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Callum, a 19-year-old from Vancouver's west side, doesn't fit the stereotype of a heroin addict, but his pathway to serious addiction is a textbook case of a trend that is alarming experts: the trajectory from prescription opiate abuse to heroin addiction.
In many ways, Callum fits a new profile; young, privileged and with everything to live for, he fell into heroin addiction after developing a dependence on prescription opiates.
His first narcotic high came after he found a bottle of Tylenol 3s, a commonly prescribed painkiller, in his mother's bedside drawer.
"I ate about 10 of them, and went from feeling out of control to not bothered," he recalls.
A so-called resurgence of heroin addiction has been dominating headlines around the world. Some call it a "major comeback" and an "epidemic." Others argue that heroin has never really gone away, but its profile has been raised by the tragic overdoses of young celebrities: Peaches Geldof, Philip Seymour Hoffman and last summer, here in Vancouver, Glee star Cory Monteith.
The number of people across North America using prescription opioids — including codeine, fentanyl, hydrocodone, morphine, hydromorphone, meperidine and oxycodone — to treat severe and chronic pain has risen dramatically during the last decade. The concurrent rise for non-medical use has U.S. public health experts calling it "an emerging public health concern globally," with "misuse increasingly common in key populations including general adult and student populations."
Health officials in Canada and the U.S. moved to counter that trend with the introduction of abuse-resistant formulations that make crushing, snorting and injecting prescription opiates more difficult. But instead of solving the problem, health advocates say it is simply pushing addicts toward heroin, a drug that is often easier, and cheaper, to access.
In Vermont, for example, the crisis is so acute, governor Peter Shumlin recently said: "What started as an OxyContin and prescription drug addiction problem in Vermont has now grown into a full-blown heroin crisis. We have seen an over 250-per-cent increase in people receiving heroin treatment here in Vermont since 2000, with the greatest percentage increase, nearly 40 per cent, in just the past year."
Across Canada, officials are bracing for a similar trend: a rise in heroin addiction directly tied to the rise in prescription opiate addiction.
In B.C., 61 per cent of overdose deaths between 2005 and 2010 were accidental and related to the use of prescription drugs. At St. Paul's Hospital, there has been an 89-per-cent increase in all addiction-related emergency room visits in the last four years.
Vancouver, unlike Vermont, is not new to heroin. The problem reached epidemic proportions here in the late '90s, when health officials were counting an overdose a day, a crisis that prompted groundbreaking harm reduction programs such as the supervised injection site, Insite. Now officials, alarmed by the trend in other cities, anticipate a resurgence here.
Opioids a drug of choice
Rates of prescription opioid addiction have soared across the U.S.
Eighty per cent of the world's opioids are consumed in North America. South of the border, among high school seniors, Hydrocodone is the drug most commonly abused, second only to marijuana, and opiate overdose is now the second-largest cause of unintentional death after motor vehicle accidents, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Studies show similar patterns of use in Canada. In every city studied across the country except Vancouver and Montreal, prescription opioid use was more prevalent than heroin. From 2002 to 2005, according to a study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, use of prescription opiates among street drug users jumped 24 per cent.
In Ontario high schools, 20.6 per cent of students admitted using prescription opioids, according to a 2010 study published in Canadian Family Physician, up from 15 per cent in 2008. In that province, prescription opioid-attributed deaths doubled between 1991 and 2004, and rose another 30 per cent between 2005 and 2009.
Although data for Vancouver is less exact, the trend is ringing alarm bells.
"In Canada, consumption of prescription opioids has tripled over the past decade, and we are now the second-largest consumer in the world," said Dr. Thomas Kerr, co-director of the Urban Health Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDs.
"We are documenting a very large increase in prescription opiate use, and we are interested in looking at how people initiate into heroin. Heroin addiction can start with opiate addiction," he added.
"We need to understand what is happening here. Vancouver has such a long-standing injection culture; if there is anywhere that it matters, it's here."
