Pubdate: Fri, 19 Jul 2013
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2013 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/letters.html
Website: http://www.calgaryherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Licia Corbella

VANCOUVER'S EASY DRUG ACCESS MAY HAVE HELPED KILL MONTEITH

Ask any informed Vancouverite where you could pick up a bit of heroin 
and they'd be able to tell you. Everyone from teetotalling old ladies 
with blue hair to a straight-A student in elementary school - all 
know if you want hard, illicit drugs, just go to the Downtown 
Eastside of Vancouver and heroin will be as easy to acquire as chewing gum.

Heck, ask virtually any informed person across the country and they'd 
be able to tell you that if you want to go on a seedy trip of your 
choosing - be it a heroin holiday or a crack cocaine carousal - just 
head down to East Hastings Street and you will find what you're 
looking for with no risk of arrest.

Which brings us to the heroin-alcohol overdose death of promising 
young Glee actor and singer, Cory Monteith.

The Calgary-born actor, who was raised in Victoria, was found dead 
Saturday in his room at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, which is a 
five-minute cab ride away from the Downtown Eastside, but worlds away 
in terms of ambience.

It's unlikely that the 31-year-old would have risked bringing hard 
drugs across the border from his home in the United States, so it's 
safe to assume he either picked some up himself or had a gofer do it 
for him by visiting InSite, the government-sponsored and funded safe 
injection site at 139 East Hastings. The next step is easy. Wait for 
an injection drug user to show up, ask them to score you some heroin, 
grab a few clean, free needles and distilled water, and you're set.

So the question is, if Monteith were visiting virtually any other 
city in Canada, would he have been able to find heroin? Would he have 
died? I think the likelihood is much lower.

Proponents of safe injection sites argue that such harm-reduction 
strategies save lives and that's inarguably true. After all, if an 
injection drug user overdoses in the safe injection site, then a 
nurse is on hand to offer assistance and call an ambulance. This has 
happened numerous times.

But no one ever asks how many people have died of drug overdoses who 
use the safe injection site as a legally safe place to procure drugs.

Several years ago, while partaking in one of my addictions - the 
double crunch sushi roll at Midori Japanese Restaurant on 17th Avenue 
- - I overheard a group of three young people talking excitedly about 
how on their upcoming trip to Vancouver, they intended to drop by 
InSite to try heroin for the first time. I have since long wished I 
had butted into their conversation and intervened.

There will be some people reading this who will assume that finding 
heroin in any major Canadian city is an easy thing to do, so InSite 
really doesn't make things that much easier for first-timers to find 
and partake in their inaugural heroin hit, or for people like 
Monteith - who had a history of drug use, to find some easily. But an 
anecdote, dating back many years now, proves this wrong.

Back in the early 1990s, I was assigned to cover the growing heroin 
trade in Toronto. I had great police contacts then and they told me 
to head down to the Parkdale neighbourhood and ask virtually any of 
the street prostitutes I saw if they would talk to me.

Sure enough, the first working girl I approached was Sam - whom we 
called Jackie for the article - who along with her boyfriend, Danny, 
had to make enough money daily to support their $600-a-day heroin habit.

Sam and I hit it off. We shared a lot of laughs and some tears as I 
injected myself into her messed up life for a week and then we stayed 
in touch. I made sure she had my home number as well as my work phone 
number, and one night, months after the story ran, she phoned me in a 
panic from Montreal.

She had left Danny for a regular customer and had run out of heroin 
in Quebec. As she entered into the agony of withdrawal, she begged me 
to drive to Parkdale that Saturday night, find Danny and get him to 
put some heroin on a Greyhound bus for her, as she couldn't find 
heroin in Montreal.

I told her what I'd do instead was call the Montreal police and ask 
them if they knew where the heroin users and dealers hung out. I 
didn't have any Montreal police contacts, but called the on-duty 
sergeant. He didn't know and neither did the various other police 
officers I was transferred to.

In other words, show up in most North American cities and even a 
heroin junkie can't necessarily find their poison. Even police don't 
know where to go in their own city to find the stuff. But ask my 
strait-laced 82-year-old mom in Vancouver, and even she knows.

Would Cory Monteith still be alive had he been visiting Halifax, 
Toronto or Calgary instead of Vancouver? In my view, it's highly likely.

InSite is well meaning. But the time has long passed for an 
independent investigator to really study how many people are using it 
as a gateway into hard drug use and a legally "risk free" way to 
procure an illegal substance.
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