ZEN AND THE ART OF NEEDLE PICK-UP

Used Syringes Can Be Found All Over Centre-Sud. For Dan Raymond, That's A
Reason To Get Up In The Morning

The Terumo brand needles littered throughout Centre-Sud take on all
different forms. You've got your regular used syringes, used syringes with
broken tips, syringes missing their white plungers, white plungers without
syringes, empty syringe wrappers, syringe wrappers with orange caps still
inside, fresh unused syringes in their clear sealed wrappers and loads of
orange caps. Besides syringes you've also got your dime bags, alcohol
swabs, used condoms with sperm, used condoms without sperm, broken pipes
and bits of aluminum foil. You find them on the street, in alleys, around
benches and in the dark corners of the city you wouldn't visit if someone
paid you.

Within five minutes of leaving the office on a clear June morning, Danny
Raymond finds his first needle. By the faded orange of the cap, Dan
estimates it is several months old. He lifts the needle carefully with his
three-foot-long grabber and places it neatly into a fluorescent yellow
container the size of a small thermos hanging off his belt.

For Dan, a square-jawed, bearded 36 year old dressed in black, there's no
better job. Hours before the rest of the city wakes up, he is out there,
sniffing around the bad spots. He is Dan the Needle Man. And he will sweep
this city clean of syringes if it's the last thing he does.

Killer Job

Dan recuperates needles for the Spectre de rue, an outreach centre for drug
addicts. Dan and his partner Michel Poulin, 29, keep track of the needles
found on a huge map pinned to the wall in their utilitarian office at 1280
Ontario E. Dan picked up 1,700 needles in 1999, 2,284 in 2000, and 1,634
last year. Numbers are higher for the first three months of this year
compared to last. Keeping track of the needles helps the provincial
government better understand the junkie population.

Dan's pick-up zone runs from Sanguinet to de Lorimier west to east, and the
train tracks to Sherbrooke south to north. The mostly-francophone area
falls square in Centre-Sud, which includes the gay Village and a lethal mix
of poverty, high unemployment, biker gangs, prostitutes and drug addicts.

"I have the right psych profile to do this. I have patience," Danny says.
When I ask him what sparked his needle-picking mission, he reads my mind.
"Journalists have asked me if I have AIDS or HIV. I don't."

Considering his work, Dan is lucky. He got himself pricked once by picking
up a tissue with a syringe in it with his bare hands. He went on an HIV
cocktail for a month, and tested negative. He has used his three-foot-long
grabber ever since.

In recent years, big cities like Montreal have seen a huge increase in
cocaine injection. Roughly 100,000 drug users in Canada are at risk of
catching HIV, according to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse Web
site: "Attention has typically been focused on the heroin-using population,
but new trends indicate an increasing shift toward cocaine use in many
cities across the country."

Seventy per cent of Montreal needle exchange clients inject cocaine,
compared to 80 per cent in Vancouver and 52 per cent in Halifax, the site
says. Because coke addicts can shoot up 20 times a day and more, chances of
catching a virus are much higher. A fifth of Montreal injection drug users
had HIV in 1997, compared with a quarter in Vancouver, according the
Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.

Quickie Fix

Twenty dollars gets you a quick hit of coke that lasts only a few minutes,
explains Mike, 49, an HIV-positive regular at the Spectre de rue's day
drop-in centre at 1387 Ontario E. Mike goes through five to six quarter
gram bags a day. He injects the whole bag in one shot, which gets him high
for maybe five minutes. He injects again 20 minutes later.

Melanie Coulombe, a counsellor at the drop-in, says most junkies are in
such a hurry they usually don't inject properly. Rather than using a
lighter and a sterilized spoon to heat the drug with clean water, many will
pour water into their dime bag, stir it with their syringe and then pull
the mixture into their needle. They want to inject as quickly as possible
both because of their addiction and out of fear of being seen by the public
or police.