One teen's story
It's a road that Callum has already travelled. The teen, who spoke candidly and at length with The Sun, grew up in a stable west-side home. He describes his parents as loving, successful, and financially comfortable.
Like every kid, he said he "wanted to be accepted."
Around Grade 6, he said he began to experience what he now knows was undiagnosed depression. Withdrawn, a reader and a dreamer, Callum recalls Grade 8 as the first year he experienced real isolation and difficulties. "I spent the first year of high school very alone. My friends were all making new friends. Finally, the next year, I started hanging out with old friends and one of them said, 'We should smoke some pot this Halloween.'"
Callum didn't think twice about the pot smoking — it was simply a door to having friends. "I was more interested in just having something to do with them."
What he remembers most now is getting high. He felt the depression lift. "It was the first time I felt like I could just smile for a spontaneous reason. I loved that I could smile and laugh again and have a release from my depression. It helped me feel OK with being socially awkward."
Callum "almost instantly" became a regular pot smoker and more. "My curiosity started getting the best of me. Within the first month of trying pot, I tried mushrooms."
He bought whatever he could with his lunch money.
Eventually he admitted to his parents that he was using pot. "My mother was very concerned. My father was unsure of whether to draw a hard line in the sand or take the more accepting approach to see if he could put himself in a position where I could share more things with him. What inevitably happened was I remained dishonest with him and took his ambivalence as a form of complacency."
Drugs of all kinds were readily available at his school, he said. By Grade 10, he was experimenting with acid, ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, DMT, Tylenol 3s, "all the drugs I knew that people I knew were doing and that to a degree were accepted. I was very reckless. I was smoking pot at lunch. Very quickly my reputation got out of hand."
His counsellor sat him down with his parents. By the end of Grade 10, the school principal told him he was no longer welcome at the school.
He had also turned 16, and although he still lived at home he was beyond his parents' control.
"I was exercising my independence," he said. "I decided I was going to start selling drugs."
Callum enrolled in an alternative school. "The main reason was that I had read (that) a lot of kids there were also drug users and would be open to buying MDMA and K."
He figured it would be good for business.
At the same time, Callum was growing more fragile. "The drug use amplified my depression; I was getting very emotional."
He began to steal from his parents, including that fateful bottle of Tylenol 3s he found in his mom's drawer.
Callum had discovered opiates.
"Right after that I called my supplier and asked if she had any painkillers."
Science behind the high
Heroin provides a cheaper, stronger high than prescription opiates, but both work on the same receptors in the brain.
Risks and harms related to heroin abuse are well documented: addiction, illnesses such as Hepatitus C and HIV, the risk of overdose, and, because it's a street drug, a lack of control over the quality of the supply.
"In Vancouver, rates of addiction remain persistently high, but deaths have fallen," said Dr. Evan Wood, an addiction medicine specialist and co-director of the Urban Health and Research Institute at St. Paul's Hospital.
Since the opening of Insite, Vancouver's supervised injection site, in 2003, fatal overdose events decreased by 35 per cent in the surrounding area, according to a study published in The Lancet.
The drop is largely due to harm-reduction initiatives and the widening of availability of Naloxone, which can quickly and effectively reverse an opiate overdose.
However, people do still die from heroin overdoses. It's often when, like Cory Monteith, the user has also used alcohol, or has been clean for some time and the body's tolerance to the drug is lowered, or the drug is laced with a secondary drug such as Fentanyl.
Snorting and smoking
Opiate users of all ages and stripes are particularly vulnerable to accidental "mixed-drug toxicity deaths" of the kind that killed Cory Monteith, and which Vancouver coroner Barb McLintock says account for the majority of deaths in B.C. that include opiates. Heroin and other opiates are sedatives, slowing down the heart rate and breathing. Alcohol has an "additive or synergistic" effect when used with opiates, even in moderate amounts, suppressing respiration.
In spite of high-profile celebrity deaths — actor Heath Ledger had oxycodone, hydrocodone and several other drugs in his system when he died — opiates continue to be a problem drug.
