HEROIN UK

The murders of five women in Suffolk, all of them addicts, have
served to highlight Britain's growing heroin problem. Opiates have
moved from being the preserve of the few to the drug of choice in
towns across the UK

They were offering Christmas specials on the south coast last week.
Two wraps of heroin for the price of one. Buy a gram, get a hit of
crack for free. Mike was unable to resist. Another year would soon
pass with the 48-year-old from Hastings, Sussex, still enslaved to the 'brown'.

Heroin has never been as cheap or as easily available in the 30 years
Mike has been injecting opiates into his skinny, mottled arms. 'These
days it is easier to score than cannabis. I could go into any town in
Britain and score within a day. Try the social security building,
look for street drinkers or people using drugs support centres and
you'll soon find it,' he said. His eyes were glassy. He looked
dog-tired. He had just injected half a gram of heroin.

'It becomes your best friend. When you have UKP10 in your pocket and
there is no electric in the house and no food you'll still go out and
buy a bag. You would choose that brown powder over your partner.'

Mike is white and working class, the precise socio-economic
classification that the syndicates behind Britain's ever-powerful
UKP10bn heroin trade are targeting. If one thing became clear
following the murder of five women in Suffolk, it was that each of
their lives had been wrecked by the drug. They were part of a new
semi-rural class of taker, not from the mean streets of the big
cities but from everyday roads in everyday towns up and down the
country. As one prostitute interviewed in Ipswich said, if she had to
choose between food and heroin, heroin would win every time. Just as
it does with Mike.

Senior police officers are now warning that with record amounts of
heroin flooding the streets, readier availability and all-time low
prices will increase the number of addicts drawn from the most
impoverished margins of society.

An expanding alternative economy driven by the profits and crime
generated by heroin is being documented by experts. The narcotic
subculture is no longer largely confined to metropolitan Britain, but
instead has spread to hundreds of towns. Anyone could pitch up in any
town at any time and, without too much effort, score, according to experts.

Harry Shapiro, spokesman for charity Drugscope, said: 'If you look at
areas of high unemployment that also have high crime levels you will
find heroin. It almost feeds off itself. If you visit any market town
and ask for heroin you will find someone able to help you out.'

The most recent analysis has found heroin being sold for as little as
the price of a cappuccino. Wraps have been sold for UKP2, often as a
'taster' for potential new users who traditionally would have been
priced out of the heroin market. Its price is less than a third of
what it was when Mike began flirting with the drug during boozy
sessions on the King's Road, during the summer of 1976. Its falling
value has alarmed Whitehall. Heroin's street price is the surest
indicator of whether Britain is winning its war on drugs.

Heroin's current standing is a far cry from when opiates were
associated with the aristocracy or creativity. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's masterpiece 'Kubla Khan' was inspired by opium. Thomas de
Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater secured him praise
rather than pity among his peers.

Materially, Mike never had as much to lose as such literary icons of
the nineteenth century. But what he did possess, has long gone. 'If I
had never touched heroin I would have a totally different life, with
a nice house, 2.4 children, a wife, car and holidays abroad.'

His days are spent alone. He does not speak to his wife. He has lost
contact with his daughter. Hepatitis C, a common complaint among
intravenous heroin users, plays havoc with his health. Friends are
bound by a shared addiction to heroin.

One punched his mother in the face and stole her money. Another ran
into a pharmacists with a syringe full of blood and threatened to
infect staff unless they handed over money. Most prefer pushing
pensioners to the ground and making off with their shopping. Some
friends have disappeared. One committed suicide while going through
heroin withdrawal.

Last Thursday, Mike gazed at the small counselling room at the
Hastings branch of Addaction, a charity that supports users of class
A drugs,and shook his head. Opposite sat Ben Fitzpatrick, the man
tasked with helping Mike go 'clean'. It was like trying to persuade
someone to turn their back on a lover they could not live without.
'It is quite common for people to describe their relationship with
heroin in a similar way to an intimate relationship,' said
Fitzpatrick. 'The idea of giving up can be terrifying.'

Amid the flat emptiness of the southern Afghanistan desert, thousands
of British troops will spend today re-reading messages from their loved ones.

Many will be written by families and friends who hail from the
streets and estates of towns corrupted by heroin. Here, in arid
Helmand province, is where the opium is grown that feeds Britain's
heroin habit. A direct line can be drawn from the wilds of Helmand to
Hastings and hundreds of places like it.

Nine in every 10 grams of heroin sold in Britain originates from
Afghanistan. Officials from the Serious Organised Crime Agency,
protected by British troops, will spend Christmas working with the
Afghan authorities to try to dismantle the heroin supply into
Britain. So far, the network of tribal leaders, criminal syndicates
and hundreds of thousands of subsistence opium farmers has proved
impossible to crack.

