex, the "dial-a-dope" investigation that nabbed Loi also
lured in 34 other suspected dealers from across the city.

Including Loi, 31 are male, four are female and all range from 14 to 45
years old. They are facing a combined 61 charges related to possession and
trafficking. Of those arrested, 17 were selling cocaine, 13 were selling
marijuana, four were selling a combination of drugs and one was selling
heroin.

Seven live in the Downtown Eastside, 18 elsewhere in the city, five outside
the city and another five did not provide a fixed address. Some are in jail;
others have been released pending a trial.

Though increased efforts by police to stem the flow may not have raised the
price, lowered the purity or discouraged the purchase or use of drugs,
Horsley has this to say:

"We made 509 drug arrests last year. You think the drug problem is bad now,
just think how much worse it would be if we hadn't arrested those 509
people. Just think about that for a minute."