THE LONG ROAD BACK FROM HEROIN HIGHWAY

Emma Goldburg and Rachel Stewart sit round-shouldered and silent beneath
the beige ceiling of the Melbourne Magistrates Court. They fidget and bite
their nails. They gape like children, as the suits and savvy talk engulf
them. Words and more words. They fill the room until the hearing for the
two young women forges a sound bite.

"It's like turning round an aircraft carrier," lawyer John Willis tells the
magistrate, David McLennan. "It takes a long time."

McLennan nods. He has heard it all before. The addicts' anthem. Outside, on
the city's sweltering streets, the lunch-time rush is on. Here, on the
roundabout called justice, and in the veins of thousands of young addicts,
it never ends. Humdrum heroin. A reporter sticks his head in the door,
whispers a question, and goes. Junkies are news only when they are
well-known or dead.

For a quarter of their lives, Emma, 19, and Rachel, 28, have been anonymous
and hitting up. Taking literally the lyric of the Rolling Stones on Gimme
Shelter, "It's just a shot away", they embraced the escape of junk and the
despair that goes with it.

It is a trade-off that bewilders governments and runs a fingernail down
society's blackboard. How can they do it to themselves?

McLennan must be asking himself that question as he stares down from the
bench into Emma's young face. An experienced magistrate, he knows about the
needle and the damage done.

Even so, he can do only so much. While not as rigid as the US, where
first-time users can get life on the testimony of a dealer, state laws are
not aligned to the reality of young heroin addicts.

Luckily, Emma has avoided the big league of the Supreme Court, as was
originally proposed when she was charged with armed robbery. That course
would have taken a year or more to get to court, and almost certainly led
to prison on conviction. The charge was reduced to robbery, partly, her
lawyer, Rob Stary, says, because she did not wield the knife that she
allegedly carried when demanding money for drugs. And partly, he says,
because of her addiction, her age, and the "futility of jail" for junkies.

Slim and neatly dressed, Emma, in common with most addicts, seems, on paper
at least, a lost cause. Rob Stary confides that it will take all of
McLennan's "insight" into the drug world to give her a break. This is a
teenager with a string of offences to her name, along with a seeming
inability to take what chances are offered. It is the junkie's way. Nothing
comes before a hit.

Left home at 14, pregnant at 15, on heroin at 16 and shoplifting at 17,
Emma was a street kid for three years.

She got out of jail in April after four months (for breaching a
community-based order and a suspended sentence) and was back in court in
May over the robbery, committed before her spell at the Deer Park women's
prison. Now it is judgment time. Stary expects jail.

But McLennan is willing to give her another chance. With a series of
"clean" urine tests and a spell on naltrexone (a costly but some say
effective counter to heroin), she has given him the opening he needs. Stary
is happy. The judgment, for a two-year, 150-hour community-based order,
will keep her out of prison.

"Naltrexone was a turning point," Stary says. "She was lucky. Her family
paid for it. It's not on the benefits list, so she could not have afforded it."

Stary, whose Footscray legal firm handles 1200 cases a year, most of them
drug-related, says that while the law is an ass when it comes to heroin,
most magistrates are not.

It is not a view shared by those in the field. Jo Beckett from the Wesley
Central Mission thinks some magistrates stop listening. Jim Carlton from
Brunswick's Brosnan Centre, which looks after young, usually addicted,
offenders, agrees. "There's not a lot of compassion in courts, but we have
to find it," he says. McLennan would not comment. "I can't say anything
publicly," he said.

The attitude of most lawyers is summed up by the New South Wales director
of public prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, QC, who argues that the criminal
law is a curious choice for trying to alter addictive behavior. "It's
doomed to fail in most cases," he says, adding that heroin prohibition is
based on "wishful thinking". How can society expect to stop it when top
security jails cannot? he asks.

The Victorian Law Institute agrees. It says prohibition has been an
expensive failure and should be dumped in favor of a health-based stance
that seeks to rehabilitate rather than punish users, and includes harm
minimisation policies such as heroin trials.

Such a view accepts the first law of junk, which holds that hard-core
addicts normally go to prison, mature out of their habit - the average
period is 10 to 12 years - or kill themselves.

Jail is their destiny once in the system, but instead of arresting the
slide, it usually accelerates it. "What else do you expect when just 5per
cent of $500million enforcement budget goes on treatment?" Rob Stary says.

