Pubdate: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 Source: Link, The (CN QU Edu) Copyright: 2004 The Link Contact: http://thelink.concordia.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2694 Author: Alex Dobrota Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange) Live Through This FORMER ADDICT AND HERO OF THE YEAR SHARES STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS Eleven years ago, Darlene Palmer was biking to her evening job after working all morning and shooting heroin and cocaine all night. Today, Darlene is driving to her evening job after working all morning and has been clean for almost ten years. "I thought it was the drugs that kept me going, but it wasn't," she says. "And it's not the coffee, either." The 47-year old Plateau resident spends her nights as an intervention worker at the Centre d'action communautaire aupres des toxicomanes utilisateurs de seringues (CACTUS), a needle exchange clinic on St-Hubert St. that caters to intravenous drug users. During the day, she coordinates SurvUDI, a research project on HIV/AIDS. She goes to bed at four in the morning and is up and at 'em at seven. Darlene was named Chatelaine woman of the year in 2003 for her work with drug users. Last month, the Farha Foundation honoured her as Hero of the Year 2004 for her work with HIV and AIDS patients. Those who know her call her "le p'tit soleil," perhaps for her blond frizzy locks or her balmy smile; but storms have often rocked Darlene's tumultuous life. Born in 1956 into a family of six children in the village of Iroquois Falls, Ont., she was sexually abused for the first time at age seven. Her uncles and cousins repeatedly raped her throughout her childhood years. To block her feelings, Darlene started drinking and using drugs at age 11. She was gang-raped at 13. Fearing her former aggressors and looking for a protector, Darlene entered into a relationship with a man, Larry, who was feared by the entire village. In the summer of 1973, Darlene's protector turned against her. Larry, who was also a drug user, came back from work one night doubting Darlene's faithfulness. In a fit of jealousy, he set fire to the tent where Darlene was sleeping. The 17-year old girl did not wake up in time. "That night they shipped me to Toronto by plane from the village," she says. "The doctors thought I wouldn't live longer than an hour. I had third-degree burns covering 62 percent of my body." One year, seven skin transplants later and against all odds, Darlene recovered the use of her arms. But the incident left her with indelible scars and a pattern of abuse that would follow her until late in her life. At 19, she moved to Toronto, and was raped again. At 25, she landed a job as a computer analyst in Montreal, where she fell in love with a man who was "ashamed to be with me in public, ashamed of my scars," she says. This man abused her for three years. "It was like a vicious circle. In my relationships I was looking for violence, because it confirmed that the person loved me." In need of affection, plagued by despair and suicidal thoughts, Darlene spiraled into an uncontrollable drug addiction. At 26, she injected cocaine for the first time. Heroin followed shortly thereafter. Darlene was still able to maintain her professional life depite her drug addiction. Dressed in three-piece suits, she worked as a computer analyst for several Montreal firms. There were times she would shoot up in her cubicle while talking to her boss on the phone. "At times, I could inject myself 60 times a day," she says, flicking her cigarette. "I liked the feeling. It's as if the syringe replaced my sexual life. It was my eroticism. It was my sensuality. That's why it was very difficult to quit." At 37, after having lost her job and resorting to prostitution and dealing to pay for her escalating drug habit, Darlene hit rock bottom. "I was dead inside," she says. "I tried all the drug trips and alcohol trips possible. I had nowhere left to go." Helping herself, helping others On October 15th, 1994, Darlene quit drugs, abruptly and without methadone or detoxification cures. Almost one year later, she began working part-time for CACTUS, where she immediately felt at home. This is where her healing process began. "I started entering data at CACTUS," she says. "But I also got to do a bit of intervention work during 10 or 15 minutes. I adored that. It's like I was high, without having to use drugs." The clinic doles out approximately 400,000 clean syringes per year in exchange for used ones to help contain the spread of Hepatitis C and AIDS among active drug users. When Darlene became involved, the clinic was sharing space with the CLSC on Sanguinet St. In 2000, CACTUS moved to St-Hubert St. and the ensuing personnel rearrangement offered Darlene a long-awaited opportunity. "Her objective was to get closer to the active drug users in the context of her job," says Roxanne Beauchemin, CACTUS' coordinator and Darlene's close friend. "So she had an opportunity to change her position at CACTUS and that is what she did. She passed from administrative assistant to intervention worker." Darlene gave herself entirely to her new job. Along with the needles, the syringes, the alcohol swabs and the condoms that she doled out to drug users four nights a week, from eight at night to four in the morning, she slipped in a few words of hope, a smile and an encouraging thought at times. Encouraged by Beauchemin and with permission from CACTUS' general director, Marianne Tonnelier, Darlene pushes the boundaries of her work outside the doors of CACTUS. Darlene pioneered a new method of intervention by accompanying drug users on the street to the hospital and to their methadone therapy. She becomes their confidant, and sometimes their friend. "She gave me her home number, her cell number and her pager number so I could call her whenever something was wrong," says Karine Vaillancourt, 24, who, with Darlene's help, quit drugs four years ago. "I could even call her in the middle of the night, and she would be there for me." "If it wasn't for Darlene, I wouldn't be here today," says Priscilla Fagnan, a 25-year old, who wears coloured bead necklaces and bracelets and whose arms are lined with scars. Fagnan met Darlene in 2001 while she was overdosing on St-Hubert St. "She stayed with me until the ambulances came, and she reassured me," says Fagnan, who has been off drugs for two months now, and says she owes this to Darlene. "I had syringes filled [with coke] in my purse and I was afraid I'd get in trouble with the police. I asked Darlene to take them [and dispose of them], and she did it, although she wasn't supposed to." Over the following three years, Darlene accompanied Fagnan to her hospital visits, reassured her mother and helped her reintegrate into society, always remaining only a phone call away. "When I had cravings, I would have fallen back into drug use if I didn't have a place to stay," says Fagnan, who just like Darlene has lived through a tumultuous childhood and started using drugs at 12 years old. "Darlene rescued me. She always helped me find a place to stay and she always listened to me without ever judging me." Inevitably, some drug users relapse and fall back into the mire. Others succeed in reducing their usage, without completely quitting. For Darlene, the goal is not to bring all users to abstinence, but to alleviate their loneliness--to make their conditions more human. "The idea is to help them help themselves," she says. "I wanted for a long time someone to hear what was wrong in my life. And what I can do with all this pain that I've lived without ever having been heard, is to make sure I'll listen well when somebody truly needs me," Darlene explains. "I can't save people. But if I take a moment to really listen to what the person is saying, then what I lived won't be lost, because as much as I'm helping the other person, I'm healing myself. I suffered, but it wasn't in vain, because I gained the capacity to listen." As she stepped on the stage this March to accept the Farha Foundation award, with tears welling up in her eyes, Darlene is finally content. "For all the void that I felt inside me for so many years, and for all the time that I've tried to fill this void with drugs and self-destruction, that night, [it] felt filled. It's not important how long it lasted. I was filled with love. I was just filled with love." - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake