BATTLE BEGINS IN JUNKIES' VERY PERSONAL WAR ZONE

Drugs and crime are inseparable vices, says the Government. So 'take the
drugs out of the criminal, and he will stop offending'. But is it that
simple? Part two of an Observer special investigation into the class-A epidemic

In the summer of 1971, when United States involvement in the Vietnam war
was near its peak, Richard Nixon's government commissioned a research
project. The Pentagon knew that, confronted by the trauma of losing a war
and limitless cheap narcotics, tens of thousands of American troops had
become addicted to heroin.

Nixon and his advisers feared this flood of returning junkies would cause
havoc back home, overwhelming drug treatment services and triggering a
crime wave.

So they commissioned a study of almost 14,000 troops approaching the end of
their tours of duty, and asked a team led by Professor Lee N. Robins of the
Washington medical school to monitor them.

The results were extraordinary. First, the Pentagon had massively
underestimated the scale of hard drug use. Almost half had taken opium or
heroin in Vietnam, while at least 20 per cent were physiologically addicted
to heroin, dependent on multiple shots of the drug each day and prone to
withdrawal symptoms if their supply was interrupted.

The second major finding has lasting relevance for the debate about
addictive drugs today. Twelve months after their return to America, only 5
per cent of those who left Vietnam as addicts were still using heroin.
Almost all the GI junkies simply came home and stopped taking it: less than
2 per cent of the soldier addicts had had any kind of drug treatment. Even
those who admitted they had been exposed to the drug subsequently and taken
an occasional 'hit' had not been re-addicted.

As Robins commented, these findings sharply challenged conventional wisdom
about heroin and its 'uniquely addictive' qualities - so much so that the
New York Times assumed the study must have been some kind of whitewash and
spent months trying to discredit it.

The story was never published. If we want to try to understand heroin
addiction, and to find means of reducing the chaos and harm it wreaks,
Robins's study is the place to start. We need to look not only at the drug
but at the people who take it and cannot stop; at those who might, in other
circumstances, have been among the 5 per cent of former addicts who were
still dependent a year after leaving Vietnam.

The implications for current UK government policy are uncomfortable.
Reduced to its essentials, this views the rapidly increasing problem of
addiction to heroin and crack cocaine almost entirely through the prism of
the criminal justice system. A high proportion of people arrested for
property and other types of crime are drug users, the argument goes: so the
crimes are caused by drugs. In the words of the former 'drug tsar' Keith
Hellawell, we need 'to break once and for all the cycle of drugs and crime
which wrecks lives and threatens communities'.

To an increasing extent, drug treatment programmes are being made available
to addicts as part of a sentence by a judge or magistrate, for example
through the new Drug Treatment and Testing Orders. The belief, in the words
of a senior Oxford detective, is that 'if you take the drugs out of the
offender, he or she will stop offending'.

Putting money into drug treatment cannot be a bad thing. But what if the
relationship between drugs and crime is far more complex than Hellawell's
formula suggests? What if there is no simple, causal link? That would leave
existing policy dangerously skewed. Measured by the criteria that created
it - the political need to cut the crime rate - it would fail.

Of course, there is such a thing as drug-related crime. I have spent the
past six weeks talking to current and former Class A drug users, mainly in
and around Oxford, and all of them had been in trouble.

One afternoon at the Ley Community, a long-term residential rehab unit
outside the city, I joined a group of new residents who began swapping
stories about their brushes with the law: 'Have you ever had the police
chase you from a helicopter, fixing you from the sky with that red laser
spot,' asked Linda from London. 'That's scary, man. Really scary.'

They agreed that when they were starting to 'cluck' or 'rattle' - to
experience withdrawal from heroin - their determination to acquire their
next 'raise' (the price of a deal) knew no limits. But the crimes they were
prepared to commit were relatively restricted: cheque and credit card
fraud, stealing from vehicles and, above all, shoplifting. Five years ago,
they said, most problem drug users were often burglars. No longer. 'There's
so many hard things about burglary,' Linda said. 'To begin with, you're
much more likely to get caught. And nowadays you can get a lot of bird.'

