On the Saturday night of 28th April, a colourless, odourless gas was released into the ventilation systems of two Toronto gay bars, the Globe and Mail newspaper has revealed. "I had just gone in and checked my knapsack," said Mike Graydon, a graduate student from Ottawa who was at the first bar hit, the Black Eagle, about 11.20 pm, "and then, wham! I breathed in, and there was this burning. You didn't see or smell anything, then it just hit you." Graydon recalled helping people out the door, and then going back in to see if others needed help, getting a double dose. "This could have been much nastier... If you did that in the middle of Woody's," Graydon said, referring to a much larger bar a few doors north of the Black Eagle, "and all those people have to get down the stairs into the street, you'd have a panic." In fact, scores of people were removed, and the gas reportedly burned people's mouths and lungs for hours afterward. Yet the two attacks, in the heart of the city's gay village, have elicited little response from either the community or the police. Despite the possibility of a hate crime, staff at the Black Eagle did not call police, nor have police decided independently to investigate, dismissing it as a probable joke or accident. In Toronto's gay village, the days of regular bashings and drive-by homophobic epithets seem mostly in the past, but there has been some recent violent - though not, apparently, homophobic - activity in the area, including three muggings in the past three months. Toronto Public Health manager Jim Chan is advising everyone affected to see a doctor immediately, calling the incident "suspicious." "It's too bad they didn't go through the 911 system," Chan said, "because then there would be record tracing, health, police would be informed, and they would send paramedics." He said that this long after the incident it would be difficult, probably impossible, to determine what the substance was. More on this story is available on the link below. Ref: Globe and Mail (m)