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An overview of
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PLAYFUL TEEN
I4-year-old Alys Howe is
youngest playwright at
this year's Fringe Festival.

Office, Editorial 985-2131 Display Advertising 980-0511 Classifieds 986-6222 Distribution 986-1337

September 17, 1993 100 pages

High-grade narcotic raising ambulance, police concerns

A POWERFUL form of heroin that is being bought and
seld in Vancouver-area drug circles is resulting in more

NORTH VANCOUVER Rhino Richard the Troll Schaller (left) blows his horn outside the party’s
North Shore hindquarters as national party member Barry Headoffice Heidt iooks on. See

story page 5.

heroin overdoses in North Vancouver.

And two veteran North Van-
couver police and ambulance of-
ficials say they have never seen the
‘situation this bad before.
_ “Eve been in drug enforcement
since 1987 and this is the worst
I've seen it,’? said North Van-
couver RCMP Cpl. Mike Little-
john, of the police’s drug unit.
~ “The purity of the heroin is
going up in a hurry and that’s
leading to the overdoses. Their

By Surj Rattan
News Reporter

(drug users’) systems just can’t
handle it,”” he said.

But Litdejohn added that there
are few heroin traffickers in North
Vancouver,

Advanced fife support
paramedic Tim Jones, the North

Vancouver unit chief of the B.C
Ambulance Service, agreed with
Littlejohn that heroin overdoses
have now become a problem in
North Vancouver.

He said the North Vancouver
ambulance unit is now ordering
the drug ‘‘narcan’’ more fre-
quently to deal with the -heroin
overdoses.

Narcan counteracts
of heroin.

Jones spent seven years working
as a paramedic on Vancouver's
skid row before transferring to
North Vancouver,

the effects

While he didn’t have any
statistics on the number of heroin
overdoses in North Vancouver,
Jones said there has been a
marked increase this year over
past years.

“This summer all
bulance) platoons have had
heroin-related calls, and we've
never had that before,’ said
Jones.

He added the situation has
become so bad that ambulance
attendants who are below the level
of an advanced life support

See Narcan page §

four (am-

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