RAISING HELL

Many heroin and methodone users are also parents, and life for their
children can be full of risk. Adele Horin looks at what is being done for
the innocnet casualties of the growing drug problem.

The lowest point in Steve's life of troughs and gullies was the day his
beautiful, 15-month-old son was taken into the care of the Department of
Community Services. Steve* was a heroin addict. So was his partner, Louise.
But they believed themselves to be good, loving parents. Well, good enough.

Yes, they took Jamie on late-night trips to the Cross. Yes, Louise had
overdosed once in the boy's presence. But Jamie was clean, and fed, if not
always at the right time. And they adored him.

"He was the best thing that had ever happened to me," says Steve.

When Steve heard the news about DOCS, he was lying at death's door in
hospital from drug-related health problems. Louise was bringing him heroin
to the hospital. She was scoring for both of them. And she wasn't coping
well on her own with Jamie.

When she was asleep one day, Jamie turned on the stove and started a fire
in the flat. That was when DOCS moved in, and placed the toddler with his
maternal grandmother.

Steve can see now, 18 months later, that their lives were out of control,
and their son at risk. At the time, though, he raged at DOCS, full of
bitterness and anger.

The admission that Jamie was being neglected comes slowly, painfully: "I
loved him but drugs were the most important thing," Steve says. "I had to
have them to survive - or I thought I did."

Children are the hidden casualties of Australia's drug addiction crisis.
The image of heroin users as wayward youth, shooting up in stair wells and
toilet blocks, is an over-simplification. Many heroin, methadone and other
drug users are parents. They love their children.

"But most cannot bear to tell you their kids have suffered," says Anne
Webb, co-ordinator of Guthrie House, a residential service for women. "Most
of the children I have seen have big problems."

In the past two years, about 20 babies and children of drug-using parents
have died through abuse or neglect. Child protection workers are concerned
that drug treatment and general medical services have paid too little
attention to the physical and emotional safety of the children caught up in
their parents' addiction problems.

Neglect is the big concern. Parents with serious addictions may fail to
establish the routines children need. They forget to feed them regularly,
they keep them up too late, they introduce them to a criminal subculture,
they fail to supervise adequately, and they may fail to respond to their
children when their children need them.

Babies born drug-addicted are at particular risk. They are very distressed,
cry a lot and won't feed or sleep easily. They need medication for
withdrawal to be given at precise times.

"A baby who is hard to parent, and a parent who is drug-addicted, are an
explosive combination," says Carol Peltola, director of Child and Family
Services at DOCS.

Anecdotal evidence from drug workers also points to longer-term risks for
children: a second generation of heroin-users is on the rise despite - or
because of - what they saw and experienced in childhood.

Cherie Crockett, 26, grew up with heroin-addicted parents, and her story
illustrates the folly of simple solutions that involve removal of the
children from such families.

Despite having seen her parents shoot up regularly, and despite regular
police busts on account of her parents' dealing, Crockett doesn't consider
herself to have been neglected.

Her father held down a job as an electrician, her mother got dinner on the
table and drove her to school each day. The parents stuck together through
thick and thin, through the years of their four-times-a-day habit, and
through the intermittent straight years.

"I have mixed emotions about it all," says Crockett. "I thought when I was
young we were doing all right, but all these relations tell me I wasn't.
There are horrible memories from when Dad was in jail. There were times we
hung around parks with them for hours and hours, or up in Kings Cross, when
we shouldn't have been there.

"But I'm pleased I wasn't taken away from them despite all the ups and
downs. They were great people."

At 14, however, when she understood more about addiction, Crockett was
devastated to learn her mother had started using heroin after a period of
abstinence. There were twin babies in the family then and she didn't want
them to ride the roller-coaster of emotions she had experienced. She ran
away many times.

At 18, she tried heroin "just to try to understand why they had to do it
every day". She hated it. Yet three years later, with a young daughter of
her own, she tried it again, and soon had a habit.

Her parents were upset and disappointed. And she could never answer their
question: why, after all she had seen them go through?

Crockett overdosed and DOCS took her daughter into care. While her parents
had been able to maintain a family life of sorts, she knew that her habit
put her child at risk.

Carol Peltola says: "If parents maintain their drug use so it is not
impacting seriously on their children, that is not our business. It is not
our job to make a judgment about parents' drug use. Our job is to make a
judgment about the safety of the kids."

Sixteen year-old Angela believes she was left too long to cope with a
heroin-addicted mother. From the age of eight till 11, when she begged a
magistrate to send her to foster parents, Angela lived in a chaotic
household, with three siblings, and men who came and went.

