HEROIN THAT GOES FAR BEYOND JUNK

J.D.'s voice is ragged. It tears from someplace deep inside his
throat. He says he is sick, and broke. It is 10 a.m. in Kelowna,
B.C., and the 35-year-old heroin addict is craving his morning fix.

"I've been using for 23 years now," J.D. says.

He knows about the lethal batch of high-potency heroin that has hit
B.C.'s Lower Mainland. It is killing addicts in alleyways and in
their beds, in Kelowna, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Surrey, Burnaby and Vancouver.

But J.D. is not going to stop. He says he is "too far gone," despite
the 21 heroin-related deaths that have been confirmed in the first
four months of this year, nearly triple the number than over the same
stretch in 2010. Police are awaiting toxicology reports from several
additional cases and believe the toll could climb higher.

Last week, the parade of dead junkies pulled into Kelowna. Two men,
aged 21 and 24, were found dead in a 36hour span. A family member
discovered the 21-year-old lying in his bed. Police later learned
that he had used a small amount of the drug.

"We don't get a lot of overdose fatalities." Kelowna RCMP spokesman
constable Steve Holmes says. "This is very unusual."

Asian, Latin American and West African criminal gangs control the
international heroin pipeline. The drugs flow from Asia to Canada on
large ships, planes, speedboats, snow machines, all-terrain vehicles
and personal backpacks and suitcases with false bottoms.

"South and Southwest Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, and
Turkey) have dominated the Canadian heroin market since the early
2000s," a 2009 RCMP report on Canada's illicit-drug situation states.
"While heroin consumption is reportedly one of the least common forms
of drug used in Canada, seizures of heroin have been on the increase
since 2004."

Intercepting the drugs before they reach the streets is a lot easier
than stemming the flow of a toxic batch of heroin once it is already
in circulation.

Kelowna's RCMP detachment has petitioned the drug community for help
in tracking the drugs to their source. There have been no tips,
anonymous or otherwise.

"When we are talking about the drug community we don't get a huge
amount of co-operation," Const. Holmes says. "We put out the plea,
and if people are concerned about their friends, or themselves, then
please help us find out who is dealing it.

"To my knowledge we haven't had much success getting any definitive
information that will lead us in a particular direction."

The British Columbia Coroners Service has issued a warning.

"Heroin being dealt to users in some areas is at least twice as
potent as usual," the coroner advised. "[Users should] never be alone
when ingesting drugs, and where possible should use available
community services such as INSITE, or needle exchanges."

INSITE is the province's supervised-injection site in Vancouver's
downtown east side. There have been 3,000plus overdoses at the
facility since it opened in 2003. None has resulted in a fatality.

Police, the coroner's office, the provincial government, academic
studies and two B.C. court rulings have endorsed the program, a
harm-reduction strategy that was at risk in the Supreme Court of
Canada on Thursday, where judges heard arguments from federal lawyers
to shut the clinic.

The federal position is that the facility encourages drug use, and
that its continued operation could have widespread ramifications for
the provincial health system. "The state has no constitutional
obligation to facilitate drug use at a specific location by hardcore
addicts, the mildly addicted, frequent users or occasional users,"
prosecutors argued in court submissions, although a federal lawyer
told the court Thursday the Conservative government hasn't decided
whether it wants to close the facility.

For J.D., the street has been his life and his drug den, first in
Winnipeg, and then Abbotsford and now Kelowna. J.D.'s girlfriend
overdosed in November. He shoots up four times a day in a public
washroom. He is not going to stop.

"I am not scared," he says. "I've been doing this long enough now to
know that when it is new stuff, I just got to do a lower dose of it.

"But I am out here, on the streets, and what happened last week has
not slowed the young kids down. It is pretty sad to see. It is their
friends that passed away, and they pour a couple of drinks out on the
street during the day when they are talking about them but they still
turn around and are using.

"It hasn't slowed them down. Heroin doesn't scare them. They think it
is cool ... Maybe if they could see themselves like I see me, maybe
they would quit.

"I am so far gone it is not even funny."