CANADA'S CRACKED-OUT CAPITAL

'Just Suddenly Overnight It Seemed Like A Ghetto'

OTTAWA - You know you're in Ottawa when the first drug dealer you meet
once worked on Parliament Hill. On a cold Friday afternoon, Raymond
Lambert leans in his black leather jacket against the wrought-iron
gate outside the Shepherds of Good Hope, a homeless shelter on the
edge of the Byward Market, a short walk east of the Peace Tower.

It's cheque day, so the crack business will be brisk: His regulars
will have their personal-needs allowances, $4 for each night spent at
a city shelter. Police and shelter staff call it the Personal
Narcotics Allowance. On such days, Frenchy - as he is known to
everyone, even police - can make $150 a half-hour.

In his 20s, he made a living delivering documents for MPs and in his
free time played pool on the top floor of the Confederation building.
Then he started snorting coke. Now, 20 years later, he's the front man
- - "tour guide" in street jargon - for a dealer based in nearby public
housing. He gets crack cocaine a few rocks at a time, and walks over
to the Shepherds to sell it: $20 for an amount roughly the size of a
pea, $5 for a bread crumb.

His regulars often pay in loonies and toonies, the proceeds of
panhandling. Some days he walks to the change machine at Loblaws with
more than $100 jingling in his pockets. He spends most of it on his
own $700-a-day habit: He gets high, on average, every 40 minutes.

Frenchy's jeans are caked with mud. His face has the same dry, pinched
look as his customers, who pace around him even now, waiting for two
police officers on the sidewalk to leave. This winter, he spent three
months in jail for dealing.

Crack didn't just arrive in Ottawa one day, but it seems like it: In
the past 18 months, police and outreach workers have seen an explosion
in the amount available in the capital, sweeping through a street
population that already had one of the country's highest rates of
hepatitis C and HIV.

It was as if the chronic alcoholics and rambling pot smokers were
suddenly replaced, as in many Canadian communities in recent years,
with a more unpredictable, reckless kind of addict.

"Crack is an epidemic right now," says Constable Mike Stoll, who
patrols Ottawa Centre. "The supply has gone through the roof. Five
years ago, working down here, you saw crack every once in a while. Now
there's not a day that goes by that we don't see crack. . . . They
smoke crack right on the corner. They don't care."

The high is immediate and intense, but lasts only minutes. Addicts
describe sharing their pipes with strangers, despite serious health
risks, just to have a taste of the leftover resin. They steal bags of
meat from the grocery story to sell for crack money. They convert Tim
Hortons gift certificates and bus tickets - thoughtful offerings from
passersby - into coins for a crumbly grain of rock. When they get
really desperate, they sell themselves.

On this particular cheque day, police break up a drug deal not five
minutes before a group of schoolchildren parade past on their way to
the National Gallery.

Ottawa's design is a dealer's dream. Canada's capital has one of North
America's most centralized downtown cores, with its main entertainment
area, high-end shopping district, historic food market and major
tourist attractions all contained in four square blocks. Luxury condos
are under construction. The American embassy, the Chateau Laurier and
the Parliament Building line up one side.

If you're among the 6.3 million tourists expected to visit this
summer, you're not likely to run into Frenchy. But his Ottawa sits in
the margins of that postcard picture, where the users (who make up
only a small portion of the homeless) gather around three shelters and
several social-services agencies, drifting like doomed spirits among
shoppers and diners and the late-night bar crowd to beg change from
sympathetic tourists and government workers - handouts that police are
now trying to discourage.

"It's a trap here," says Dave M., a 42-year-old from Halifax who, like
Frenchy, sells to pay for his habit. "You can spend everything you
have and you never have to worry about going hungry and you've always
got a place to live. There's no other place like this in Canada. The
opportunity to support your drug habit is phenomenal."

More crack invariably means more crime, and one drug tends to follow
another. Crystal meth is already appearing on Ottawa's streets in
small batches.

"We're probably still at the state where, if we as a city want to do
something about it, it hasn't become an impossible problem to solve,"
says newly elected Mayor Larry O'Brien. Although he was born here and
lives in a condo next to the Chateau Laurier, he didn't know Ottawa
had a crack problem until police gave him a tour. "I thought my
toonies were going for coffee and food."

Sabina Sauter and her neighbours could have told him otherwise. Ms.
Sauter owns a 22-room inn a few doors up from the Ottawa Mission, a
men's shelter. She installed a $5,000 security camera in her front
lobby last December.