I see this phenomenon in person when Dan and I change a used needle
container at Viger Park West, a dismal slab of concrete near city hall. We
get to the container just as a man on a bench is extracting drugs from a
dime bag with a syringe. The man slowly puts his hands to his sides,
staring at us bug-eyed until we are done. Injecting this way creates
bacteria, says Coulombe. "Users don't have good filters they can put at the
tip of their needle when they prepare their injection. They often use
cigarette filters, which can cause enormous infections." Coulombe treats
the infected arm by placing it into a basin of piping hot water to drain
the white-yellow pus. "We tell them not to squeeze the abscess themselves
since it can worsen the infection."

The Addict Toolkit

To prevent disease, Spectre gives out needles, condoms, small plastic water
bottles, straws, and alcohol swabs. They also teach smokers how to make
pipes out of the water container and the syringe, since sharing pipes can
also spread disease. "More and more people are using their own pipes.
Someone came in the other day and asked for five," says Coulombe.

Nevertheless, it's still hard to get needles. "The pharmacies make you pay
a dollar for five syringes, and the drop-in centres make us fill out
forms," says Spec regular Mike. Neither are open 24 hours a day. Unlike
over a dozen cities in Europe and Australia, Canada has no syringe-vending
machines, which offer needles anonymously 24 hours a day in sometimes
difficult-to-reach areas. Mike's never heard of them, but his gaunt face
brightens at the idea. "If people can't find needles easily, they'll share."

Asked what he thinks would slow down the rate of disease among intravenous
drug users, Mike has only one answer: supervised injection centres. "It's
not logical that they give people clean needles, but no safe place to
inject and no safe supply of dope." Mike says he has seen addicts so
desperate, they will purposely inject themselves with HIV to get bigger
welfare cheques. "It puts an extra $150 on their monthly cheques and they
get a free bus pass if their doctors think they have trouble walking."

Zen Master

Dan was not always the Needle Man. Until the ice storm in January 1998, Dan
was working as a Zen meditation instructor in Lacolle, Quebec, near the
American border, where he also ran a small business selling imported
anti-anxiety CDs and books. "The ice storm shut me down for 28 days, and
people had other things to spend their money on. I lost all my money."

Living on the dole in Montreal in the winter of 1999, Dan suffered from
depression, and spent his days walking the streets. Sickened by the huge
number of drug and sex paraphernalia in the Village, Dan began cleaning the
streets voluntarily. Soon he had a city salary. "I saw that one person can
change things." Dan sees his mission as Zen: by showing people that he is
doing his part, he encourages people to do theirs.

In a small park off Ontario, we find a small gold mine of white plungers.
Dan diligently picks them all up. He suspects one user left them there, but
has no idea why he would keep the syringes. Behind a gas station we find
some personal articles: a money clip, a pencil sharpener, part of a pen.
Dan thinks we've found the unwanted leftovers of a stolen purse.

Dan is able to see syringes I miss, buried in grass or hidden in shadow.
Nevertheless, he finds the work difficult, and would prefer syringes were
coloured bright yellow. It would help, he muses, if users would be kind
enough to replace the fluorescent orange caps.

Although I am not picking up any syringes, I am conscious of the fact that
a needle could easily penetrate the soft rubber soles of my Adidas. Dan,
who wears steel-toed military boots, is unafraid. "Personally I don't think
I'm at high risk since I'm consciously looking for syringes. It's more
dangerous for someone who is pricked by accident."

In a wide alley behind some residences, we find some bloody tissue papers.
Dan thinks we might have just missed the user. "The work on the
Jacques-Cartier Bridge has pushed people up here," he says. Junkies like to
be where no one can see them. Dirty alleys are better than clean ones,
since there's less likelihood someone's going to pop out for a quick sweep.
Around the corner from the bloody tissue paper, we find a girl's school
bag. Behind a church on Plessis, we find a homeless patch--some blankets on
the ground, some needle wrappers, and a badly beaten copy of The Gospel of
St. John, a narrative of the life of Jesus.

The Night Shift

On the night shift with Serge Boulet, 38, the director of the street work
division of Spectre de rue, I learn how Dan's needles wind up on the
street. Boulet sleeps during the day and roams the streets at night,
talking with junkies and distributing safe sex and drug paraphernalia. He
visits all the hot spots, including shooting galleries and crack houses.
His work comes with considerable risk. He's been pricked by used needles
four times, and each time doctors put him on the HIV cocktail for a month.
He has used CPR to save people from OD-ing as many times. So far he is
HIV-negative.

Serge is also a social worker. On our first visit to a downtown rooming
house, the residents know him by name. Tonight we have come to check in on
a 20-year-old prostitute and her older boyfriend/pimp. Dressed in their
sleeping clothes, they yawn as they talk to us in the communal kitchen. The
woman talks with Serge about her ongoing court case to get back her child
from the Department of Youth Protection (DYP). Meanwhile, women prostitutes
come and go with clients. A young one gets some mint-flavoured condoms off
Serge. We leave the couple with a bunch of needles and alcohol swabs.

Just after 10 p.m. we enter a peep show to check on a used needle
container. The man at the door explains that it was full, so he removed it
from its metal casing in the bathroom and set it aside. Dan or another
member of the day crew will come by to pick it up. "If we spent our time
picking up needles, we would never meet with any people," Serge says.

Viger After Dark

We end our night at Viger Park, chatting with punks who have chosen the
spot as their summer home. Under a concrete roof, a dozen young men are
curled up tightly in their sleeping bags. Rain sloshes in sideways.

Steph, 32, has come to Viger to visit his friends for a few hours. He has
lived on the streets for 20 years, 18 of which he consumed hard drugs like
coke and heroin. Steph says he's clean now, but doesn't plan to stop living
on the street anytime soon. "For me, it's a lifestyle choice," says the
father of two. "I like the way I live." Steph can't live in shelters
because he finds them too structured. Steph says his mother was a junkie,
and the government put him in the DYP where he was abused. At 12 years old
he was selling dope at Foufounes Electriques.

Steph explains that to me that he is an "old-school punk," an anarchist who
has dedicated his life to combating capitalism. He says he robbed banks and
served time in prison. He also says the new generation of street kid is
less violent and more likely to squeegee and do break-and-entries for money.

Steph says Serge is a special kind of street worker. "Other street workers
come and hand out needles. But Serge asks me how I'm doing. So many people
don't understand that."

In the morning, Dan will be back here in Viger Park. The 60 needles Dan
picked up in our two days together make up a small percentage of the more
than 1.2-million distributed in Montreal last year. Yet Spectre de rue says
its clients return over 80 per cent of needles given out. From Spectre a
private company picks up the needles, sterilizes them and destroys them.
They bury the remains in landfills.

The man who cleans up the addicts' leftovers doesn't see himself as a
garbage man, though. "It's syringe research," Dan says. "If I picked up all
the syringes in parks, the city would stop [their own needle clean-up
efforts]." Dan's goal is much greater. "I am trying to change society's
values. The government has to put more money into prevention."

SIDEBAR

Dan's Equipment

Nine-inch military surplus steel-toed boots: With boots like these, Dan doesn’t worry about stepping on needles. The boots allow him to walk safely through thickets of vegetation, broken fences, and to squeeze into tight passages packed with needle-strewn garbage.

Grabber: Dan bought this nifty device from an orthopedic store downtown. With it he can safely pick up syringes, condoms, dime bags and other sex and drug paraphernalia. He manipulates it like a third arm, easily grabbing several items together, and dropping them neatly into his plastic used-needle receptacle. He hangs the grabber off a leather band on his belt.

Used needle receptacle, or 'sharps container': This used needle container is manufactured by Beckton, Dickinson and Company, the self-described 'Leader in Sharps Safety,' according to their Web site. The container is 'durable, stable, closable, leak and puncture resistant, facilitates one-hand disposal, with guards that prevent hands from entering.'

Hip pouch: In his handy hip pouch, Dan carries his pen and notebook, which he uses to jot down the places he finds needles. His stats allow the Spectre de rue to learn where they need to focus their energies, and help in community and police relations.