"There is a resurgence of heroin as a problem drug, and a change in who is using heroin to younger people and opioid users who are turning to it for the first time," says Wood.
Although data in Canada is still sparse, Wood points to a recent U.S. study that is drawing attention to the problem. "A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at some of the restrictions around OxyContin in particular resulting in people with untreated opiate addiction turning to street heroin when diverted prescription opioids become less available."
This worries Rob McGirr, a youth drug counsellor in Surrey and former police officer. McGirr has seen the evolution of the problem firsthand.
"There's been a transition and kids seem to be shifting to more sedative drugs," he said, nothing that he first started to see teens using OxyContin seven or eight years ago. "It's been a huge problem in the U.S. and sooner or later we knew we would see it here. OxyContin is quite expensive on the street, about $35 a cap. Heroin is about half the price."
McGirr said the pricing for OxyContin "can be very erratic," depending on its dosage and other factors.
Heroin is usually packaged in "decks" or "flaps," he added. "The usual lowest amount packaged is a 'point' of heroin (1/10th of a gram [100mg]) and is usually $15. This would be considered a single dose."
Younger kids are experimenting with snorting and smoking heroin, or "chasing the dragon," which involves inhaling the vapour released after heating the drug on a piece of foil.
It's not just that heroin is a cheaper narcotic high. McGirr cites another reason. Kids are not seeing the ravages of the drug: "In 1999, 2000, heroin had a bad name. Everyone knew a kid that had experimented and they saw what happened. That group of kids is 27, 28 years old now, dead or in jail. The drug has been off the radar for teen use for so long, it's enjoying the status of (being) the new drug."
The problem is that patterns of addiction with opiates, prescription or street heroin develop so quickly, users "don't have time to change their minds."
A slippery slide
The first prescription opiate Callum's dealer gave him was morphine, a big step up from Tylenol 3s. For Callum, morphine was magic. "Going to bed in a good mood, waking up in a good mood, just feeling warm and like no obstacles will overcome you, like there is no reason to be worried or concerned."
Although prescription opiates are designed to treat severe or chronic physical pain, the narcotic took care of something else for Callum: "My emotional pain."
By Grade 10, Callum was still living at home, using morphine as often as he could and dealing at the small alternative school where he says he was "technically enrolled."
"It simply got worse at that point. As soon as my old friends that I had done drugs with saw that I was getting into morphine and opiates, they got scared and started distancing themselves," he said.
One night, he was on his way home from doing his regular "runs" (drug deliveries) with $20 in his pocket. He had hoped to use the money to pick up a cap of one of his regular prescription opiates, but had no luck. He ran into someone on the bus who offered him heroin instead.
"I thought to myself, It's f--king heroin, this is not a good idea. At the same time, I thought, but it is an opiate. This is your last chance."
At first he said he didn't see it as much different than the prescription opiates. He moved from snorting heroin to smoking it. "But from that moment, heroin started dominating."
Soon, he said, he started to prefer it. He was addicted. From that point forward, the 16-year-old began using daily. Conflicts grew and he left his parent's house, to stay with his dealer. Lulled by the drug into a kind of apathy, he could see the future but had no power to resist.
"In my head I was imagining myself living on the Downtown Eastside," he said. "Instead of that thought or image compelling me to run back to my parents and try to clean up, it felt more like I was just mentally preparing for the inevitable."
But Callum was arrested in a police sting after his school liaison officer was informed he was selling drugs at school. His dad came to pick him up at the police station.
"I cried the whole way home," he confessed. "My parents thought, 'This is it. This is the intervention he needs to get his life on track.'"
Instead, he started bingeing. Callum wasn't going to go into rehab willingly. He moved back in with his dealer. Two months later, he missed his court date. After turning himself in the next day, Callum was released to his parents under the conditions that he had to attend a rehab of their choosing.
After a seven-day detox, Callum's parents took drastic action. Because Callum was 16, his parents had no way of forcing him to stay in rehab in B.C. If they got him into the United States, however, he would be under his parents' control again, due to more restrictive laws. Without telling him where he was going, Callum was taken to the airport, loaded onto a chartered private jet and flown to Utah. "It felt to me at the time that I was being kidnapped."
