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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,501
Crack goes mainstream [CAN]
    #6577568 - 02/17/07 09:40 AM (16 years, 11 months ago)

February 17, 2007 - canada.com

Crack goes mainstream

As young undercover officers trying to infiltrate Calgary's drug world in the mid-1990s, Monty Sparrow and Doug Hudacin bought whatever illicit drugs they could get their hands on.

For four years, the pair purchased everything from heroin to marijuana to prescription drugs. Over time they noticed a disturbing trend: crack cocaine, a drug once relegated to the ghettos of big cities like New York and Chicago, was becoming more and more plentiful on this city's streets.

By 1999, says Sparrow, "all we were buying was crack."

Eight years later, the crack cocaine trade shows no signs of slowing down.

"The amount of crack out there today is even higher," says Sparrow, now staff sergeant of the Calgary Police Service's drug unit.

"Nobody can say for sure" how much crack cocaine is entering our city, says Hudacin, a detective and the force's resident drug expert.

One thing is certain: the trafficking of illicit drugs in Calgary has soared over the past few years.

"A decade ago, one officer said five kilos of cocaine were coming into town in a month. But now it's probably well over 100 kilos of coke that will be converted to crack cocaine, coming to Calgary every month. It's hard to attach a concrete number to it -- it's an educated guess."

The police service's most recent annual statistical report, for 2005, showed drug offences increasing by 30 per cent over the past six years, trafficking offences up 49 per cent and crack cocaine offences up 113 per cent.

The two veteran officers don't need hard and fast numbers to convince them that crack cocaine is a growing problem in our city. Even

Alberta's smaller communities are seeing the trend.

Others on the front lines of the drug wars support this view: academics, psychologists, counsellors -- and the addicts themselves.

Not only is crack cocaine more prevalent than ever, they say, its influence is cutting across socioeconomic lines. While many of its users are society's most marginalized -- its presence obvious on the city's streets and hooker strolls -- it's also increasingly becoming the drug of choice for an upscale clientele.

Some observers see it as another symptom of the "affluenza" epidemic: one more unanticipated downside of the current economic boom.

Crack -- a drug made by mixing and cooking cocaine, water and baking soda until it forms a rock that is smoked to produce a high -- has never before experienced such an elevated position in our society.

But it wasn't that long ago that crack had the seediest of reputations.

First showing up in U.S. urban centres in the 1980s, the drug became such a scourge among the lower classes that in 1989 half of all felony arrests in New York City were crack-related.

By 1986, Time Magazine had declared crack addiction the No. 1 issue facing America. Newsweek would later call crack the most significant story in the United States since Vietnam and Watergate.

An ABC News special called it a plague "eating away at the fabric of America," while NBC labelled crack "America's drug of choice."

The outrage over crack's grip on society led to an overhaul of U.S. drug laws.

By 2000, however, the New York Times declared crack cocaine no longer a societal threat with a series entitled The War on Crack Retreats. The combination of tougher policing and laws, along with a tarnished reputation as a drug for losers, it said, were to blame. The term "crack head" was deemed the highest insult, even on the mean streets of urban America.

So how, in 2007, has crack resurfaced in cities like Calgary as a drug of choice for some members of mainstream society?

"Gangs should be given PhDs in marketing," says Dr. Louis Pagliaro. "Somehow in the last few years, they've convinced people that meth is the poor man's drug and crack is the new Cadillac, the rich man's drug."

Pagliaro, a professor in educational psychology at the University of Alberta, has been tracking drug trends for more than 30 years and was the RCMP's key expert witness during a landmark crack trial in Alberta in 1995. He just finished his 14th book with his wife and fellow professor Ann Marie Pagliaro, called Gangs, Drugs and Violent Crime Among Canadian Youth.

He won't use the word epidemic when it comes to crack use, only because "I've been chastised for saying that. But call it what you want."

