GRIEVING MOTHER FIGHTS TO CHANGE 'FAILED' SYSTEM

"He said, 'I love you, Mum.' I said, 'I love you, son.' And he said,
'I'll ring you tomorrow.'"

Adam Dobson could not phone his mother, Gwen, the next day at her Port
Macquarie home because he was dead of a heroin overdose.

He spoke to her that final day - September 5, 1996 - from a Newcastle
hospital where he was being treated for mental disorders and substance
abuse. He wished her a happy birthday.

His last words, thinking of his twins, now aged 16, and his
18-year-old son, whose whereabouts are unknown to the family, were:
"Do you think we'll ever find the children?"

Mrs Dobson says Adam spoke to her between 6.45pm and 7pm. He collapsed
at 7.25pm and was pronounced dead at 7.50pm. He was 35.

She didn't know that he had got out of the hospital where he had been
admitted as an involuntary patient and, says his family, caught the
train to Cabramatta with a fellow patient, who bought rock heroin.
Adam shot up and caught the train back.

"This was the son I had waited nine years to have. It's happening here
now. Eleven-year-olds are selling the tablets," said Mrs Dobson, who
has become an anti-drugs campaigner.

She and her daughter Leisa are unhappy with the way many of the
authorities with whom Adam had contact handled him. They are asking
Port Macquarie people to sign a petition seeking a locked ward for
mental health patients in the local hospital and an appropriate
vehicle to pick up those needing help.

They claim Adam was put in an open ward when he should have been in a
locked ward. He was transported from his home to the local hospital in
a police paddy wagon before being put in an ambulance to Newcastle.

The family says services in a country town are inadequate to deal with
drug users in a crisis.

The Dobsons believe Adam's downward slide began when he was jailed in
Sydney for not paying a $40 fine. He got onto pills in Long Bay. That
left him with drug-induced schizo-phrenia, according to Leisa.

When he was 21, his family took him to Port Macquarie. There, a year
later, he met a doctor who Mrs Dobson claims supplied him with 45
physeptone tablets (a form of methadone) over two days.

"I would lie down on the floor to hear if he was breathing," Leisa
recalled. "I was pregnant at the time. I'd say, 'He's breathing, but
is he going to take another breath?' He was very slow.

"When the doctor was deregistered, [Adam] had nowhere else to go but
the dealers. He started heroin. He couldn't go on the methadone
program because he didn't use heroin enough."

It was not hard to get illicit drugs in Port Macquarie. Mrs Dobson
says Adam was frightened of his suppliers because they would accuse
him of not paying when he had.

"He slept with a metal bar and a butcher's knife," she
said.

The Dobsons think the prison system failed Adam because he was able to
get drugs there. The health system failed because certain doctors
assisted his drug abuse. And at the end, they say, they had to fight
to discover the truth about his death. All they have left of him are
photos.

"That last phone conversation is what keeps me going," Mrs Dobson
said.