In Utah, Callum was strip-searched, given a backpack with necessities, blindfolded and driven to a camp in the wilderness. He spent 11 weeks in the program and then moved to a residential treatment centre north of Salt Lake City for 11 months, where he was able to finish high school.
He's been sober ever since.
Now a student at a university in another province, majoring in psychology, he finds visits to Vancouver challenging.
"Just being in Vancouver puts me on edge," he said. "My Dad would be driving me down Broadway, and I'd see the Tim Hortons and think about when I did drugs there. A corner where I bought drugs, another corner where I stole drugs. No block was safe."
He goes to meetings, talks to his parents often about how he is feeling emotionally, and tries to address situations and feelings "as they come up."
To kids who are experimenting with drugs and might be feeling low after a weekend of partying, Callum says he hopes they will understand their "low feeling could be related to their substance use, and that it won't go away with more and more powerful substances, but only get worse."
The cognitive therapy he received in rehab has provided Callum with new coping tools. "Coming back from a run one day, I just lay on my bed and felt like I was on ecstasy. I realized that by doing all those drugs I was robbing myself of that ability to feel that sensation naturally."
Now he is working to reclaim his life, one small pleasure at a time.
Early intervention
Dr. Evan Wood, who is spearheading an addiction medication training program at University of B.C., believes that in addition to ongoing efforts to reduce the prescription and availability of opioids, health care providers must move toward early intervention. "The question I am asking is, how do you catch people before they become addicted?"
The issues are complicated: the very real needs of patients who require pain treatments must be weighed against very real issue of narcotic addiction and dependence, and the problems caused when prescription drugs are diverted to the street.
When it comes to anyone who might be addicted to opioids, whether it started with a prescription for pain relief, or a pill bought on the street, Wood believes the answer is going to take a concerted and multi-pronged approach: continued efforts at harm reduction and educating physicians so they can recognize and treat the problem.
"Just speaking to someone in a white coat who knows about addiction and can lay out the statistics in terms of a bad outcome, and say, 'These are the things you can do to alter the trajectory you're on,' that's impactful," he said. "But most primary care physicians aren't necessarily equipped with the tools to help with addiction. It's a fundamental barrier."
Wood believes that highly publicized celebrity deaths, such as Cory Monteith's, are too often a lost opportunity for education. "We need to seize these opportunities as public education opportunities to discuss why deaths like this happen and why we need to address the very real risks and dangers associated with opiate abuse."
• Callum's name has been changed to protect his identity.


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Memoir Contest
In the hustle and bustle of life, most of us never take the time to collect and preserve special memories, such as notable events and historical anecdotes, for our friends, family and future generations. Enter Sarah White, a personal historian who works with individuals, families, businesses and communities to write it all down. These days she's especially interested in helping people record their life stories, or a significant episode or time period that holds special meaning.
White describes herself as a "coach, partner and friend" on the memoir-writing journey and has teamed up with Madison Magazine to offer one lucky reader the chance to see his or her special story transformed into a beautiful book, illustrated with photographs and other memorabilia.
Contest entrants are required to write a five-hundred-word autobiographical sketch about an event from your life. You could write a scene from your childhood or describe a memorable event from later in your life concerning jobs, family, personal interests or travels.
Visit for the complete rules.


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I think I'm in the habit of trying to do the impossible…
Or at the very least, what might seem impossible to me.
In the midst of training for Chicago I got an e-mail from The NorthFace Endurance Challenge. I have a soft spot for this race, you see, a weak-in-the-knees adoration for this endurance challenge.
It was my first marathon ever last year.
So, you know it pulled at my little heart strings until I officially registered for a second round. Only this time I decided to go for the even more impossible.
The mini-ultra.
The 50K.
I just added a few more weeks of training after finishing the Chicago Marathon. I was tired, wornout, overwhelmed, scared and nervous…but I was stoked to complete another new challenge.