As a result of changes brought into effect in Labour's first term, even a
first offence of burglary will usually now attract a prison sentence.
Shoplifting is different. Users may easily find themselves before the
courts time and again, repeatedly given bail, a fine or probation. If they
finally do get a custodial term, it will be much shorter: a few months,
instead of years. And the one thing heroin addicts aren't is stupid -
research by Dr Marian Small, a psychologist, has found that Ley Community
residents tend be of above average intelligence.

However, this is shoplifting on an industrial scale. At the bottom end are
'trolley runs'. Here, the user's client gives him or her a shopping list:
he goes into Tesco or Sainsbury's and fills up a trolley in the normal way
- - then wheels it calmly out the entrance, avoiding the checkout. Or he may
go for specific items and sell them door-to-door.

Other users work in pairs or teams, and the methods get more sophisticated,
the sums raised higher. They have learnt how to remove security tags and
how to prevent alarms going off. Sometimes, said Oxford's criminal
intelligence chief, one or more users may act as decoys to capture the
attention of security staff. Or one may go in and move valuable items away
from security cameras' sight-lines; a partner will follow and remove them
from the shop. 'Why bother stealing a suit?' asked Darren, 25. 'Far better,
if you can, to steal the whole rack.'

Five years ago Oxford had 20-30 burglaries a day. Now the average total is
four. National figures bear out the local experience. In the past 10 years
Class A drug use has exploded, yet property crime figures recorded by
police have steadily declined. Total burglaries in England and Wales fell
from an all-time peak of almost 1.4 million recorded crimes in 1992, to
950,000 in 1999.

Most retail theft is never reported to police or recorded: at pains not to
damage their share price, the larger stores like to minimise its impact.
The best data come from the Retail Crime Survey, produced by the British
Retail Consortium. Changes in its methodology make longer-term comparisons
impossible.

But on last year's figures, shoplifting is increasing at a mind-boggling
rate - up from 1,450 known thefts per 100 stores in 1999 to 2,260 in 2000,
a leap of 50 per cent. The average value of each theft also increased, from
UKP 61 to UKP 74. The survey states: 'Over 50 per cent of those arrested
for customer theft were funding a drug habit.'

The former Home Secretary, Jack Straw, suggested that up to 70 per cent of
UK crime might be 'drug-related,' and his successor, David Blunkett,
appears to be taking a similar line. On the one hand, there is evidence
that about 20 per cent of all people arrested have recently taken heroin or
cocaine. But as Professor Mike Hough, leader of a specialist drugs research
unit at South Bank University pointed out, 'when people start talking about
70 per cent of offences being drugs-dependent, it's meaningless'. Getting
people off Class A drugs may well reduce shoplifting. However, 'there is a
real danger that coerced treatment is now being applied as some kind of
panacea.'

As I listened to the Oxford addicts' stories in the custody suite at the
police station, at the Ley Community, and at the drugs rehabilitation unit
the Ley now runs in Bullingdon Prison, I realised there was a further layer
of glibness obscuring debate about drugs and crime. It was far from clear
which was the chicken, and which was the egg. Almost all of these users had
committed many offences before trying crack or heroin. Hough said: 'So
often, the criminal career permits the drugs career. The money people make
from stealing allows them to buy drugs.'

At Bullingdon, Colin, a programme graduate who now works as a 'mentor' for
fellow inmates, described a spiral into criminality which began with
shoplifting at the age of 11 and developed into stealing cars for the
nightly displays of 'hotting', racing stolen high-performance vehicles.

He also got into burglary, he said, and for years before he became a junkie
he was committing offences 'nightly'. Although by now he was used to
cannabis and amphetamines, he did not take heroin until the hotters,
thwarted by concerted police action, turned to Class A drugs.

At the Ley, Calvin Isaacs (not his real name), 25, described a similar
trajectory. His speciality was 'banging cars' for laptops, CD players and
other high-value items. He viewed his criminal career as a skilled
profession: 'I'd do the cars parked in St Giles first; watch what people
locked in their boots then bang them; move on to the Worcester Street and
Westgate shopping centre car parks; then call one of the taxi drivers who
worked with me on my mobile. I'd drop the stuff off, pick up the gear; and
20 minutes after banging a car I'd be at home, doing gear and smoking crack.'