He says our province is ripe for such a development. "Albertans are working the longest hours in the country, calls to your city's distress lines are hitting record numbers," he says. "A boom can create a lot of unhappiness."

Where there are unhappy people, there is always substance abuse. "I've treated everyone from multiple murderers to Hollywood movie stars, and they all have one thing in common -- unhappiness. They use drugs to alter that state of unhappiness."

But why crack?

Pagliaro says so-called drugs of choice are anything but. Organized crime, he says, has the biggest influence by flooding the market withcertain narcotics.

"Cocaine is the major lifeblood of these gangs," says Pagliaro, who adds that alcohol is still king when it comes to abused substances. "It's the way they support any and all of their criminal activities."

While crack cocaine appears to be cheap at first glance -- a rock can cost anywhere from $5 to $20 -- its short high (about 10 minutes) means the addict will often need 20 or more hits a day. Some hard-core users report taking from 50 to 100 hits.

"They're making a lot of money off one drug," says Pagliaro. "These days, you can hardly find any powdered cocaine on the streets, because the gangs have decided they'd rather sell crack."

Despite crack's emergence as a popular drug, it's impossible to find accurate statistics on its use. Health Canada states on its website that "because cocaine is an illicit drug, the number of users can never be determined definitively. Not everyone who uses cocaine will admit use if asked in a survey, or will accurately recall consumption."

Some critics say that because crack also has the distinction of creating poverty in its users more quickly than most other drugs, self-reporting will never give an accurate picture. That's because crack users deep into their addictions rarely even have homes anymore, let alone telephones.

Add to that the fact that most government surveys here and in other parts of the world group crack together with powdered cocaine, which is snorted.

Still, studies like the Canadian Addiction Survey, published in 2004, found that more than 14 per cent of males, and 10.6 per cent of the total population, reported having tried cocaine.

Dr. Ron Lim doesn't need spreadsheets or polls to convince him of crack's growing prevalence. A professor with the University of Calgary's faculty of medicine, Lim is involved in the addictions field on a number of fronts, from consulting with the Foothills Addiction Centre in Calgary and a private facility in B.C., to helping out at the Renfrew Recovery Centre, a detox centre in the city run by the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission.

"In every aspect of what I am doing, I am seeing more cocaine and crack cocaine," he says. "At Renfrew, crack addiction is now second only to alcohol."

Another problem with this highly addictive drug, Lim points out, is that dealers often add other dangerous substances into the mix, so the user isn't getting pure cocaine. "They cut it with everything from Tylenol to Procaine (a topical anesthetic) to maybe even a bit of crystal meth and heroine. You really have no guarantee what you're getting."

While he acknowledges an increase in professionals joining the ranks of the crack addicted, Lim says he rarely treats them. "The waiting list in Alberta is four to eight weeks, and it's almost all government-run," he says. "People with money don't want to wait, and they don't want to sit beside a homeless person in treatment. They're heading to private treatment centres in British Columbia."

Cocaine and crack cocaine, he says, are psychologically, not physically, addictive. That makes it one of the toughest addictions to treat.

"Cocaine is extremely difficult to quit," he says, adding that if you took 100 people and gave them alcohol, statistically 10 per cent would become addicted. "For cocaine, it would be around 17 to 20 per cent. It is such a dangerous drug to try."

"If you take a drug, you can become addicted," says Dr. Perry Sirota, director of Serenity House Drug & Alcohol Treatment Centre in Calgary. "It doesn't matter how much money you make, how educated you are."

Sirota understands why there has been much media coverage and government interest in methamphetamines -- the Premier's Task Force on Crystal Meth, for instance -- because "meth is a pretty horrible drug, with permanent effects." But he can't understand why crack isn't getting at least equal attention.

"There are a heck of a lot more people in this province using crack than crystal meth."

Sirota says that he's seeing a lot more middle and upper middle income crack addicts, partly because "they were using powder, but then found that was harder and harder to get. They won't think about the fact crack is worse, they just think about replacing that high."

