Yukon's Drug Problem

I've certainly seen and heard more about drugs in the Yukon than anywhere else I've lived or worked. Crack and cocaine seem to be the major culprits here. The First Nations communities have chosen to put up big signs warning drug dealers away, and there was a group of citizens that drew attention to the issue when they gathered together one night and began to systematically go through the downtown bars and toss the drug dealers into the streets. They also started taking pictures of the dealers, and noting addresses and license plates and then stapling posters of this information all about town. We got our hands on one of the posters at work and of course, recognize some of the addresses as client homes...no big surprise.

Then my daughter comes home from work last night with a tale of her ordeal...she works at a national grocery chain, and her particular department is the closest to the bathrooms. A woman came rushing over to A. to tell her there was someone who needed help in the bathroom, so A. goes in, thinking what the hell is going on in there. She found a gal in there, about the same age as her, passed out cold on the floor of a stall, having vomited and somehow struck her head, possibly from when she passed out, she may have hit her head on the toilet on the way down. Either way, she was laying in a pool of blood and vomit, and floating in the toilet was a used syringe. This gal had obviously been shooting up and trying to flush the needle with wads of toilet paper. The kicker is that she was still in her work uniform - the same as my daughter's. A. recalled someone being paged repeatedly and not answering the page...she thinks it was this gal. In any event, A. checked for a pulse, and it was barely there...911 was called and the gal was rushed off to hospital while the throng of shoppers peered on.

Nice work environment. The reality is there is a serious drug problem here in the Yukon and something needs to be done about it. I don't know how effective the signs warning them off are, nor am I sure that tossing dealers into the streets is the answer. I do think that the RCMP need to step up their involvement, put the heat on, and shut down the crack houses. How is it that the city's citizens know exactly who the dealers are, what they drive, and where they deal from but the RCMP aren't able to do anything about it? Perhaps the police are doing something, but one would never know it as the drug use here climbs ever so rapidly.

So A. was pretty shaken up by the happenings last night. She didn't panic, and knew what to do, calling a "code 66" which means first aid is required immediately with security. And she was careful not to touch the blood and vomit, thankfully. Her employers want to keep it all hush hush and are simply telling others that someone took a seizure in the bathroom...um, yeah, because covering up a drug problem is the way to help. If people keep burying their heads in the sand, nothing will change. The store clearly just wants to avoid negative publicity...whatever...they have the market cornered here in Whitehorse anyhow, so I don't think business will suffer in the least. Sigh...