Recent high-profile crimes turn attention to Metro's drug underworld

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Brent Mazerolle

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There are 'pharm parties' where bowls of prescription pharmaceuticals are passed around like candy, but cannabis use is down.

Addiction Services offered in our region are seeing 300 requests for help per month.

The RCMP is linking a pair of violent area crimes to the drug trade.

It's difficult to get a sense of Metro Moncton's illicit drug scene.

However, some of those who would know best suggest that though the nature of drug use in our area has changed a bit and is at the root of much of our relatively rare major crime, the size of the drug problem has at least stayed relatively constant.

The arrests of five young area men in connection with a homicide last week in Shediac and a violent robbery in Moncton have people in the community talking, and what they are talking about is drugs.

The pair of middle-of-the-night home invasions, just 90 minutes apart, were enough to make most in the public jump to the conclusion the violence was somehow connected to illegal drugs. Now the RCMP is officially saying the same thing, that investigators believe the motive in the two home invasions was the robbery of drugs and cash and all five accused are known drug users.

Though those allegations have not yet been tested in court, they nevertheless lead to questions about the size and nature of Metro's drug culture, especially when so many have been troubled by the youth of those implicated in these two high-profile crimes.

Crime overall has been dropping in Metro Moncton for a number of years -- by 16 per cent between 2006 and 2007, for instance.

However, Codiac Regional RCMP spokesman Cpl. Mike Gaudet believes he can't honestly say drug crime has gone down, because crime statistics in general have a way of being unpredictable and full of sudden spikes and troughs. Gaudet said small annual increases and decreases in drug crime statistics may not exactly signal larger trends.

There are other problems with tracking drug crime. If a house has been broken into, there's clear evidence a crime has been committed whether police make arrests and prosecutions are obtained or not. However, if a drug transaction is made and police don't learn of it, the crime, of course, does not get recorded. Conversely, if police happen to make an increased number of drug arrests, their good work has a way of making a problem seem bigger.

Corporal Gaudet suggested there's yet another problem with drug crime statistics. They don't account for all the other crimes that have their roots either in the drug trade itself, the efforts of users to get money to feed their addictions, or the crimes they commit that they might have refrained from had they not been under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

"We don't always have hard facts and statistics behind it but, in my 18 years as a police officer, I can say a high percentage, if not most of our crimes, have a relation to the drug world," Gaudet said.

He said most of our major crimes especially have drug implications, even if, "at the end of the day we don't necessarily have (arrested individuals) make a statement about why they committed crimes."

All those provisoes notwithstanding, the most recent crime figures from Statistics Canada, from 2007, show drug crime below the national average in Metro Moncton.

Ultimately, though the drug problem is certainly real and the public would be naive to think otherwise, it is also probably not as bad as some people imagine it either -- thanks, in Mike Gaudet's estimation, to the dedication of numerous social agencies in our community.

There are many people doing great frontline work in confronting drug abuse, crime, poverty and homelessness in our community, so it's hard to single anyone out as a leading expert.

However, Normand Blais has seen the conditions on the ground in Metro from a number of perspectives. Recently hired as a community program officer for the Codiac RCMP, he came to the job after a decade of working with Metro at-risk youth through organizations like the YMCA, YouthQuest and the Dieppe Youth House.

Blais said this week that alcohol, cocaine and prescription pills have been the leading culprits in the problems community outreach workers are seeing.

Whether they are causes or symptoms of wider social issues is, as it is everywhere, the great chicken-and-egg question, though Blais tends to see things like abandonment and abuse leading to drug use among youth rather than the other way around.

Blais said while people might be surprised to learn that the relatively 'new' drug crystal meth has actually been around since the First World War, he noted contemporary drug use here and elsewhere can have a multi-generational facet. The flower children of the 1960s are, in some cases, still using and abusing drugs and alcohol, and they are now the parents and grandparents of youths experimenting with drugs today.

For instance, "marijuana and alcohol are more socially acceptable today, and that's an issue," Blais said.

He has a point. They are so socially accepted, that when Blais refers to them as gateway drugs that can lead to an even more damaging lifestyle, the post-Cheech & Chong generation might be tempted to roll its eyes at what seems today an earnest "reefer madness" cliché. But then you consider his decade spent working with troubled youth in Metro Moncton, and you decide he and his colleagues in the social safety net trenches just might know more about gateways than the rest of us.

Blais sees abuse of prescription pills as a current problem, "because Mom and Dad have them in the medicine cabinet." While he suggested it wasn't an epidemic in our area, he did speak of pharm parties in which "everyone puts Mom and Dad's pills in a bowl and everybody takes some," a particularly dangerous approach because the sort of safety information about dosage amounts and interactions that might challenge a pharmacist is left to random chance.

Gaudet expressed a similar view about the appeal of pills, both the legitimate ones being abused and the designer highs created in drug labs.

"Prescription pills and methamphetamines and the new flavours of the week, there has been an increase in the last 10 years, according to our drug section," he said. He suggested young people especially get interested in pharmaceuticals because you're not smoking anything or snorting something up your nose.

"You're taking a little pill and you feel funny," he said, suggesting how easy it can be to get interested and then hooked. "You're taking one hit of ecstasy and going to dance, and next week you're taking two because that one didn't last long enough. That initial high is the best high a person gets, so they turn around and want to reach that high again and they won't, so they're taking more."

Jean Daigle, the regional director of Addiction and Mental Health Services for Regional Health Authority B, agrees prescription pill use has increased in the last eight years, but alcohol is still the drug that leads to their greatest intake of clients. Meanwhile, he says the demand for addiction services in Metro Moncton "is greater than ever before -- not that we necessarily see that as a bad thing."

While they are now getting a staggering 300 requests for service each month, he says they are happy to try to help as many people as they can.

While a growth in service requests can represent a growing problem in Metro, it can also be attributed to overall population growth in this bustling corner of the province. It's to be hoped it's also the result of more people trying to take control of their lives, which is certainly a positive for all of us. Daigle notes a 2006 study found addictions cost the Canadian economy about $8.2 billion per year.

Against that backdrop, the public would be wrong to think the drug problem in our community is insignificant. On the other hand, Daigle said, "there's this great perception that nine-year-olds are out there getting high and we don't really see that."

The trick to successfully dealing with addiction is, "if you can get at them within the first week," they come seeking help.

Sadly, that isn't always possible because of caseloads. Addiction Services has however reduced wait times recently by introducing more group counselling over one-on-one counselling.

Meanwhile, Daigle shared his service's philosophy of harm reduction, which is to understand that not everyone will succeed in beating addictions on the first try and that no one should feel it's useless to seek help again or that they are somehow disqualified from further help.

"Always know that you can come back."