COMING CLEAN FAR FROM EASY STREET

Suited, and constantly attached to the earpiece of his mobile phone,
"Ross" is about as far away as you can get from the heroin user stereotype.

He is a senior executive at a Melbourne-based multinational company
and lives in the suburbs "with a wife, two-and-a-half kids and a lawnmower".

Seventeen years of "clean time" separates Ross from the streets of
Darlinghurst in Sydney in the 1960s and '70s where, at the age of 13,
he fell into the kind of brutal existence that is played out hundreds
of times over on the streets of Melbourne.

He had a physically abusive father, became addicted to drugs and
alcohol, was the victim of daily physical and sexual violence, and
contracted hepatitis A and B.

Ross has changed his name not for his own sake - a process of "coming
out of the closet" means his family and close work colleagues are
aware of his past - but because he doesn't want to embarrass his employer.

He prefers not to talk in detail about the "blood and gore" of his
childhood, for he says the stereotype of the heroin addict is as
binding as the drug itself.

As Mr Craig Mercer, the manager of a Collingwood needle exchange, has
written in Smack Street, Melbourne: "We may be looking at the wrong end of
the animal when we constantly locate the problem in the individual... The
heroin user is usually described as an `addict', a `poor unfortunate' or a
`junkie' ... and the impact on the community of this `evil scourge' is
described as a `crisis' or a `war'. Never a truer word was spoken when the
`war on drugs' was correctly redefined as a `war on drug users'."

Dr David Penington, the head of the Bracks Government's Drug Policy
Expert Committee, said something similar this week. He hoped that by
treating the heroin problem as a public health issue rather than a
moral one, hitting up would no longer be considered so fashionable,
the drug of the anti-hero. In Holland, he said, heroin had become a
slightly dowdy drug used by the middle-aged.

Ross, now 44, believes that he has won his war. On 16March 1983, aged
27, he used his last drug and went into a seven-day detoxification
program. Since then he has had "not a drop, not a puff, not a tickle".

He has friends who have done the same - one works in property, another
is the general manager of a theatre company.

Amid all the talk of supervised injecting rooms and harm minimisation,
Ross believes in the power of abstinence, and says every street kid
has it in him.

"Shooting galleries (he pardons the pun) are a stab in the dark. As
unpalatable as it sounds these days, we've missed the focus. The
politicians are talking about different options that might minimise
the harm, but it is a myth, a lie, that `once a junkie always a
junkie'," he said. "We've tried methadone, we've tried naltrexone,
we've tried free needles. The focus needs to shift back."

In the same year that he had his last hit, Ross found work through a
government job scheme. "Now I earn a six-figure salary in the IT
industry, and I have a rock-solid marriage."

When Ross told his son, 14, about his addiction he felt like a World
War II veteran talking about a former life in the trenches. "It's like
history to him," he said.

Ross is one of the lucky ones. He has emerged relatively unscathed
from, as one addict describes it in the book Heroin Crisis, the army
of "hollow-eyed teen victims lurching half-dead - needle falling
unseen from their arms - one dirty alleyway to the next".