The videos show crack smokers gathering almost nightly and sharing
pipes in the small entrance of her inn, where guests buzz to be let
inside. One user appears to have hidden a rock under her radiator for
later pickup.

In the past year, at least 20 would-be guests have refused to keep
reservations or checked out. "They say, 'I'm not staying here, there
are drug dealers right outside your house.' . . . It is absolutely
disastrous for us around here."

Across the street, Katherine Gibbs watches drug exchanges from her
13-year-old daughter's bedroom window. Sometimes, users sit and smoke
crack on the front porch of her heritage home. The dealers park in
black SUV Pathfinders while their go-betweens circle on bicycles; one
man she calls Yellow Shoes hands crack out "like Halloween candy" on
the sidewalk.

Her family always liked the eclectic mix in the area - the students,
families, shop owners, even the shelters. Now, they think often of
moving. "Those were the good old days, when we used to have drunks,"
she says. "Just suddenly overnight it seemed like a ghetto."

Ottawa isn't alone. In mid-sized and rural communities across Canada,
the crack trade is flourishing. Marijuana remains the leader and
crystal meth may be the flashy newcomer, but crack has moved in
stealthily as one of the most prevalent and addictive drugs.

Narcotics are like fashion trends: What's hip in Toronto and Vancouver
takes time to filter out into the rest of the country. But eventually,
dealers facing competition in major centres look for better profits in
untapped markets.

And the problem isn't limited to the street: Drug-treatment centres
report seeing more patients from all backgrounds with crack
addictions, many of them stalled on waiting lists. Geoff Norbury, the
executive director of Newgate 180, a private treatment centre outside
Ottawa that caters largely to middle-and-upper-class clients, says he
has seen a 20-per-cent increase in five years in callers and patients
with crack problems.

In Sudbury, Ont., Sergeant Peter Orsino, head of the police drug unit,
describes an addict who blew his entire $100,000 salary on his crack
habit.

In 2005, for the first time, Calgary police statistics on cocaine
incidents outnumbered those involving pot; crack incidents had doubled
since 2001. Last year, the detox at Winnipeg's Main Street Project saw
more crack addicts than alcoholics. In Sudbury, the amount of crack
seized by police has increased by five times in the past five years.
"And I would say we're only scratching the surface," Sgt. Orsino says.

What's happened is basic economics: Supply went up and prices went
down. In the early 1990s, when crack was headline news, a gram of coke
in an American city sold for an average of $275 (U.S.). Fifteen years
on, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report, it was a
bargain at $104.

Cocaine comes to Canada mainly in powder form from the United States
and, since the 1990s, the amount has increased significantly -
recently, the RCMP has seen a thriving cross-border trade of Canadian
pot for American coke. The wholesale price in Canada has dropped by
more than 60 per cent in a decade, says RCMP Superintendent Paul
Nadeau, national director of the force's drug branch.

In the latest survey by Health Canada, the proportion of Canadians who
reported using coke or crack in their lifetime tripled to 10.6 per
cent from 1994 to 2004. But the homeless don't have phones to answer
surveys, and crack is mainly a poor person's drug.

It is made by boiling down cocaine powder with water and baking soda
so it cools into a solid: The name comes from the crackling sound when
it's smoked. It resembles bits of old soap and breaks handily into
tiny fragments, or rocks, priced by size. In Ottawa, a bread crumb of
crack rock costs less than a $6 bottle of fortified sherry.

In her neighbourhood, Ms. Gibbs related in an e-mail last week, "it's
got back to how it was last summer." She can track the action in
20-minute intervals: Users gather on the corner, dealers arrive and
distribute and then it starts over again. When she turns her lights
out at 11 p.m., the street is still active. "We have a whole network
of people on the move the whole time."

Last week, while her husband was walking the dog before bed, he
encountered a man face down on the steps of a nearby church. He was
using a small knife to scrape tiny remnants of crack from the grooves
in the outdoor carpet.

"We'll make an arrest in the first five minutes," Constable John
Gibbons predicts from the passenger seat of the unmarked police car.
And sure enough, rounding onto Murray Street, on the edge of a parking
lot up from the Shepherds of Good Hope, three men are huddled
together. Constable Stoll drives the car up on the sidewalk. The two
officers leap out and order the men to put their hands on the wall.

"I'm not selling," grunts Mohammed, a young black man in a green
tuque, as his wrist are snapped into handcuffs. "I'm buying."

Constable Gibbons finds a pipe in Mohammed's pants pocket and three
folded five-dollar bills. They've met him before - he's what's known
as a "crumber," selling tiny bits of crack to offset his habit. One of
the others insists this is his first time buying crack downtown. He
promises not to return. Patting them down, the officers don't find any
crack. Constable Gibbons lets them go with a warning.

