Pubdate: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 Source: Calgary Sun, The (CN AB) Copyright: 2011 The Calgary Sun Contact: http://www.calgarysun.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/67 Author: Michael Wood Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine) WHEN DREAMS BECOME A NIGHTMARE Crack City: Part 2 She's been choked nearly to death, beaten and had a narrow miss with the blade of a drug-crazed john. The woman's endured more than 20 years working the streets of Calgary, Vancouver and Edmonton, which pitched her within inches of an early grave more times than she can count. "I wanted to be a lawyer, and a marine biologist," she says with tears welling in her eyes. Those dreams died long ago, somewhere between old Electric Avenue and a serial killer's hunting grounds on the East-End streets of Vancouver. In the past 10 days, the woman, now 42, has been beaten to a bloody pulp over an 8-ball of rock cocaine, booted out by a landlord and lost most of her possessions to the hands of greedy crackhead 'friends' enlisted to help her move. Her name is Susan. She has been a crackhead for the past 23 blurred years. Susan's tale of torment began when she was 15 years old, during an horrific excursion to Edmonton where a pimp pummelled her for more than a month and a half. As she says, she simply got "caught up with the wrong people." She has never been the same since. "That sort of changes a person irrevocably, you don't ever go back," she says. The lure of money and drugs estranged the woman from the middle-class life in which she was raised as she spiralled into the seedy world of hard drugs and cold cash. As a teenager, she latched on to a drug-culture circle which revolved around one particular man, a coke dealer who made regular trips across the border smuggling bricks of cocaine. He was a star in certain company. "He made about 160 grand every five months dealing cocaine, bringing it up from Mexico. We had a lot of cocaine, we had a lot of money, we had a lot of fun," she says. Her life spiralled and she forgot about school until she finally left for Toronto. She wanted to get clean, which she did - temporarily. At 19, she came back to Calgary and took up work in a bar along the once-infamous Electric Avenue. "And that's where the party started," she said. Her first hit on the pipe was handed to her by her then-boyfriend. Her nose was in bad shape from the coke she was again sniffing and the pipe, he said, fixed that problem. The first time wasn't memorable, but the second time, and then third . "You're numb, your problems disappear," she says. In reality, they were just beginning. "It got a lot worse, I couldn't hold a steady job anymore." She began selling her body in Calgary and then Vancouver. She worked the streets hard, bringing in $700 or more a night before retiring home to her boyfriend with a pile of crack, only to do it all over again the next day. The addiction was so powerful not even the spectre of a serial killer swayed her from hooking on Vancouver's turbulent east end. "Everyone knew there was a serial killer out there, I still worked it," she says. That serial killer was the infamous pig farmer, Robert Pickton, arguably Canada's most notorious. He is serving a life sentence for the murders and gruesome disposal of six women, although he told an undercover cop he had slaughtered 49, mostly drug-addled prostitutes. There came a point when she switched gears and, under the tutelage of a new boyfriend, worked a series of cons that netted thousands of dollars each week. She doesn't want to talk about those. They have since parted ways. Her slightly hollow eyes and sunken cheeks suggest she has been to hell and back. In a car behind a relative's house, where her circumstances forced this writer's initial interview to take place, she breaks down. "I'm just so sick of this," she says, wiping away tears. Susan has tentative plans to check in to Aventa, a Calgary treatment facility for women. She's tried before, for her family. "Now I'm just trying to do it for myself. I don't want to be high anymore," she says. . . . A life too lucrative to pass up His enterprise employed dozens of people, ran a 24-hour delivery service, made piles of cash and, by his estimates, afflicted thousands of lives. His name, for the purpose of this story, is Kyle. He was a coke and crack dealer. Kyle agreed to this interview on the condition his name would not be used. "I got in it for the money, about 10 years ago," he told the Sun, fresh from a three-year sentence on trafficking charges. Kyle was found guilty in 2008 for his role at the helm of a minor drug empire, which had tentacles across Calgary, stretching beyond city limits into several southern Alberta towns and cities. He declined to reveal how much money was made, but at its pinnacle, Kyle's business of organized dial-a-dopers doled out between 10 and 20 kg of cocaine and crack each and every month. When pieced out on the street, a kilogram fetches upwards of $100,000, cops say. "I ran it as a business," he said. "It's not like I set out to hook people on drugs or (screw) them over." Instead, he called it basic supply and demand. His clientele was already there, a steady stream of fiends, each with their own source of cash, whether they were women turning tricks or groups of boosters stealing thousands of dollars worth of electronics, jewellery and countless other items they could pawn or trade for as little as 10% of market value, so long as they could fund their next desperate fix. "Anything and everything ... that's all you can say," he said. The average crackhead, he said, spent at least $2,000 every week on crack. "Those are the bottom-end crackheads. A high-end crackhead could spend $10,000 a week," he said. His life as drug dealer stretches back nearly 20 years in Calgary, to days when he would sell joints to classmates at $5 a piece. He switched over to cocaine and then crack as the market began heating up to become the rock cocaine prairie capital it is today. "This is definitely a crack city," he said. His reign ended at the hands of a small army of RCMP officers who busted him and several others in an operation that netted several ounces of blow and thousands in cash. Kyle spent the next two years in jail with hardened crooks and various drug-addled dregs of society, time which he spent on switching gears for a new life. "There was a moment I realized money wasn't everything," he said. "I've done lots of vocational training and got my high school (equivalency diploma) in prison and it's changed my lifestyle to the point where I just don't want to sell drugs anymore," he said. "I've learned other ways to make money and I've seen the impact. I have, obviously." . . . HELP IS HERE - Local recovery centres Alberta Health Services facilities Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission Help Line, 1-866-332-2322 Renfrew Recovery Centre (same day admission for detox) 403-297-3337 Adult Addiction Services (no wait list) 403-297-3071 Lander Treatment Centre (two-week waitlist) 403-625-1395 Addiction Centre (addiction and mental health issues) 403-944-2025 Other facilities For men 1835 House 403-245-1196 Simon House Recovery Centre 403-247-2050 Fresh Start Recovery Centre 403-387-6266 Sunrise Native Addictions Services Society 403-261-7921 Calgary Dream Centre 403-243-5598 For women Aventa Addiction Treatment for Women 403-245-9050 Servant's Anonymous Society (for women at risk of sexual exploitation) 403-237-8477 . . . Who's using what? . Among Canadians 15 years and older, the prevalence of past-year use of cocaine or crack was 1.2%, comparable to rates reported in 2004. . Meanwhile, the prevalence of past-year use of cannabis among the same age group decreased, from 14.1% in 2004 to 10.6% in 2009. . The rate of drugs-use by youth 15 to 24 years old remains much higher than that reported by adults 25 years and older: Almost four times higher for cannabis use (26.3% versus 7.6%), and almost five times higher for past-year use of any drug excluding cannabis (6.3% versus 1.3%). - - Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, 2009, Health Canada - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom