THEN, FAR FROM THE SHELTERED HOUSE ...

A squad of young Elder Mormons was on patrol in Cabramatta Mall
yesterday, seeking to save wayward addicts.

It tried in vain to spread the word politely, but the folk of
Cabramatta just didn't want to hear.

While the politicians and delegates talked at the Drug Summit, the
hard edge of Sydney's drug world rolled on. The young Mormons found
there may be more to solving Australia's drug problem than an earnest
sermon about the virtues of abstinence.

As the summit at Parliament House broke for lunch, a couple of chubby
young constables jogged past the Mormons, puffing into their radios.

Around the corner they ran, and then a few blocks more, receiving
instructions along the way. In a park near the police station, more
police had gathered. One officer had crash-tackled a young man who was
being handcuffed on the ground. The man had been wanted for selling
stolen goods. When police approached him, he allegedly rammed a
shopping trolley at them and ran. As the arresting police emptied his
pockets, they found a couple of needles.

The politicians and the Drug Summit will head to Cabramatta
tomorrow.

"These are the people who are meant to be deciding the future for drug
policies," one officer at Cabramatta said yesterday. "You'd think that
they'd have been here before this. It's open every day."

Back in a restaurant off the mall, a young Caucasian girl walked in on
the lunching Vietnamese. She walked around every table asking if
anyone wanted to buy boxes of batteries that were still in the plastic
wrapping.

There were no takers and no complaints that she appeared to be selling
stolen goods.

While at the summit they focused on this hard side of drugs, the soft
side - the casual users who make up the vast majority drug takers -
was facing another Monday at work in everyday jobs.

But in Kings Cross, Ray, a middle-aged man, waited for his girlfriend
to return home. Kate is a stripper and prostitute with a hefty cocaine
and heroin addiction. She had gone down to the dole office to fill in
her forms. Ray explains that Kate, like most drug-using girls of the
Cross, uses her weekly cheque to take a night off, a night when she
doesn't have to work to support her habit.

"She earns more money than the Prime Minister, you know," Ray says of
the money she squirts up her arms. Kate is a few hours late and Ray
suspects she wanted some coke before starting work, so picked up a
client on the way home.

That's life for Kate. Sleeping with 25 to 30 men a week in exchange
for six shots of coke and three or four shots of heroin daily, with a
day off (the sex, not the drugs) on dole day.