POLICE VIDEO TARGETS CHILDREN IN FIGHT AGAINST KILLER DRUG

Police in South Wales are resorting to shock tactics against heroin
abuse after a dramatic rise in deaths among young drug users.

Children as young as nine are to be shown a harrowing video depicting
the death of an addict in a rubbish-strewn underpass, in an attempt to
warn them against being sucked into the drug culture when they move on
to secondary school.

A recent Home Office report warned that heroin use had reached
epidemic proportions in towns and cities that had seemed free of the
drug.

The nine-minute video, The Trap, was shot in the Rhondda Valley, which
has seen what officers describe as an explosion in the use of heroin
in five years. In the past two years 18 addicts aged between 16 and 25
have died.

'We are recovering an alarming amount of a drug which we weren't
recovering only a few years ago,' said Insp Paul Cannon, who had the
idea for the film.

He added: 'Once children make the move from junior to comprehensive
schools you lose them. They are swept up in the drugs scene. The film
is hard hitting but... there is no point in pussy-footing around:
heroin kills and we must get that across to them.'

The video, a joint project between police and the pressure group
Rhondda Against Illegal Drugs, is being delivered to the 50 primary
schools in the area in time for the new school year. It will be up to
head teachers to decide whether to use it in their drugs awareness
education.

In the video a man aged 20 is shown injecting himself with heroin
before sinking to his knees and dying in the underpass, despite
attempts to revive him.

It shows the man's coffin lying in a chapel of rest and ends with a
shot from inside his grave as earth thrown on the coffin blocks out
the light.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady