WHERE DRUGS CROSS THE RELIGIOUS DIVIDE

In Ballymena, The Biggest Cross-Community Initiative Is Heroin, Says Declan
Lawn

THE town of Ballymena has been forced to grow up quickly. At the beginning
of the Nineties, the then DUP-dominated local council banned a concert by
ELO on the grounds that such music would attract ``the four Ds Drink, Drugs,
Devil and Debauchery''. At the time most residents of the mid-Antrim market
town saw the decision as laughably censorious. Today, they might look back
on those days with a certain degree of nostalgia.

Three years ago, the same council who had once recoiled at the thought of
the Electric Light Orchestra pressurised the RUC into establishing a
Ballymena sub-division of the Drugs Squad. In the second half of 1998 until
April 1999, the Ballymena drugs squad sub-division seized 57 grams of
heroin. From April to September 1999, they seized 325 grams, 70 per cent of
the total seized in Northern Ireland during that period. During the
troubles, Ballymena was thought to be a place where business transcended
sectarian politics. Today, for those addicted and those who work against it,
heroin is the biggest cross-community initiative in town. And for a society
long renowned as being snobby and acutely class-conscious, one of the
biggest difficulties has been coming to terms with a drugs problem as
prevalent in the middle-class avenues as it is on the working-class estates.

Jenny (not her real name) is an ex-addict and ex-dealer who has been clean
for five months. She quit heroin while in prison for attempting to smuggle
the drug into Northern Ireland. She is from a middle-class area of the town,
and before she became addicted to heroin owned her own house and car and had
a lucrative job.

``I started smoking heroin with a group of friends. We all had good jobs,
and money was never a problem. We started smoking it at weekends, and then
it became two or three nights a week. I was addicted for ages before I
realised it. One day I went to the sun beds with my friend, and I felt like
I was getting a terrible flu. She felt exactly the same way. We didn't even
realise that it was withdrawal symptoms.''

``It's very hard to get through to people what's happening,'' says Davy
Warwick, a drugs worker with the Together project in Ballymena, ``because as
a community we're very proud of ourselves. When there's plenty of money and
a church-going ethos, it's difficult to imagine it coming to your door.''

Until September 1998, the Northern Drugs Co-Ordinating Team was aware of 106
registered heroin addicts in Ballymena. Today, sources involved in treatment
in the town estimate that the figure is at least double that, for registered
addicts alone. Jenny says that in her days as a heroin addict in Ballymena,
she knew three unregistered addicts for every one registered. After going to
prison she took a HIV test and tested negative. She says she does not know
of one other Ballymena addict, in the five years she was using, who ever
took a test. Since there is no needle exchange programme in the town, most
needles are shared.

``I know of one addict personally who regularly shares needles and yet he
has three children to three different girls in the town,'' says Davy
Warwick. ``Antrim hospital maternity ward is already dealing with babies
addicted to heroin, so what's next?''

Nor does Ballymena, or Northern Ireland as a whole, have any dedicated drug
treatment centre. The only option is to join a 24-to-36-week waiting list
for a bed in Holywell hospital, where addicts share wards with patients who
suffer from acute mental problems. The ward is not secure, meaning that
drugs can be smuggled in or hidden, and a recovering addict can leave at any
time. Most last a couple of days, and the maximum allowed is two weeks.

Davy Warwick is appalled at the programme: ``Two weeks? What is that to a
heroin addict? In my opinion they need months off it in a controlled place
before they even have a chance.''

Geraldine Mulholland is the newly appointed drugs information worker on the
Dunclug estate, generally perceived to be the epicentre of dealing in
Ballymena.

She is quick to point out that working alone she will never be able to help
the users. ``I'll be running an information clinic, offering counselling to
those affected by drugs in any way, organising a needle exchange, and doing
street-work around the estate, but without resources none of this will make
much of a difference to the users in terms of getting them off drugs. We
need a detox centre.''

While the North's politicians bicker over old wars that heroin addicts in
Ballymena have long transcended; as Davy Warwick puts it, ``I've never seen
a syringe that was orange or green.''