Isaacs spent several years making vast sums of money while barely touching
Class A drugs: 'When I was 15 I'd make a grand, spend UKP 400 on clothes;
go to the pub.' His drugs habit did not begin to spiral out of control
until he emerged from his first jail sentence at 18: 'When I got out I
thought "Fuck you, the police, probation, the authorities, the public. You
think I've been bang at it. Just you wait and see".'

We come back to Lee Robins and the addicts who returned from Vietnam. What
stopped the small minority of GI junkies giving up so easily? Why do some
people become addicted to crack and heroin, and others - the 97 per cent of
UK citizens who try illegal substances without become problem users - not
at all?

The answer lies within this same, awkward problem: the link between drugs
and crime. The Ley Community's approach to drug rehabilitation, which it
has been developing since 1973, is rigorous and austere. It provides
neither therapy nor counselling, nor the appeal to a 'higher power'
developed by programmes in the mould of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Instead, it treats its own residents as its experts, and through searing
encounter groups enables them to grapple with the 'issues' which so many
carry inside. This process makes one thing very apparent: that for most
Class A drug addicts, the causes of addiction and of other criminal
behaviour are one or many and the same. They cannot be treated in isolation
from each other - if they can be faced successfully, the results may be
extraordinary.

Digging out these underlying issues can take months. But afterwards, as one
listens to what residents have to say about their lives, their behaviour
begins to make all too obvious sense. So take Colin at the Ley programme in
Bullingdon. He began to steal when his mother developed the cancer which
eventually killed her. A year after her diagnosis, his father left home. He
first turned to heroin after his mother, unable to cope, placed him
temporarily in care.

Or Calvin: he committed his first offences after his mother, an alcoholic,
blurted out when he was 14 that her husband - the man he'd always known as
'Dad' - was not his biological father. 'From that day on, I didn't want to
know. About school, anything. The hurt was too deep.'

Sitting in on the encounter groups, I heard of other demons: childhood
abuse; violence; inherited hard drug use. Robins's Vietnam study found
identical factors in the returning soldiers who continued to use heroin.
Most of the GIs came off drugs because, once removed from a war zone, they
had no need of them. Those who continued to use - who had often been
addicts even before their tour of duty - would have been at high risk of
addiction if they had never served at all.

'When people come here, they are totally cynical, burnt out,' said Karen
Nolan, the Ley's assistant director. 'They've reached rock-bottom and had
experiences most normal people can't comprehend. Their self-esteem is
non-existent, and they don't really care if they live or die.' Staff talk
of heroin use as a 'coping strategy': a way of dealing with experiences so
dreadful and intense that they might, in other circumstances, drive people
to commit suicide.

The key is self-help: not wallowing in victimhood, but facing up to what
has happened, and a willingness to take responsibility. Those who enter the
Ley are usually stones underweight. Sometimes their first fortnight is
spent 'rattling;' as one resident told me, 'People say it's no worse than
the flu. Well it was some dose of flu: 11 days without sleep.'

But after a few weeks, the community's director, Paul Goodman said, 'they
start to fill out, physically and mentally. You see them put on weight,
look normal. And they meet you in the eye, speak openly for perhaps the
first time.'

Nolan said: 'They start to remember they used to be able to do things. That
they were good at music, or sport.'

And it works. Heroin addiction has a high relapse rate. Some drop out of
the Ley at an early stage; some complete the 13-month programme but later
'mess up;' some come back and try again. But overall, the success rate is
high. Small's research suggests only a small minority who successfully
complete the programme either remain addicted or reoffend.

There is an influential body of opinion whose view of the Class A epidemic
and the crime associated with it is close to nihilism: that nothing will
work except partial or total legalisation, maintaining tens of thousands of
junkies on heroin indefinitely.

There can be alternatives: hope behind the despair. Last week I spoke to
Martin. He asked me not to use his real name because he owns and runs a
multi-million-pound manufacturing company, and he feels his customers might
not understand. Now 37, he has been clean since he left the Ley Community
in 1989.

'I was in a deeply spiralling curve. My life was in pieces,' he said. 'When
I went there, and tried and failed detox nine times: each time I got clean
I used again. Immediately. I'd been on trial at the Old Bailey. I weighed
seven-and-a-half stones. As soon as I got there I started to change. It
helped me get my life back.'