Reporter Jennifer Pritchett spent the last seven months investigating parts of Yellowknife's cocaine underworld, its affect on the city and some of the people who live here.
Relatively new to the North compared to other Canadian jurisdictions, the intoxicating white powder is no less destructive here, which could quite possibly be cocaine's last frontier.
NNSL (June 06/97) - Fred takes a long drag of his cigarette and turns his mind back to the first time he ever smoked a joint.
He exhales slowly. As the smoke rises in front of him, he talks of his cousin offering him marijuana when he was 12.
"I liked it. I liked the feeling it gave me. It was a form of escapism -- I had been physically abused by my dad since I was 11."
Now at 35, Fred, not his real name, doesn't play the victim any more. But he admits he still needs help.
He's hooked on cocaine and feels like he's stuck in a rut, fighting urges to spend all his meagre earnings from his part time food service industry job on crack, while trying to get out of Yellowknife's drug scene.
He's not alone.
Fred sees more young people getting lured into the drug scene in Yellowknife every year.
A convicted drug trafficker not long out of jail, Fred says that more young people are getting involved with cocaine in the city than he's ever seen since he started using nearly 10 years ago.
The street-sellers (runners) are getting younger, lured by the potential money they can earn.
"I've noticed over the past four years ... they see their older brother doing it and they want the money, the freedom it gives them."
Fred feels for these young people, many of whom are high school students, who, he says, need help now before they end up like him.
"These people are going to grow up as users. Unless they get out, all their lives they're going to be users -- introducing more and more people to the drug. Eight years ago, it was a small group of users, now it's growing."
Lowest point in his life
An articulate man who sees himself as something of an intellectual, Fred sees how bad things really are in the drug addict's world, like how bad it can get for a dope addict who spends hours wondering where the next hit is going to come from.
This is the lowest point of Fred's life. He now realizes what kind of hole he's gotten himself into and how hard it will be to get out.
"I can't go anywhere in this town to avoid people who are going to ask me to find (drugs) and there's no resources in this town to help me get out."
But he's forced to stay in Yellowknife to pay off debts racked up to support an expensive habit. This is why he got into selling. "One year after I started snorting, I was offered a way of getting it cheaper," he says.
Before he went to jail, all the money he made dealing cocaine went to buying more for his personal use -- eight to 12 grams a day. Eight years ago when he first started using, cocaine sold for $200 a gram. When he stopped dealing, the price in Yellowknife had dropped to $160.
Since then he's reduced his use to three or four grams a week.
"I was making that kind of money then, and I was going into debt to the people I was selling for," he says. "I was a runner before I went to jail. Now I'm just someone who knows the people, has the connections and occasionally helps people score."
Problem is only growing
Fred says more people in Yellowknife should realize how big a problem cocaine has become here. And he sees it as only getting worse until more resources are made available for those in need of help.
"People who need help can't afford to save the money to go down south to get treatment, that's a fact," he says.
The city needs more services available for drug addicts, Fred contends. That might give him and others like him some real options.
Instead, he heads off to work so that he can make enough money to buy the cocaine that he will likely smoke till the early hours of the next morning. |