KITCHENER - In recent years, when people saw Catherine Devries of Kitchener, they saw a tiny and obviously ill woman who needed to use a wheelchair when she managed to get out of bed at all.

But her family and friends don't remember the trail-blazing medical-marijuana activist as frail. Anything but.

"Cathy was a very, very strong fighter," said her father Carl Devries. "She would not give up even when her life was extremely difficult for her."

Catherine died last Sunday in St. Mary's Hospital, at the age of 49. Most of her life, she had struggled with a host of health problems and pain.

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Many years ago in Toronto, the newspaper I was working for at the time undertook a multi-day series on various drugs plaguing the city and I was assigned to cover heroin.

That's how I came to know Sam, a prostitute and addict whom I renamed Jackie for the articles. Sam was extremely open and she and her "man" Danny gave me total access to their lives.

Sam's life was horrific -- a total waste and a terrible worry for me. When possible from my obscured vantage point, I would write down licence plate numbers of the cars she would jump into and always felt an intense sense of relief when she would return to her corner, something she would do time and again until she raised enough money to feed her and Danny's $600-a-day heroin habit. Her life, as she said, was a vicious circle of turning tricks to get a fix and needing a fix to turn the tricks.

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Owner Of Pete's Open Kitchen Says He's Ready To Pack Up And Leave

OSHAWA -- Peter Captsis is tired.

Tired of finding pills and syringes on the bathroom floor, tired of breaking up fights, tired of listening to foul language float over the tables in his restaurant.

For the past two years, he has been trying to make Pete's Open Kitchen a downtown Oshawa success story but says the methadone clinic next door is making that all but impossible.

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Access to free, clean crack pipes in Ottawa will continue next year despite the city's opposition to the controversial program.

Jack McCarthy, director of the Somerset West Community Health Centre, confirmed Friday in a conversation with a Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care spokesman that the province will fund the program without city involvement.

"The minister is committed to funding this program," Mr. McCarthy said, adding he is pleased with the news.

The province will provide $287,000 to run the crack pipe program in 2008. The money will go toward paying for two outreach workers, transportation and supplies. Mr. McCarthy said he hopes the funding will be made permanent.

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It's not just marijuana grow operations that need to cause concern in the community; the potential for crystal meth labs also can't be ignored.

That was part of council's discussion surrounding a new co-ordinated response protocol for marijuana grow operations that it approved at its meeting last week.

Ward 3 councillor Cindy Lunau brought up the danger of methamphetamine - -- or crystal meth -- labs to council and said it's important not to focus solely on marijuana grow-ops.

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More than a century ago, the keepers of the peace in the city were viewed a little differently than they are today.

According to a published account in 1878, which can be found in the Historical Atlas of Hastings County, while the Belleville police force was "quite efficient and well officered," the head of the department held a position like no other in the town.

"Hugh McKinnon, a name which strikes terror into the hearts of evil-doers, is chief," according to the breathless prose in the account of the day.

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Researchers Are Working On A Vaccine That Could Neuter The Effects Of Narcotics Like Cocaine. Some Experts Warn This Magic Bullet Could Backfire

A man is at a downtown loft party. He knows he shouldn't be there, but a friend convinced him it would be a good time, one not to miss.

The music, the short skirts and familiar faces set off an urge he has been fighting for six months. It's been that long since he last cut cocaine. And he swore to stay clean.

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Ottawa's homeless shelters have the beginning of an answer to the million-dollar question of what to do with homeless drug dealers who've been charged by police. Stop bringing them to us, they say.

The heads of the Mission, the Shepherds of Good Hope and the Salvation Army have written a letter to police, meant to be read by judges who deal with the street-level addicts who deal on the side to support their own habits. The shelters beg the authorities not to leave homeless people facing such charges on the shelters' doorsteps. More than that, they want judges to stop ordering such people to live at the shelters, as sometimes happens when the judges hope doing so will bring some stability to the alleged dealers' lives.

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There have always been enormous stresses placed on teens throughout their high school years.

That is never going to change, but what seems to be changing are the ways in which teenagers learn to cope with the many pressures.

With the constant emergence of new technology, a logical way to relax would be to turn on the television or listen to music on an iPod.

However, recent research suggests an alarming trend in the way teens choose to relax.

On Wednesday, Dec. 5, a drug awareness meeting was held for parents, students and teachers in the library of M. M. Robinson High School. It was put on by the Halton Regional Police Service in partnership with the Halton Health Department.

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Some people just can't stop fussing about the police budget and it's true that the increase will cost the average homeowner $36. Is it too much? Maybe the better question is, are we getting value for the money?

The recent mass arrest of drug dealers downtown suggests that we are. The situation in the ByWard Market area had gotten ridiculous with people selling and smoking crack in public as if there were no law against it. Or, at least, no law enforcement.

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Vancouver's safe injection site isn't the whole solution to the drug problem in the Downtown Eastside -- but it has done a great deal of good

Liz Evans

Citizen Special

I was saddened by Margret Kopala's recent column, "Revoke this licence to enable" (Dec. 8). Like Ms. Kopala, I remember my first experiences in the Downtown Eastside as shocking, and I too was naive about the problems there when I left the hospital as a nurse to work in the community. It's now been almost 17 years working in the very neighbourhood Ms. Kopala describes.