Come beautiful Saturday morning on November 17th, I had all the same feelings. I was tired, but excited. Overwhelmed but prepared. Nervous but amped. And when the race started I was off again on cloud nine. My feet, one after another, doing what they know best, my eyes on the road ahead, my hot pink fingernails waiting to give me my superpowers when I needed them. I know my mom thought I was crazy when I stayed up late just to paint my nails on race eve, but there was method to my madness. Superpowers, duh.
And I definitely needed them.
There's no play-by-play for this race recap, just as there wasn't for Chicago. I think what is happening is that I'm becoming so overwhelmed by emotions that everything seems to happen in a blur. I am so humbled by my running experiences, grateful for my capabilities, and beyond thankful for all the support I've received. I remember the race in moments, and these are moments I hope to remember for the rest of my life…
…all the runners lined up at the start, nervously chattering about how it's "just five more miles." Me, standing there in the middle of it, smiling like a kid in a candy store.
…reliving all the sites of Kansas City and remembering running the same streets last year and how magnificent I felt when I finished my first marathon. The same hill, the same bridge, the same buildings…they all felt so nostalgic.
…my friends who were running the half marathon catching up with me and giving me words of encouragement. Then watching them as ran ahead, finishing a great race of their own.
…coming to the first aid station that offered sliced oranges. An orange has never been so delicious.
…the stairs. Four flights to be exact. At least they were going down.
…splitting away from the marathon runners and beginning the out and back route that added those no-big-deal five more miles.
…looking down at my pink fingernails and summoning them for some of those superpowers now.
…the smiles, waves, thumbs up, nods, and words of encouragement as the leader 50k-ers passed back along the out and back route. Those small gestures meant oh-so-much.
…seeing my dad at mile eighteen. I knew it was him from half a mile away…pride just beaming out of him.
…wanting to stop around mile twenty. I've never wanted to stop so bad. I decided to walk and eat another orange…then dug deep and found some way to keep going.
…seeing my sister. Her voice screeching as she cheered me on. Then seeing her again, driving in her car, yelling out her window. And again.
…coming to terms with the fact that I needed to walk again. So I did. And at the encouragement of one of the wonderful Kansas City Police Department officers, starting to run again.
…striking a conversation with another runner. Come to find out the only race he'd ever ran was a 5K, and here he was running a 50K right next to me. I told him he was doing great, and he admitted that it was only because he knew I'd been behind him for awhile and he didn't want me to pass him.
…a mile later, passing him.
…walking for a third time up the longest and hardest and steepest hill, probably in the world.
…the feeling of knowing I only had two miles to go. I was actually going to finish this.
…the little girls who were cheering and told me that the finish line was so close.
…coming around the corner…the same corner that I rounded on August 27th, 2011…hearing my sister's voice again…trying to hold the tears back and myself together long enough the make it a few more yards to the finish line…seeing my dad standing there…hearing the announcer call my name…
…and crossing the finish line after four hours, forty-seven minutes, and thirty-three seconds. Another seemingly impossible task…finished.
If there is one thing I can tell you, it's that you can really do anything you want to in life.
My heart is so full of pride and gratitude and thankfulness. For everyone who has given me so much support through everything, I can't thank you enough.


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A dogfish might not be quite the pest locusts are but from fishermen to scientists to government officials, wanted to see more dogfish taken.
Are local fisheries going to the dogs?
Some people in the business think so. In point of fact, the spiny dogfish has been classified as over fished, and thus under federal protection since 1998, but they aren't nearly over fished enough in some minds.
"Managing the field for locusts is just nuts," opined Robert Fitzpatrick, a fish broker with Maguro America in Chatham. "Guess what? They're not going to go extinct. It will be a terrible thing if a snorkeler can't see a pile of dogfish? Why do we want them?"
A dogfish might not be quite the pest locusts are but most everyone at the Spiny Dogfish Shark Forum, at the Holiday Inn in Hyannis, from fishermen to scientists to government officials, wanted to see more dogfish taken.
