A MOTHER'S LESSON IN THE HEROIN ECONOMY

I AM a mother watching my daughter struggle with heroin addiction. Courage
is all I have left as I watch her detoxing, relapsing, detoxing, relapsing.
On and on it goes. All I can do is provide unconditional love, a home and a
firm reality check.

I wrote a letter to the herald 18 months ago about "my race against time".
At the time I was hopeful: the possibility of heroin trials was being
discussed, even decriminalisation was on the table. Attitudes to this
terrible disease looked as though they were changing, and radical
approaches were being contemplated. I naively thought we might lead the
world in a new way of dealing with this nightmare.

Now I am back on the streets of Kings Cross, armed with a photo for ID as I
search for my daughter. She is on a bender. I go to her old haunt, bin it
has changed hands and is run by some really tough-looking men. My fear of
confronting thugs never goes away but my courage keeps growing. They are
aggressive and confrontational and in the past I have been threatened and
asked for money to go upstairs to search.

I declare that I'm a mother looking for her child and make it clear that it
will be a police matter if they don't co-operate. They call me ma'am, the
books are opened, rooms are phoned. There is a girl with my daughter's
street name in Number 7. She works as a stripper. I'm led upstairs and the
door is unlocked to reveal a child in bed covered by a white sheet. She
looks 16 or 17. Soft curls fail around a little girl's face. Her eyes are
completely bruised. Her skin is ashen. This is someone else's lost child.
My heart breaks for her, for she is in the living hell where my daughter
was not long ago.

The hotel owner remembers my daughter. He remembers she worked on William
Street. I know he remembers because he threatened to kill her if she showed
up in his territory, after she stole a customer from his strip club. I am
relieved she is not there. The implications of such a circumstance would be
too horrible to think about.

My daughter has got past full-time prostitution and a $1,500 a day habit.

There have been periods of complete abstinence and it is always great to
have her back. She is a beautiful human being. My husband and I love her so
much. Heroin addiction is a chronic relapse disease and her plan now is to
move to the country, another State, away from her dealers.

We are determined to keep our strength as an example and support and
encourage her to take control of her drug problem. It's a very slow
process. The public system is stretched beyond decency. We spend money on a
private family therapist, and a drug and alcohol psych to help hold our
lives together. Without this we would be insane.

It is like living with Russian roulette.

Imagine your child holding a loaded gun to her head every day and you have
to learn to let her get on with it until she just can't stand it any more.

I try another hotel, it is a shooting gallery, but they are helpful. I
track down her old room-mate from a year ago. She is living at the hotel
with a boyfriend who is starting to deal beyond the normal dealing that
goes on between addicts, and I know this is the supplier of my daughter's
bender. Nothing prepares me for how bad this girl looks. She is a
pus-covered living corpse being eaten by a heroin lifestyle and Hep C and,
yes, my daughter is coming to see her later.

I decide to look around the streets and visit someone who sometimes gives
my daughter a bed for the night. As I walk down a lane, behind me the
police have pulled over two addicts in a car. They are young and very
stoned. The police are young and rightfully fearful. They hold guns at
their suspects and make them get out of the car real slow.

I run to the nearest doorway and take cover. I have to look back - its all
too surreal. One of them is holding a baby and there is a two-year-old in
the back. I start to shake, I cry in the middle of the street I am
shameless, an empty vessel of a mother watching another mother. We are both
ankle-deep in the shit of life.

I go back and wait for try daughter to turn up at the hotel. For three
hours I watch the business oil the Cross, the deals and scams coming and
going. Girls smacked out - and thin as sticks travel up and down the
stairs, up and down the street. Spruikers yell out selling young women like
slaves.

I wonder if these men realise that the only reason a young girl is selling
herself might be to support a heroin habit. Do men ever wonder why a girl
would be having sex with someone as old as their father or why they want
sex with a girl their daughter's age?

Boys are lining up deals. They keep taking the table from next to me into a
room at the end of the corridor. More young people go into the room, then
the table comes out again, they leave and more arrive. And more.

My daughter rings on my mobile. She was upstairs in another room all the
time. She staggers down the stairs to me glassy-eyed and says her friends
told her I was waiting in the lobby. I then realise I need a new photograph
to identify her with: she no longer looks like the beautiful angel she once
was. We go home to our nice North Shore suburb and as we walk down the
street we pass other people's children nodding off. Crumpled children who
have become living holes for needles, for penises.

The economy we now live in, as opposed to a community, seems to have
swapped the virtues for the sins. We are being sold greed and self-centred
pride that makes me wonder if the 2,000-3,000 kilograms of heroin, with
street value up to $3 billion, arriving in Australia each year is more
useful to us the way things are. After all, illegal drugs in 1995 were
estimated to be worth $US500 billion worldwide - the second most lucrative
business in the world after the arms trade. The Canberra heroin trials -
our first hope of trying something different - have been stopped.

My daughter is dying and so are hundreds of others. We step over them in
the streets and feel better if we see them as dirty junkies, somebody
else's problem. Well they are not; they are our youth and our future. It is
a measure of a community how it treats its youth. . . ah, but I forget we
are living in an economy, not a community.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson