>> Used syringes can be found all over Centre-Sud. For Dan Raymond, that’s a reason to get up
in the morning

by CRAIG SEGAL

The Terumo brand needles littered throughout Centre-Sud take on all different forms. You’ve got your regular used syringes, used syringes with broken tips, syringes missing their white plungers, white plungers without syringes, empty syringe wrappers, syringe wrappers with orange caps still inside, fresh unused syringes in their clear sealed wrappers and loads of orange caps. Besides syringes you’ve also got your dime bags, alcohol swabs, used condoms with sperm, used condoms without sperm, broken pipes and bits of aluminum foil. You find them on the street, in alleys, around benches and in the dark corners of the city you wouldn’t visit if someone paid you.

Within five minutes of leaving the office on a clear June morning, Danny Raymond finds his first needle. By the faded orange of the cap, Dan estimates it is several months old. He lifts the needle carefully with his three-foot-long grabber and places it neatly into a fluorescent yellow container the size of a small thermos hanging off his belt.

For Dan, a square-jawed, bearded 36 year old dressed in black, there’s no better job. Hours before the rest of the city wakes up, he is out there, sniffing around the bad spots. He is Dan the Needle Man. And he will sweep this city clean of syringes if it’s the last thing he does.

Killer job
Dan recuperates needles for the Spectre de rue, an outreach centre for drug addicts. Dan and his partner Michel Poulin, 29, keep track of the needles found on a huge map pinned to the wall in their utilitarian office at 1280 Ontario E. Dan picked up 1,700 needles in 1999, 2,284 in 2000, and 1,634 last year. Numbers are higher for the first three months of this year compared to last. Keeping track of the needles helps the provincial government better understand the junkie population.

Dan’s pick-up zone runs from Sanguinet to de Lorimier west to east, and the train tracks to Sherbrooke south to north. The mostly-francophone area falls square in Centre-Sud, which includes the gay Village and a lethal mix of poverty, high unemployment, biker gangs, prostitutes and drug addicts.

“I have the right psych profile to do this. I have patience,” Danny says. When I ask him what sparked his needle-picking mission, he reads my mind. “Journalists have asked me if I have AIDS or HIV. I don’t.”

Considering his work, Dan is lucky. He got himself pricked once by picking up a tissue with a syringe in it with his bare hands. He went on an HIV cocktail for a month, and tested negative. He has used his three-foot-long grabber ever since.

In recent years, big cities like Montreal have seen a huge increase in cocaine injection. Roughly 100,000 drug users in Canada are at risk of catching HIV, according to the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse Web site: “Attention has typically been focused on the heroin-using population, but new trends indicate an increasing shift toward cocaine use in many cities across the country.”

Seventy per cent of Montreal needle exchange clients inject cocaine, compared to 80 per cent in Vancouver and 52 per cent in Halifax, the site says. Because coke addicts can shoot up 20 times a day and more, chances of catching a virus are much higher. A fifth of Montreal injection drug users had HIV in 1997, compared with a quarter in Vancouver, according the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.

Quickie fix
Twenty dollars gets you a quick hit of coke that lasts only a few minutes, explains Mike, 49, an HIV-positive regular at the Spectre de rue’s day drop-in centre at 1387 Ontario E. Mike goes through five to six quarter gram bags a day. He injects the whole bag in one shot, which gets him high for maybe five minutes. He injects again 20 minutes later.

Mélanie Coulombe, a counsellor at the drop-in, says most junkies are in such a hurry they usually don’t inject properly. Rather than using a lighter and a sterilized spoon to heat the drug with clean water, many will pour water into their dime bag, stir it with their syringe and then pull the mixture into their needle. They want to inject as quickly as possible both because of their addiction and out of fear of being seen by the public or police.

I see this phenomenon in person when Dan and I change a used needle container at Viger Park West, a dismal slab of concrete near city hall. We get to the container just as a man on a bench is extracting drugs from a dime bag with a syringe. The man slowly puts his hands to his sides, staring at us bug-eyed until we are done.
Injecting this way creates bacteria, says Coulombe. “Users don’t have good filters they can put at the tip of their needle when they prepare their injection. They often use cigarette filters, which can cause enormous infections.” Coulombe treats the infected arm by placing it into a basin of piping hot water to drain the white-yellow pus. “We tell them not to squeeze the abscess themselves since it can worsen the infection.”

The addict toolkit
To prevent disease, Spectre gives out needles, condoms, small plastic water bottles, straws, and alcohol swabs. They also teach smokers how to make pipes out of the water container and the syringe, since sharing pipes can also spread disease. “More and more people are using their own pipes. Someone came in the other day and asked for five,” says Coulombe.

Nevertheless, it’s still hard to get needles. “The pharmacies make you pay a dollar for five syringes, and the drop-in centres make us fill out forms,” says Spec regular Mike. Neither are open 24 hours a day. Unlike over a dozen cities in Europe and Australia, Canada has no syringe-vending machines, which offer needles anonymously 24 hours a day in sometimes difficult-to-reach areas. Mike’s never heard of them, but his gaunt face brightens at the idea. “If people can’t find needles easily, they’ll share.”