Emma is a good example. The prohibition model, which treated her stealing
to feed her habit as a criminal matter, propelled her through a maze of
hearings, court orders and ultimately a stint in jail, rather than towards
what eventually helped her: a course of treatment and someone who took a
tolerant, personal interest.

By focusing on her law-breaking instead of the compulsion behind it, the
system plunged her deeper into the junkie abyss, a dark hole that is
littered with low self-esteem and the urge to use to feel better.

When "help" came, it just upped the ante of addiction. It is a familiar
pattern. In Emma's case it turned a detox stay at the start of her drug
problem - when she was trying to combat a pill habit - into a liaison with
a junkie who introduced her to heroin.

A lot of people were telling her to stop using, but few asked why she felt
the need to disappear into the delusional comfort of smack.

Whatever lay at the heart of her behavior, it was not of interest to those
she encountered. What they saw was either a girl who needed to get clean,
or a body for hire. As she learnt as a five year-old when she was sexually
abused, she was a commodity.

Little of this was evident in court, where she was defined, on the one
hand, by her offences, and - paradoxically - on the other, by her
adolescent appearance. With her blond ponytail, dimpled smile and pixie
features, there was nothing to suggest a suicidal teenager who got stoned
to strip, and stripped to stay stoned.

"Six months ago I took sleeping pills. I was trying to kill myself," she
explains after the court case. "I was lying under a car in Melton,
scratches all over my body. I couldn't handle it, coming off smack, living
with my boyfriend. I had had enough. I was treated like a piece of shit.
You stole this, you stole that."

The only unusual thing about Emma's story is that she managed to take one
of the chances flung her way to get off heroin young - a decade before the
average age at which addicts die. Just as heroin is a drug designed to
disappoint, addicts are a group sure to let you down. To get clean they
need lots of chances. Detox, rehab, naltrexone, methadone; all "cures" are
a process.

This is not a finding compatible with "zero tolerance", and adult society's
performance-driven measures. As youth worker Bernie Geary, a member of the
Penington taskforce, points out, the teenage mind is a delicate thing.
"These kids desperately want to please us," he says, "and the best we offer
them is a world of winners and losers. We've made them juicy targets for
dealers. To help, you have to stay in their lives a long time. But the
trend now is to treat them as `customers', to make bodies fit money".

Turning Point's Professor Margaret Hamilton agrees. "What would prevent the
drug problem?" she asks. "You have to go back to questions of inequality.
We have gone from a relatively equal society to one of extreme disparity
between rich and poor, and that produces social dislocation, an inability
to fit in. If you can't feel potent, you feel sad, and young people are
very sad."

Maybe that is why young people like Emma get caught up chasing the euphoria
of the first hit. As she says, when heroin flooded her body, she felt no
pain. "It was grouse, I loved it," she now says.

As with most addicts, she did crime to pay for the dope. "I was rorting,
robbing people, anything," she says. "I never worked, except as a stripper
in Richmond. I was always high stripping. Sometimes I'd be hanging out
(withdrawing). It didn't worry me, I was just getting money." Emma would
line up with other girls while men made their choices. "You'd strip, he'd
wank," she says. "It was $40 for each strip. With tips I could make $350 a
day."

She stopped stripping when she became too emaciated to turn on the clients.
"I got too skinny and had the junkie stink," she says. "On the streets you
didn't wash or go to the laundry for a month."

Emma says she wanted to stop "doing robberies all the time", but feared
withdrawal. "On the street, everyone's got a habit, and no one wants to be
sick. You're hustling for the next hit."

Like most junkies, she could quit long enough to stop the craving. "It's
not physical; more a mental thing," she says. Being "off her face" erased
memories that went back to when her parents separated.

Clean now for several months, she lives in the country with her fiance,
Charlie Muscat, 51. Dressed in jeans, her hair is wet and washed as she
wolfs down the smoke from a Winfield Blue.

There are scars above one wrist as she sips from a small bottle of vodka.
Outside, Trigger, the 15-hand chestnut quarter horse Charlie has given her,
prances in a muddy paddock. She looks like a child seeing the ocean for the
first time.

"I'd never been able to do it without Charlie," she says. "I thought he was
just another bloke. But he's got a good heart. He's been there for me."

Her dream now is not of heroin - although the memory of that first hit
never goes - but of a home and kids. The evidence is all around the lounge
room - snapshots of family, furry animals, soft toys, a large-screen
television, and a Christ-on-a-cross wall clock. "I have always wanted
someone to hold me, to love me," she says.