Britain remains the world's biggest customer for Afghan heroin and
its most voracious consumer in Europe. And, now, there is more
Helmand heroin than ever before. The land for poppy cultivation in
the country had increased by 59 per cent to 165,000 hectares,
according to the United Nations, despite Britain's attempt to
eradicate its growth.

Tim Hollis, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers'
drugs committee and chief constable of Humberside admitted that
Afghanistan continued to cast a shadow over attempts to control
heroin abuse throughout the UK. He said: 'The fact is that the heroin
crop is one of the biggest on record. One factor is that the criminal
markets are very fluid and once one of the routes is blocked then
they will try and find another. The worry is that there is more on
the streets and the price has fallen.' Latest figures indicate there
are 327,000 hard-drug users, although drugs charities worry the
figure could be as high as 500,000.

Shapiro said that all evidence points to the fact that the most
disenfranchised have become the most vulnerable to heroin. 'We know
about the aristocratic heroin users but those at risk of becoming
chronic heroin users come from poor backgrounds, are homeless or have
mental health problems. Areas of deprivation are the most vulnerable.
You are more likely to have addicts in Middlesbrough and Grimsby
than, say, Richmond. While the absolute numbers have not skyrocketed
like in the Eighties or Nineties. The distribution of heroin has
spread a lot more evenly across the country.'

Scoring heroin, he said, may have become too simple. Eventually,
though, most addicts, find themselves beholden to a dealer who will
use intimidation to ensure their custom, a practice pushers call
'powder power'. Purity fluctuates wildly. During the summer, when the
supply was lower, the quality fell to as low as 0.2 per cent of
heroin compared to five per cent which is the highest purity level
British users expect.

Its strength has improved recently though Mike warns that such
changeable purity levels offer an omnipresent threat. One sudden,
strong doseage can kill. But, as always, cost remains the key factor.
On London's King's Road in 1976, heroin cost Mike UKP100 a gram. Last
year it fell to UKP58. Police sources believe its current price of
half that may yet fall further.

Since the tail-end of the Eighties, addicts have been able to receive
free clean needles and daily doses of the heroin substitute
methadone. The strategy was called 'harm reduction'. Its aim was to
curb the spread of the HIV virus among Britain's addicts. Initially
controversial, the strategy eventually became the standard approach.

But has it worked? If anything, what was meant to have sated
Britain's fondness for junk may only have exacerbated its appetite.
One academic specialising in research into illegal drugs concluded
last week that Britain's drug problems have escalated during a period
when it should have been improving.

Prof Neil McKeganey, director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research
at Glasgow University, said that the current approach - which has
been intensified under Labour - had produced 'only modest success'.
'With approaching 15 years experience of harm reduction we have a
situation in which not only the number of problem users has increased
substantially, but the prevalence of problem drug use has escalated
substantially,' he said.

Mike's experiences are, McKeganey found, the norm. His report found
that around 40 per cent of drug users in Britain are Hepatitis C
positive with thousands dying from drug-related causes. Drug use, he
added, continues to fuel high levels of offending and scar entire communities.

Hollis concurs that the chronic reoffending of a hardcore of heroin
addicts needs to be urgently tackled and remains a persistent source
of exasperation to officers on the front-line.

Perhaps those best qualified to comment are those who have felt
heroin's grip - the diarrhoea, the aching limbs, the burning vomit
and the long, feverish nights. Only one solution remains workable to
those like Mike; heroin must be legalised and offered on prescription
if the cycle of crime and community breakdown is to be broken. Even
so, the price will be high according to those who have seen heroin's
damage first-hand. 'It might mean writing off a generation.'

[sidebar]

HEROIN

. Used widely as a painkiller in the 19th century in Britain, heroin
can be smoked - 'chasing the dragon' - snorted or injected.

. Acutely addictive and fast-acting, it is described by users as
giving them a feeling of warmth, relaxation and detachment within seconds.

. Addicts spend an average of UKP10,000 a year feeding their habit.
Famous users include John Lennon and Charlie Parker.

. Also known as brown, china white, dragon, gear, H, horse, junk,
skag, smack and jack.

. A Class A drug, it is an opiate derived from the dried milk of the
opium poppy. Heroin is made from morphine.

. Afghanistan supplies 90 per cent of heroin found in the UK.

. Methadone is the main treatment for heroin addicts, although it is
an addictive drug in itself, producing feelings of euphoria and
sedation, but to a lesser degree.