Asked what he thinks would slow down the rate of disease among intravenous drug users, Mike has only one answer: supervised injection centres. “It’s not logical that they give people clean needles, but no safe place to inject and no safe supply of dope.”
Mike says he has seen addicts so desperate, they will purposely inject themselves with HIV to get bigger welfare cheques. “It puts an extra $150 on their monthly cheques and they get a free bus pass if their doctors think they have trouble walking.”

Zen master
Dan was not always the Needle Man. Until the ice storm in January 1998, Dan was working as a Zen meditation instructor in Lacolle, Quebec, near the American border, where he also ran a small business selling imported anti-anxiety CDs and books. “The ice storm shut me down for 28 days, and people had other things to spend their money on. I lost all my money.”

Living on the dole in Montreal in the winter of 1999, Dan suffered from depression, and spent his days walking the streets. Sickened by the huge number of drug and sex paraphernalia in the Village, Dan began cleaning the streets voluntarily. Soon he had a city salary. “I saw that one person can change things.” Dan sees his mission as Zen: by showing people that he is doing his part, he encourages people to do theirs.

In a small park off Ontario, we find a small gold mine of white plungers. Dan diligently picks them all up. He suspects one user left them there, but has no idea why he would keep the syringes. Behind a gas station we find some personal articles: a money clip, a pencil sharpener, part of a pen. Dan thinks we’ve found the unwanted leftovers of a stolen purse.

Dan is able to see syringes I miss, buried in grass or hidden in shadow. Nevertheless, he finds the work difficult, and would prefer syringes were coloured bright yellow. It would help, he muses, if users would be kind enough to replace the fluorescent orange caps.
Although I am not picking up any syringes, I am conscious of the fact that a needle could easily penetrate the soft rubber soles of my Adidas. Dan, who wears steel-toed military boots, is unafraid. “Personally I don’t think I’m at high risk since I’m consciously looking for syringes. It’s more dangerous for someone who is pricked by accident.”

In a wide alley behind some residences, we find some bloody tissue papers. Dan thinks we might have just missed the user. “The work on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge has pushed people up here,” he says. Junkies like to be where no one can see them. Dirty alleys are better than clean ones, since there’s less likelihood someone’s going to pop out for a quick sweep. Around the corner from the bloody tissue paper, we find a girl’s school bag. Behind a church on Plessis, we find a homeless patch—some blankets on the ground, some needle wrappers, and a badly beaten copy of The Gospel of St. John, a narrative of the life of Jesus.

The night shift
On the night shift with Serge Boulet, 38, the director of the street work division of Spectre de rue, I learn how Dan’s needles wind up on the street. Boulet sleeps during the day and roams the streets at night, talking with junkies and distributing safe sex and drug paraphernalia. He visits all the hot spots, including shooting galleries and crack houses. His work comes with considerable risk. He’s been pricked by used needles four times, and each time doctors put him on the HIV cocktail for a month. He has used CPR to save people from OD-ing as many times. So far he is HIV-negative.

Serge is also a social worker. On our first visit to a downtown rooming house, the residents know him by name. Tonight we have come to check in on a 20-year-old prostitute and her older boyfriend/pimp. Dressed in their sleeping clothes, they yawn as they talk to us in the communal kitchen. The woman talks with Serge about her ongoing court case to get back her child from the Department of Youth Protection (DYP). Meanwhile, women prostitutes come and go with clients. A young one gets some mint-flavoured condoms off Serge. We leave the couple with a bunch of needles and alcohol swabs.

Just after 10 p.m. we enter a peep show to check on a used needle container. The man at the door explains that it was full, so he removed it from its metal casing in the bathroom and set it aside. Dan or another member of the day crew will come by to pick it up. “If we spent our time picking up needles, we would never meet with any people,” Serge says.

Viger after dark
We end our night at Viger Park, chatting with punks who have chosen the spot as their summer home. Under a concrete roof, a dozen young men are curled up tightly in their sleeping bags. Rain sloshes in sideways.

Steph, 32, has come to Viger to visit his friends for a few hours. He has lived on the streets for 20 years, 18 of which he consumed hard drugs like coke and heroin. Steph says he’s clean now, but doesn’t plan to stop living on the street anytime soon. “For me, it’s a lifestyle choice,” says the father of two. “I like the way I live.” Steph can’t live in shelters because he finds them too structured. Steph says his mother was a junkie, and the government put him in the DYP where he was abused. At 12 years old he was selling dope at Foufounes Électriques.

Steph explains that to me that he is an “old-school punk,” an anarchist who has dedicated his life to combating capitalism. He says he robbed banks and served time in prison. He also says the new generation of street kid is less violent and more likely to squeegee and do break-and-entries for money.

Steph says Serge is a special kind of street worker. “Other street workers come and hand out needles. But Serge asks me how I’m doing. So many people don’t understand that.”

In the morning, Dan will be back here in Viger Park. The 60 needles Dan picked up in our two days together make up a small percentage of the more than 1.2-million distributed in Montreal last year. Yet Spectre de rue says its clients return over 80 per cent of needles given out. From Spectre a private company picks up the needles, sterilizes them and destroys them. They bury the remains in landfills.
The man who cleans up the addicts’ leftovers doesn’t see himself as a garbage man, though. “It’s syringe research,” Dan says. “If I picked up all the syringes in parks, the city would stop [their own needle clean-up efforts].” Dan’s goal is much greater. “I am trying to change society’s values. The government has to put more money into prevention.” : Dan’s equipment