"Are you going to quit?" he asks Mohammed amicably, handing back the
money.

"Not today," Mohammed says.

Later, one of the men is found smoking in a washroom at Shepherds - he
probably hid the crack down his pants, but there's a limit to how far
the police are prepared to search. A few hours later, they run into
Mohammed hanging out in a known crack house in an apartment building
owned by the city.

This is how hard it is to police crack. The drug has no smell. Crumbs
dropped on the ground are almost impossible to find. It takes seconds
to smoke: By the time an officer sees the flame, the evidence is gone.
On the street, a call of "six up" warns that police are approaching
(and, touchingly, "kids up" means to hide the drugs because children
are near).

"I can't run fast enough," Constable Gibbons says. He uses a trick called
the Johnny Run and Scare: He yells while charging the dealers, exploiting
the fact that he's six-foot-three, 260 pounds. That's how he caught Frenchy
last winter. When he ran at him, Frenchy tried to swallow his crack (it
doesn't break down, so he meant to throw it up later), but in his panic he
missed his mouth. The drugs hit his face.

"Someone was supposed to be keeping six," Frenchy says
wryly.

"I don't like seeing you in jail," Constable Gibbons tells him today.
"But I liked seeing you when you came out. You put on weight. You
looked good."

Before he was a cop, Constable Gibbons worked on the front lines at
the Ottawa Mission. As a teenager, he volunteered at the Shepherds. He
knows the locals by name - the woman who gave up the keys to her
apartment for a hit, the teen runaways who ignored his warnings to go
home and ended up as prostitutes, the alcoholics who switched to
crack. "This drug," he says, "sucks the life right out of you."

He's been working the Market for five years, long enough to understand
that these people are victims. He likes to promise addicts he'll take
them to dinner if they ever get clean. So far, it hasn't happened.

A lot of what the police do is maintain a presence, for instance
parking a squad outside the McDonald's on Rideau Street where dealers
do business. If they are "invited" inside a crack house, they don't
need a warrant: While the drugs are invariably hidden or flushed away,
their regular visits make the places less comfortable.

Constable Gibbons is not shy about making arrests. "Being a police
officer is a pretty blunt instrument to solve social problems," he
concedes. "But it is highly effective." Though not all the time. One
dealer he collared got just 14 days: "If they were selling to kids on
a playground, that wouldn't happen. How is preying on homeless people
with addictions any different?"

Like many officers, he is not a fan of the crack-pipe program Ottawa
introduced two years ago. It is meant to reduce the spread of disease
among crack users by providing access to safer pipes.

With a pipe, crack is smoked by wedging a screen filter into a glass
tube and placing a rock on top. Unlike opiate users, who may inject
once or twice a day, crack smokers seek dozens of daily hits. Sucking
repeatedly on a hot pipe causes blisters and burns in the mouth and on
the gums - the combination of pipe swapping and unsafe sex spreads HIV
and hepatitis C.

Complete crack kits, given free to users, include condoms, antiseptic
hand wipes and, crucially, rubber mouthpieces to prevent mouth sores.
A survey last fall found that roughly 40 per cent of injection-drug
users - an even higher-risk activity - were using needles less since
the program started. A majority of users said the program had not
increased the crack they smoked and there was a significant decline in
reports of sharing pipes.

But most users take only the pipes and the filters - over four days of
interviews in the Market, not one produced a pipe with a rubber
mouthpiece on it or said they used one regularly. Almost all spoke
candidly about sharing pipes, sometimes multiple times, to get
"seconds" off leftover resin.

"I'm the one out there," Constable Gibbons says, "and they are not
using it properly. What I see is a lot more people smoking crack -
it's become more socially acceptable."

"But did you see what they were using before?" asks Andrew Cheam,
program co-ordinator at Centre 454, the drop-in centre that hands out
kits next door to the Shepherds. With no pipe, addicts will use empty
pens or punch holes in dented cans to inhale the smoke of burning
crack. A clean pipe, Mr. Cheam says, is still safer than a pop can.

And every time an addict comes in, he makes contact. "I might only get
seven seconds. If they hear anything, they hear, 'Be safe.' "

This is the challenge of any harm-reduction program: How do you get a
population with so many social problems to take safety precautions,
especially when a bargain-basement drug is widely available?

Nick, 16 years old, is panhandling outside the Fresh Fruit store. He
has just got a pipe from the program and promptly lent it to a friend.
Nick has been on the street only a couple of weeks; he left the
Shepherds shelter because he was scared, and slept in a parking garage
for a couple of nights.

