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Walk in the wake of bust

Searching for drugs

Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 24/00) - In a Yellowknife bar three days after what police are calling the biggest drug bust in Northern history someone pulls out a tin box, opens it, to show about five tightly rolled joints.

Everyone was talking about it. Some of it fiction, some of it truth.

"I heard they got 100 people," said one person. "I know this guy whose roommate got woke up with a gun to his head. I heard they shut down that restaurant up the street."

The cops say they broke up two drug rings. Big deal in a town of just over 17,000 people.

They got a couple ounces of coke, angel dust and pot and held a big press conference at City Hall to tell the North the tide had turned in the war on drugs.

Early evening Saturday, the bar is starting to fill and the bottles are starting to gather in clusters.

This guy says a couple of the people he knows were pulled in.

He doesn't really want to talk to me, he says people think he's a snitch, and assures me he's not.

We talk about the bust and we talk about getting coke and he says prices are still the same, the cops didn't get the real dealers and none of them are really freaked about it. They're still selling he says, right now.

On this night it's true. Two guys got asked by a total stranger if they wanted some rock on their way into another bar.

Later, one of the guys at a corner table pulls out a tin box: "Wanna smoke?" They're from out of town.

By 10 p.m. the bar is thinning. It's time to move along.

I ask a bouncer about drugs, drug dealers, has the fear of getting busted driven these guys underground?

He says no, it's still the same, he knows who they are.

Someone is mumbling something in drunk- talk at a table not too far away. Someone else spills beer on their shirt; drunk. Just two people in a crowd lost at the bar.

On this hop-scotch night I run into a woman at another bar. She says the drug bust sucks. They're nabbing people for smoking a joint and still half the town gets roaring drunk but it's OK. It's legal.

She says the cops don't know what's going on. There's lots of stuff going on that they don't know about and this drug bust thing hasn't done a thing: the drugs are still there if you want them.

Another woman said she didn't understand why so much money was spent on getting drug dealers when so many services in the North are crippled. It's good they got the bad guys, but what does it do? At one point in the evening I get the feeling almost everyone I've talked to knows someone who gets coke, sells coke or knows someone who knows someone who does. The whole night I'm one person away from finding someone who sells the stuff.

A line in a song playing in the bar is ironic considering I spent the night trying to figure out how easy it still is to get drugs in Yellowknife: "I need some reefer when I want to get high."

All these people are dancing to a song about pot. It's like they're in on this inside joke.

And somewhere in this city someone's hunched over a mirror with a crack through it like a lightning bolt and they're slipping away from an empty stomach and a wasted welfare check or a six digit salary or their wife and kids or loneliness.