His clientele has extended to include professionals in the finance and legal fields, people in positions of trust with easy access to cash. Fraud cases, where businesspeople have dipped into company and client funds, he says, can almost always be traced to either a drug or gambling addiction.

"I treat sex workers who tell me they can point to any high-end office building in the downtown core and say that's where they go at night with professionals to party and smoke crack."

When the average person thinks of a crack addict, says Neal Berger, "I'll bet they see a male from 18 to 35, who has long, straggly dark hair and looks like he just got out of the criminal justice system.

"They don't picture a guy with a Porsche or a middle-aged homemaker."

But Berger, who has been treating addicts for 30 years and is executive director of the Cedars at Cobble Hill, a residential treatment centre near Duncan, B.C., says that's what he's seeing more and more of every day. And a growing number of Albertans are using his centre's services.

Berger says Alberta's runaway economy has created a unique set of problems among its workforce.

"Dealing with places like Fort McMurray," says Berger, who regularly consults with the province's oil and gas industry, "is like trying to change an entire nation."

He says the growth of illicit drugs like crack among the ranks of the employed is one of the biggest workplace issues today.

"The cost to business and industry is astronomical," he says. Not to mention the risks to safety. "You have addicts who are operating heavy machinery and other equipment that requires a lot of attention."

If crack users and addicts aren't prone to confessing their proclivities to government canvassers, one place some feel comfortable is an organization like Cocaine Anonymous (CA).

"We don't ask them what you do for a living," says John, a representative

of the Calgary chapter of CA. (In keeping with CA's anonymity policy, he won't divulge his real name.) "But you can tell when someone's in a nice business suit that they're not your stereotypical crack user."

In his dozen years counselling fellow crack addicts, he's seen a huge shift from the use of powdered cocaine to crack.

"You never hear the term freebasing now," says John. "It's all crack, and it's so easy to get it. You just have to know who to ask."

John, who has been clean from his crack addiction for 12 years and has a construction business, says he understands how difficult it is to shake the drug, despite his own long-term success.

"It's psychologically addictive, so it becomes a mental obsession," he says. "Just trying to say no, it seems physically impossible for an addict. The rush is so good, but so short, so it just leaves you wanting more."

For Calgary police, how much money a crack addict may have in his or her bank account is of no interest. "We're not targeting the millionaires, or any other addict," says Sparrow, of the CPS drug unit.

"Our emphasis is on the traffickers, the guys making the money off of the addicts."

By introducing illicit drugs into the community, the producers and dealers are causing more harm than just to those ingesting their product. "Anywhere drugs are present, every kind of crime goes up," says Sparrow.

"Violence, petty crimes, burglaries, robberies, murders."

But while finding down-and-out crack addicts such as prostitutes and street people is easy, the increasing numbers of addicts with money and a fixed address can go undercover for a long time -- long enough to use up all their savings and eventually lose everything.

"Everybody has an image of what a crack addict looks like," says Hudacin, Sparrow's partner.

"They'd be pretty surprised to see some of them. Crack addiction runs the full socioeconomic spectrum in Calgary."


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OfflineGWAR
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Re: Crack goes mainstream [CAN] [Re: veggie]
    #6578198 - 02/17/07 12:49 PM (16 years, 11 months ago)

:bongload:
Crack is BiG in Calgary.. it's everywhere.. I smoked a lot of crack when I lived there. I saw little kids selling/smoking it, like 13 or 14? I've been offered crack in all kind of neighborhoods in Calgary... You can't even get 'soft' (powder cocaine) on the streets!

:bongroll:


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OfflineThreePieceSuit
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Re: Crack goes mainstream [CAN] [Re: veggie]
    #6578202 - 02/17/07 12:50 PM (16 years, 11 months ago)

Quote:

veggie said:
"They cut it with everything from Tylenol to Procaine (a topical anesthetic) to maybe even a bit of crystal meth and heroine. You really have no guarantee what you're getting."





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