Not even old enough to grow a beard, Nick is hard to walk past without
pity. After 20 minutes, he has $15 in change collected in a king-size
pack of du Maurier Light cigarettes. He plans to use the money to buy
a $1.99 hamburger at McDonald's and then score some crack. "I buy as
much as I can." Asked about the risk of disease, he shrugs. "I don't
worry about that."

On a quiet Monday evening outside The Bay in Byward Market, Mark K. is
becoming more and more frantic. He darts back and forth across the
street, walking up to pedestrians directly and asking politely, "Do
you have a minute?"

Often, they do. Mark is 20, neatly dressed, tall and blond with a tidy
goatee - he could pass as a university student needing directions. An
older man in a plaid jacket, riding his bike to buy tomatoes in the
Market, gives a few coins. "He had an honest face," he says afterward.

Mark used to ask for money for bus tickets, but now he says he needs
to buy formula for his kid. How do you refuse a dollar, if there's
even a chance that there's a baby somewhere in need of food? As it
happens, Mark says he does have a three-month-old son. But he's not
buying formula.

He has been at it since 10 a.m., so far collecting enough coins for
five hits. For food, he bummed some leftover tabouleh salad from a
young woman sitting under a tree outside Chapters. The instant he puts
together another $2, he sprints off to the McDonald's, where a dealer
he knows will sell to him if Mark promises to bring in new business.

Then Mark slips into a corner on the ground floor of a nearby parking
garage to smoke, unfazed by people and cars passing by. They pretend
he's not there, except for one haggard homeless man who wanders over
to bum a light.

"It's such a small amount," Mark complains, poking the filter into his
pipe and carefully placing the crack on top. "It just gets me by." A
Barenaked Ladies song plays from a speaker above his head. He takes
one long haul. In the shadow of the flame, with his sucked-in cheeks,
he is instantly aged 20 years.

Mark savours the high for what seems like mere seconds. Then he
marches out of the garage to start over again. "It gets pretty
tiring," he says. "I don't like what I have to do."

His latest stint on the streets has lasted about a week now, since his
parents kicked him out: They say he can come home if he goes to rehab
in North Bay this month. If he's going into detox, he figures, why
bother quitting now? But he doesn't rank his odds of success very high.

He had coffee with his mom this morning. She brought him a new jacket
because he told her his old one was "jacked" last night. In reality,
he sold it for $20.

Users like Mark are the reason homeless advocates and police are
telling people to stop giving to panhandlers, an act they say
unwittingly fuels the crack industry.

Jean-Marc Portelance, 22, one of the city's most prolific panhandlers,
claims to have made more than $100,000 in one year, sometimes
averaging $1 a minute, and spent it almost entirely on drugs. "I make
more money panhandling than I would at any job," he says. A government
worker might hand him $20 from her car; another vehicle, with a dealer
at the window, would exchange it for crack.

But convincing the public not to give to panhandlers is a tough sell.
For one thing, if you remove one source of drug money, won't petty
theft increase? Police can clamp down on the people who approach cars
stopped at lights, but there's a lot of compassion for the sad man on
the corner with his request for cash scrawled on a cardboard box.

It seems inhuman to walk by a panhandler when you're carrying a
shopping bag of new clothes, coming from a nice meal or heading home
from your government job - and that describes most of the people
passing through the Market.

"It was kind of sketchy," says Susan Young, 22, who was coming home
from work and gave Mark a loonie after he used his baby-formula line.
But, she says, "it's just a dollar. When someone comes up to me, what
am I going to do?"

For Ottawa, this summer will be the test. Mayor O'Brien continues to
mull the fate of the pipe program. A coalition of business and social
services has formed to address panhandling and safety issues in the
downtown. Among the homeless, the problem is the lineups for rehab and
affordable housing.

But now it's spring. Soon the Market will be humming with commerce of
all kinds. It will be easy for the crowds to overlook the desperation
a few blocks to the east, or to ease their middle-class guilt by
tossing a few coins at it.

Which is, at 9 p.m., what someone does once more for Mark K., who
continues to deny he even has an addiction. He dashes into the
McDonald's, but his dealer has left, promising to be back in 20
minutes. "I gotta go," Mark says, rubbing his hair and bouncing on his
heels. "I can't wait that long."

He runs off through the now-empty produce stalls of the Market and
disappears - chasing, always chasing, the next high.

Erin Anderssen is a senior feature writer for The Globe and Mail.