Dogfish eat other fish, sometimes right off the hook or out of the net. Estimates of dogfish predation on one-year-old cod made in 1998 were for 2.15 million fish, out of a total population of 5.77 million. That's 37 percent of the juvenile cod population.
"Although the amount of cod predation is minimal compared to other fish (around 5 percent of the diet), two million is a lot of cod," admitted Dr. David Pierce of the Division of Marine Fisheries.
Codfishing is under heavy regulation in an effort to build up stocks. The dogfish seem to be on the other side of the equation.
"A small scale (dogfish) fishery would remove one of the major predators of sea herring (68,000 metric tons (848 million fish) a year," Pierce added. "Dogfish are not over fished so we need to take a precautionary approach to fisheries management in regard to cod. We should err on the side of cod rebuilding, not on dogfish rebuilding."
The dogfish population is being rebuilt, however. Prior to 1979 there was minimal interest in dogfish in the United States. However, offshore Russian trawlers were hauling in as much as 23,000 metric tons year. If you ate fish and chips in the U.K., you were eating dogfish.
The foreign ships disappeared after the United States enacted a 200-mile limit in 1976 and the U.S. take jumped from 73 metric tons in 1972 to a peak of 27 million in 1996. Based on low estimates of pups (young dogfish), the fishery was designated as over fished by the federal government in 1998. A target, for sustained reproduction, of 200,000 metric tons of spawning size female dogfish was set.
"It dipped down to 40,000 metric tons (in 1999) and the latest estimate is from '06 informed by the '07 survey, 140,000 metric tons," explained fishery analyst James Armstrong of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council. "What scientists think is that the 40,000 was an underestimate."
Estimating the number of dogfish has proved problematic. Earlier surveys suggest that there are six times as many males as females. But that could be a factor of where and when the samples were taken. Recent studies also have shown dogfish to be natural ramblers, not the stay-at-home types they were thought to be. All of which means there could be a lot more dogfish out there causing a lot more problems.
"Dogfish are voracious and opportunistic. They'll eat anything around them," declared Dr. James Sulikowski, a fish biologist at University of New England. "Dogfish consume 1.5 percent of their body weight a day."
Doing some math: if there are 478,000 metric tons of dogfish out there, which is one estimate, and they eat six times their body weight a year, that comes to 2.4 million metric tons of food. Looking at the stomach contents of 401 dogfish, Sulikowski found 93 percent of their diet was fish, mostly cod, haddock, hake, herring and sand lances.
"So what are dogfish doing to commercial fishing grounds?" he wondered.
"People cannot fish for other species, in particular bluefin tuna," said Fitzpatrick, the fish broker in Chatham, who markets tuna to Japan. "And it's as if you had a second fleet fishing for the herring."Dogfish will eat the bait off the tuna hooks.
"Let 10,000 wolves out in Yellowstone and all of a sudden they're scratching their heads wondering why the deer aren't doing well," Fitzpatrick noted. "Why not cut back mortality in juvenile cod by 40 percent by killing a pile of dogfish?"
Dogfish can be fished, the bellies are shipped to Germany, but the current federal limit is 600 pounds per trip.
"Not enough to pay for gas," Armstrong noted. "The trip level is so low because it's only meant to allow for the return of bycatch."
In shore, fishermen can catch 3,000 pounds a trip. Coast-wide the federal limit is 8 million tons. That's divided into two seasons. New England gets 58 percent of that quota, so for the summer season, which began May 1, the New England quota is 1,684,000 pounds and the season will be closed when that is reached. As of May 21, the tally was 146,943 pounds with 9,130 of those from Massachusetts' waters.
The scientists who spoke agreed with Fitzpatrick, there seem to be more dogfish than the estimates indicate.
"Spiny dogfish tend to be everywhere in the Gulf of Maine in tremendous numbers," Pierce said.
Dogfish are supposed to migrate south to the Carolinas in the winter.
"But one fisherman discarded 7,000 pounds of dogfish on Dec. 15. So the fish are here. They are not moving," Sulikowski observed. Or they're moving a lot.