"My brothers are like criminals now; one of them started shooting up with
Mum when he was only 15 or 16," she says. "If it wasn't for the way we were
brought up, they wouldn't be like that. They were allowed to do what they
wanted; they roamed the streets.

"We just had meat pies for tea. There wasn't a proper diet; we never sat
down to have dinner as a family. We had to get ourselves to school, and
sometimes we didn't have any lunch to take.

"One of mum's boyfriends threatened to kill me and Mum just stood there and
cried. Another time a man did something to my mother and I pulled a knife
on him...

"I missed out on all the good things, like going out for the day or having
a barbecue. Mum would say she was going to the shops for milk and she
wouldn't come back till the early morning. We wouldn't know what had
happened to her."

The last straw was when Angela learnt from schoolmates that her mother was
prostituting herself for drugs. She was deeply embarrassed.

Angela's story illustrates that drug addiction is usually just one part -
and not necessarily the most serious - of a family's problems. Domestic
violence, undiagnosed depression, mental health issues, or a parent who
simply has no clue about parenting, usually because of their own history of
neglect or abuse, can compound the chaos in these households.

"You're dealing with families who are going through tough times," says
Penny Kay, of the Benevolent Society's home visiting service. "They're not
mad or bad."

As well, the parents who put their children at risk are probably a small
sub-set of users. Recreational drug users are unlikely to present a serious
problem.

Maureen Steele, community advocate of the Drug Users and AIDS Association
of NSW, says heroin users "on say a $50-a-day habit" probably don't get
intoxicated and can parent effectively.

At the other extreme are parents who get their children to bring them
heroin in jail, and who shoot up with their kids. One teenager, whose
mother had used him as a drug courier when she was in jail, welcomed her
release from prison by beating her up. He had waited 11 years to hit her,
he told her.

Services to help drug-addicted parents are patchy. Anne Webb, at Guthrie
House, deals with women diverted from the prison system. Most of them are
drug users, many of them are parents. The house takes only eight women at a
time, and there are always 10 or so on a waiting list.

"DOCS says to parents, 'get your act together and we may give your kids
back'. But they offer no help, no resources," says Webb. "I have worked at
Guthrie House for six years, and met only one woman in here who's done her
HSC. This is society's problem. We have failed the women, and we're failing
their kids."

Webb says another house is needed for drug-affected mothers to live in and
learn parenting and vocational skills. The Benevolent Society runs a
home-visiting service for drug-using parents whose children are at risk.
It's the hard end of child protection work.

"Compared to other services we run, more children go into care from this
service, and there are more cases [for orders] before the children's
court," says Irene Craig, senior manager of child protection.

But given the patchy record of foster and other substitute care, including
placement with grandparents, services do their best to keep children safe
in their own families.

Drug-using parents often make big changes for the sake of their children.
"I've seen over the years parents with major drug problems in their early
years, change by the time they are 30," says Craig.

"They get their life together, they are in a stable relationship, they are
able to have their children back home, and their children are keen to go."

The prospect of a child can sometimes be a turning point for pregnant
women. Linda Fawcett and Vicki Hull are nurses who run the Chemical Use in
Pregnancy Service from the Langton Centre in Surry Hills.

They reach out to pregnant drug users, try to get them into antenatal care,
and run a clinic for mothers and babies.

"Most of the women make huge changes. If they're on heroin most will go
onto methadone. If they continue to use it is to maintain stability,
they're not taking huge amounts to get stoned," says Fawcett.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that a child - or the prospect of one -
always provides the impetus to kick drugs. Indeed a child can be another
stress factor in a difficult life.

"Having a child is not a good enough reason," says Webb. "They have to have
some hope."

In Steve's case, he and Louise started using heroin a month before Jamie's
birth, after having been clean for a year. "You don't pick when you're
going to use," Steve says.

It took a year of rage and degradation after DOCS took Jamie before Steve
saw the light. He and Louise split. He hasn't touched drugs for more than
seven months. "I got clean for Jamie," he says now. "But I stay clean for me."

DOCS is working to restore Jamie to his father soon. And it is clear,
seeing the pair together on Steve's access visits, that he is a doting father.

Cherie Crockett also kicked heroin, and is working towards getting off
methadone. Her five-year-old daughter is back with her, and she is engaged
to be married next year.

"I'm having a wonderful life," she says. Her mother died of drug-related
illnesses at 41. Her father is also getting married again. "I love him and
I'll be going to his wedding."

Angela has found a new life with her foster family. She is a conscientious
student, and is fastidious around the house. But she is still angry about
the loss of her childhood, the plight of her brothers. She has refused to
talk to her mother for the past two years. She no longer believes her
mother's promises to kick the habit. "If I had not left her, I probably
would be dead now," Angela says.

*Not his real name