BALLYMUN PROJECTS GIVE CHOICES TO ADDICTS

At the height of her heroin addiction, Elizabeth turned to
prostitution to support her habit. She made pounds 200 a night and
didn't run the same risk of being arrested as she would have had she
been shoplifting.

Elizabeth is not the real name of the bright-eyed and articulate
27-year-old seated on a couch in a converted flat in one of Ballymun's
grim grey tower blocks.

The flat houses a special Community Employment scheme, the Star
Project, which offers education and training for women who have
stabilised their drug use, normally with the substitute drug
methadone. Elizabeth has just started the scheme, is off heroin and
takes a low dosage of methadone. She says she is not ashamed of her
past, but is optimistic about her future with her two young children
and partner.

"It's great to get back into the workplace and stimulate your brain,"
she says.

The Star Project was one of the early initiatives of Ballymun's Local
Drugs Task Force, one of 14 set up since the late 1990s following
community agitation about the heroin problem.

The task forces involve representatives of communities and agencies
including the Garda, welfare services and statutory drug agencies and
receive Government funding for local initiatives.

Ballymun's task force has received funding for 16 projects including
afterschool clubs aimed at preventing children starting drugs, an
early access programme for drug users and the appointment of a
training and employment links officer for recovering addicts.

The Star Project places a heavy emphasis on personal and career
development and participants can take NCVAs in training and
communication skills and computers.

The women go on work placement and many have graduated to jobs or
further education, according to the project's training manager, Ms
Margaret Bowden.

The Ballymun Local Drugs Task Force's co-ordinator, Mr Hugh Greaves,
says in the four years since it was set up the atmosphere in Ballymun
has been transformed. Drugs were openly on sale through a
pyramid-selling scheme where the dealers' commission was heroin.
Today, the open dealing has stopped and people no longer feel under
siege, he says.

According to the last count in 1998, there were 683 people using
heroin or other opiates in the area, which has a population of 20,000.
These included one in five men aged between 25 and 29 and one in 12
women. Mr Greaves is optimistic that the inter-agency approach of the
task forces will continue to reap rewards under the new National Drugs
Strategy.

"We could be looking at reducing the problem in the coming years," he
says. "It's very bold to make that prediction because there has been a
perception that, like the poor, drugs will always be with us."