Sulikowski caught and tagged three dogfish with $5,000 satellite tags."You get great data from it," he said.
Indeed. Standard tags, recovered at the end of the fish's travels would have indicated one dogfish traveled a modest distance off the shore of Long Island. Detailed satellite data revealed a footloose traveler, who journeyed south to the Delaware, north around Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island and looped back and forth within the span over a three-month period.
"These fish are moving all over the place. They are not doing what we thought," Sulikowski said. "They're in every ecosystem, offshore, inshore, feeding on all types of commercial fish. The fish are also moving down and up the water column. Much of the time they are in the upper portion of the water."
If you are trawling the bottom for dogfish, you may be missing them. Or if your favorite fish is doing his tourist thing off Prince Edward Island when you do your population check, your estimates could be off.
"They go out and check the oil in the ecosystem and there's never anything on the dipstick," complained Fitzpatrick.Pups can also be born throughout the year.
"The population estimates are probably low," Sulikowski conceded.
Dogfish do seem to be very abundant in the cod conservation zone north of Boston.
"There is an overlap of dogfish and small codfish near Massachusetts shores," Pierce said. "It is probable that rebuilding dogfish numbers could impede efforts to revive the cod population. Unfortunately, the dogfish management plan is silent on this issue. Dogfish is a single species plan with multiple species implications."
"The law addresses single populations so if a single population drops down below a certain level, it is over fished," Armstrong explained. "Then the law mandates a rebuilding plan for that species."Considering multiple species isn't yet in the program.
"That level of management is still many years in the future, which is unfortunate," said Armstrong. "We're still on a single species assessment mentality and it ain't working."
"We're still in our infancy as far as ecosystem based management," Pierce said. "It's possible the (new) guidelines may be so restrictive we will not be able to factor in ecological considerations."
However the quota has been raised, it was 6 million pounds a few years ago. It will be reassessed for next year. Pierce would like to see regional quotas replaced by state-by-state limits.
"This is an extremely important relationship for us to understand," Pierce said.
"If we don't fix what is upside down, we're never going to fix this, this is insane," Fitzgerald concluded.
The Cape Codder


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"Castle" fans have gotten their first glimpse of Beckett's new beau Dr. Josh Davidson, in the towering form of actor Victor Webster.
Viewers know how Beckett feels about him, and have a pretty good idea about how Castle feels about him on the ABC show, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET. But just how do stars Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion feel about the hunky impediment to the crime-solving couple's romance?
When PopcornBiz asked, Katic cut right to the point: "Dude – Yes!" she squealed. "He's gorgeous! Victor Webster – He's huge! He's perfect – I get to wear heels! And you know what was really great? When we were walking off in this one scene, I was wearing high heels and he still had three inches on me as he put his arm around me, and I was like 'This. Is. Heaven.'"
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"Victor Webster – Have you met this man?" said Fillion, shaking his head in dismay. "Okay, number one: he's like a full head taller than me. Tall? Yes. Dark? Yes. Handsome? Oh my God!"
(At this point Fillion turned to his girlfriend Kate Luyben and made one thing clear: "You'll NEVER meet him.")
"His character is a heart surgeon. Helping the blind. And he likes kids and he's good with animals," added Fillion. "So you've got to be a little daunted!"
All kidding aside, Fillion said he's pleased that the show has found viable romantic options like Webster and Castle's rekindled ex-wife Gina (Monet Mazur). "It doesn't make it easy for people to say 'Oh, he doesn't belong in that relationship, he should be with Beckett…' He's got a real catch. And they've got a real catch for Beckett. Everything that Castle finds out about this new boyfriend of hers is that it's just like he's Mr. Perfect."
"Victor's character Josh doesn't have to prove anything," added Katic. "He just IS. He's physically who he is, he rides a motorbike in our storyline, he's got other qualities as well that I don't want to delve into because you'll find out about it, but he's a pretty phenomenal character in the end and, I think, a formidable competitor for Castle, which we need. You've gotta keep the stakes up there!"