Rolling with junkies

>> Social worker with l’Anonyme says there
are a lot of misconceptions about what
goes on inside the needle-exchange bus

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Julien Monpreuil

Age: 29

Occupation: Social worker

Bio: This fiery Hochelaga-Maisonneuve resident had been doing social-work-type things for over a decade before getting his official BA in the field a couple of years ago. As a result of those efforts, these days, Julien gets to spend his evenings ridin’ the travelling Anonyme needle-exchange bus, handing out clean works and advice on clean livin’ to all those heavy-lidded kids you see sleeping on the sidewalk every day.

Is l’Anonyme’s principal mandate to supply users with needles so they can make their dope stashes go further? Not quite. “Our mandate is to prevent HIV and STDs—in particular among IV drug users.”

Can people shoot up in the Anonyme bus? “Of course not, that’s illegal. We take a harm-reduction approach. We know they’re going to shoot up anyway, so we try to take care of other things with respect to their drug problems. Like, if somebody has taken too much drugs and is too high, they can come on the bus and we’ll talk about it—giving them advice and trying to help them with their situation. A lot of people aren’t ready to quit, but when they are, we obviously don’t give them a syringe. Instead we try and find them a detox or therapy centre.”

Isn’t getting into a detox centre a lot easier said than done here in Montreal? “There’s a clash between the reality of street people and the institutional services. People on the street live day by day, or minute by minute. It’s very difficult to make schedules when you live on the street. You’ve got other priorities. Usually the top one is using drugs, and after that maybe taking a shower, or eating, or finding a warm place to get out of the cold. The institutional services have very strict schedules, making it very hard for street people to take advantage of them.”

How welcoming most neighborhoods are when they see the junkie bus stopped on their corners: It depends. “It doesn’t happen a lot, but residents have pitched potatoes and things like that at us before. A lot of people don’t understand what we do. They think we encourage drug use. They think because the bus is there, the wrong people will be there too. But when we choose to stop at any one corner, it’s because we know there are a lot of people in that area who need our help. Drug users don’t come to us, we go to them.”

The drug all the kids are shooting up these days: Cocaine.

Why the snub against poor old faithful heroin? “It’s really expensive. Instead they shoot up medications like dilaudid or benzodiazepines—what’s cheap and available. But from a harm reduction standpoint, heroin is much better than cocaine. A really big heroin user will maybe shoot up four times a day, where a coke user can shoot up 30 or 40 times a day, increasing their risk of contracting HIV substantially.”

Musical preferences: Opeth, Radiohead, Korpiklaani.

Last book read: I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.

Words of wisdom: “Peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice.”