PROGRAM TEACHES ADDICTS TO TAKE ILLEGAL DRUGS SAFELY

Andrew Parker is primed to act if he encounters a drug addict
overdosing on heroin or cocaine.

Parker, 31, is not a paramedic. He's not a social worker.

Parker is an addict.

The tall, friendly man with a gap-toothed grin is also a graduate of a
striking course teaching addicts how to survive their addictions and
what to do to revive an overdosed friend.

The Vancouver-born former fisherman has a taste for cocaine and
marijuana that's sharpened over the 10 years he has been living in the
city's poverty-stricken downtown eastside.

He's part of the Peer Support Training offered by the
Vancouver-Richmond Health Board, a program that isn't trying to talk
users out of their drugs.

Instead, it is offering blunt sessions on such procedures as
CPR.

Within weeks, more than a dozen drug users will be in classes for the
program at a drop-in centre in Vancouver's eastside, located an easy
walk from touristy Gastown and the swanky hotels of the downtown core.

Parker is one of 19 graduates of the first session, held late last
year at a cost of $17,000 to the board.

As Parker sits for an interview in the office of the drop-in centre,
he is asked if he learned enough to save the life of an overdosing
friend.

"There's a damn good chance, as good a chance as anyone else who has
CPR," says Parker, who figures he has overdosed three times but never
seriously enough to require the skills he has learned.

He talks easily about clearing airways, checking pulses and the proper
number of repeated thrusts to the chest of a user dying from the drugs
that have made them high.

"I've got a good set of lungs and good arms," he says, chuckling.
"It's a pretty good bet that I could do it."

Last year, more than 370 people died in Vancouver after overdosing,
continuing an upward trend blamed on a glut of street drugs --
especially cocaine -- that has horrified health officials across the
province.

The crisis is being felt across British Columbia, but seems more
visible in the poverty-stricken streets of the downtown eastside,
considered one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods.

Classes to teach addicts to manage the risks of their taste for the
drugs that may kill them began last November.

Twenty people went through the 14-day course. Participants were not
charged tuition.

A second session is to begin later this month.

"If it saves one person or stops (an overdose), I will think it was
worthwhile," says Sharon Ritmiller, a veteran emergency room nurse now
employed with the board who helped develop the course.

"If they have some of the most basic knowledge of how to open an
airway and apply some mouth to mouth until that ambulance gets there,
that person will have a better chance."

Tammy Desjardins taught the course.

She is a trained alcohol and drug counsellor and a former addict. That
part of her past was helpful.

"It aided my ability to come across because there was an
understanding," she explains.

"I was able to know where people come from and where they were
at."

Desjardins admits the course might seem unsettling to some, but calls
the program an honest look at the realities of drug use many in the
downtown eastside face daily.

"People who live outside this area have a different reality than those
who live in this situation every day," she says.

Training includes sessions on HIV, hepatitis C and other illnesses
associated with the use of dirty needles.

Students are told they should buy from trustworthy dealers so they
know what they are using. They're also taught about the signs of overdose.

Students are warned not to shoot up alone so a friend can be around to
help if they overdose.

It's part of the pragmatic philosophy of harm reduction aimed at
dealing with the harm associated with certain types of behaviour.