Nearly two years ago, researchers hit the streets of three mid-sized B.C. cities to see how things were going for crack addicts. Last month, the results were released in a study that concludes that addicts in such communities lack necessary services to help grapple with their addictions.
Crack is cheap, available and highly prevalent. "It's come. It's arrived. It's here to stay for a while," said lead researcher Benedikt Fischer. The main conclusion, he added, "is that in small as much as larger communities in B.C., crack use is a key piece of the street drug-use problem. It comes with considerable negative health impacts or problems and we're in dire need of accessible and effective prevention and treatment interventions."
Users reported unstable housing, homelessness and a reliance on social assistance. They were found to suffer a range of severe social and health problems that are not adequately addressed by existing services. The study calls for targeted treatment to help such addicts.
The research was done between July and November of 2008. Prof. Fischer and his team recruited 70 addicts in Nanaimo, 37 in Campbell River and 41 in Prince George for one-hour interviews for which participants were paid $20 honorariums.
Prof. Fischer, research chair in applied public health at Simon Fraser University, stresses that the findings are not dated, despite the passage of time between field work and publication. "Things don't change that quickly," he said. And while he calls this an exploratory study, which did not include "a complete population," he said researchers believe that what they learned was "representative enough to local populations that there was no major scientific loss if we stopped where we did."
Murray Fyfe, medical health officer for the Vancouver Island Health Authority, says the research fills a void regardless of how representative the sample size was.
"It certainly does help us in terms of looking at what sorts of problems we're dealing with," he said. "Every bit of information we can get adds to what we know about the issue, and it is very, very challenging to get information on some of these things."
Dr. Fyfe said the local data confirm that smaller cities and rural areas "are facing similar challenges with respect to crack use as other places that have been looked at more carefully, mostly in urban centres like Vancouver and Toronto."
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Ian Bailey