MOURNERS REMEMBER PRECIOUS LIVES LOST TO DRUGS

Colin Stoddart knows he is lucky to be alive.

Yesterday he was at Yarralumla's Weston Park remembering more than 10
friends who have died drug-related deaths in nearly 15 years.

He was joined by many other grieving family and friends of users at the
third annual Remembrance Day for those who lost their lives to illicit
drugs.

Last Wednesday was another one of those days that have become all too
familiar for Mr Stoddart. He lost another mate in Canberra to a drug
overdose and he hopes that yesterday's ceremony has raised awareness of the
need for new treatments to support drug users.

He said drug users needed more understanding from the community. ''We're
ordinary people with good jobs, we're not all homeless,' he said.

Counsellor Chrissie Hall-Pascoe, of Assisting Drug Dependants Inc, said
many people who used the drug-support service had lost up to 20 friends.
''They call me Mum,' she said of her charges, to whom she was offering
support yesterday.

Mr Stoddart, 39, has been using heroin for 24 years and is a peer worker at
ADD Inc. Losing friends to drug overdoses instilled feelings of
helplessness, he said. But he helped out at the organisation by giving drug
users clean needles and information on AIDS and Hepatitis C and safe places
to use drugs.

Mr Stoddart said many drug users had fallen into a drug habit through a
broken family background. But he said that he had come from an ''ordinary
family', which showed drug dependency was an issue for all.

ACT Opposition Leader Jon Stanhope, speaking at the ceremony, said it was
important to have public acknowledgment of the impact of losing a loved one
to drug use. As a community, we needed to overcome prejudice against drug
users and their families and to ''to strive for answers and strategies to
overcome deaths from drug abuse,' he said.