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Inquest Hears Staff Would Have Helped

Five corrections officers who worked at the Owen Sound Jail the weekend of George Russell Frivalt's death all told a coroner's inquest on Tuesday that they performed regular checks on the rooms occupied by Frivalt and had no reason to suspect the man was ever in distress.

Testimony has wrapped up in the inquest into the death of Frivalt, who died on May 14, 2006, while serving a sentence at the jail.

Lt. Brad Burnett, an operational manager at the jail and the shift supervisor on the night Frivalt died, said action would immediately have been taken if any of Frivalt's fellow inmates had voiced whatever concerns they may have had.

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The "granddaddy" of highly-addictive illicit drugs, crystal methamphetamine, may not be endemic here, and that's the way health and police officials want it to stay.

Det. Sgt. Dan Reive, head of Project Longarm - a drug enforcement arm that combines several police services, including Belleville - said the drug is easily and inexpensively made from ingredients available in the community. More troublingly, it has a 90 per cent failure rate in addiction recovery and leaves addicts brazenly willing to commit crimes to feed their habit.

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Street Crime Unit Kicks Off With Sweep of Dealers

For a solid hour on Saturday afternoon, Project Street Sweep zeroes in on its targets: street-level drug dealers working city streets, selling single rocks of crack cocaine for $20 a hit.

Most of the arrests take place in the ByWard Market area, with the police radio rhyming off the intersections.

In each case, plainclothes police and uniforms identify the dealers, then swoop in to make the arrests.

"It's unbelievable how bad the street-level drug problem is," Staff Sgt. Samir Bhatnagar, a senior officer with the newly formed 10-member Street Crime Unit, says. "It's mindboggling how prevalent it is right now."

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For Now, Police Will Keep Those Facing Drug Charges Off Premises

Three downtown Ottawa homeless shelters are asking the courts to prevent those charged with dealing drugs on their premises from coming within 500 metres until their charges are dealt with.

A formal letter submitted to police was signed by Shepherds of Good Hope, The Ottawa Mission and the Salvation Army.

Police say they will temporarily impose the condition, but also submit the letter as a victim impact statement for the courts to consider at trial.

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Ottawa's new street crime unit can squeeze the supply of drugs all it likes, but that won't solve the city's substance-abuse problems.

Operation "Street Sweep" picked up 65 suspects on the weekend, laying a few hundred charges. The idea was to put the fear of the law into the dealers, to show them they don't operate with impunity.

That's a worthwhile goal, although its worth shouldn't be overstated. Trafficking in drugs is illegal and the police have a duty to enforce that law. It's possible that a strong police presence could deter some would-be users and dealers from operating in plain view on the streets, to the horror of tourists and Christmas shoppers. It can also keep them out of the vicinity of shelters, where they prey on vulnerable people.

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Online debates over parenting skills and marijuana legalization have been sparked by a Waterloo man who put his son's Christmas gift for sale on e-Bay after he caught the 15-year-old smoking marijuana.

The man, who goes by the e-Bay user name "k_lid" claimed on the auction site that he spent weeks scouring stores in order to buy Guitar Hero III for his son, Isaac, to play on his Nintendo Wii.

After finally scoring a copy of the game, the elementary school teacher came home one day to find his son smoking marijuana in his backyard with two friends.

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Mounties Have Seized 50 Kilos This Year At Pearson Airport

The RCMP say they've seized a record 50 kilos of heroin so far this year being smuggled through Pearson airport and destined for GTA streets.

The Mounties are concerned about a rise in heroin use and are cracking down on smugglers who try to bring the drugs into the country.

"We have stopped a significant amount of heroin from hitting the streets," said Sgt. Frank Gougeon of the force's airport drug squad. "There seems to be a big demand for the drug."

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Three Brockville physicians plan to open a clinic for drug addicts in the city's downtown core early next year.

And while the "addiction clinic" will tackle patients' hard-drug habits, Dr. Andrew Everett, who will run the King Street West facility with Drs. George Kolbe and Charles Bonham-Carter, said it will also try to help people who kick such habits to tackle other addictions as well, such as marijuana, drinking and smoking.

All three physicians are part of the Brockville Family Health Team, but Everett stressed the clinic is a separate endeavour not linked to that health team.

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Re: Revoke this licence to enable, Dec. 8.

Margret Kopala's challenge to harm reduction by Colin Mangham that programs such as Insite's needle exchanges have "few or no reductions" in blood borne disease is as preposterous as saying condoms don't prevent sexually transmitted infections.

Furthermore, Insite has had more than 800 documented overdoses in their establishment, and due to medical supervision no deaths have occurred since its inception.

The assertion that the American style war on drugs has been a success is laughable. And the further misconception that enforcement will render Vancouver's "pushers and users" into treatment or jail and where "youth are hip to the dangers of drugs" is part of a delusional psyche of the last failed 35 years of the war on drugs. Canada's conservative government is quite happy to play the treatment/enforcement card, as they seemingly only pay lip service when it comes to actual funding of either treatment facilities or prevention programs, while boosting an already proven ineffective enforcement war.

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