ENGLAND'S GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND

Heroin is out of town. The age of the rural junkie is upon us,

Sunlight filtered through the trees, playing light and shade games with the
wooden tables in the country pub. The Hampshire fields were still lush from
the July rain, making it a scene from an English Tourist Board poster. Enter
the junkie.

It was obvious that "Phil" was on "brown" - the Nineties buzz-word for
heroin - from the moment he walked into the pub garden. The sheen, a light
sweat on his face, the fazed eyes, pupils the size of Smarties - most
tell-tale of all, his speech a zombie slur.

Phil needs to smoke UKP100 worth of heroin a day to keep the nausea at bay.
He deals to pay for his habit. He looked around the garden: "I know five
users within a mile of this village."

"Brown" has broken out of the inner cities and gone green. The age of the
rural junkie is upon us.

The failure to stop heroin entering the country was well evidenced last
week. On Monday, the Home Office released a police research document
speaking of an "epidemic" of heroin in small towns and the shire counties.

On Thursday, Claire Campbell's life support machine was switched off. She
lived in Haywards Heath, Sussex, the "bubbly, beautiful" daughter of a
retired insurance executive. She was 21 and, unknown to her family, a heroin
injector.

Phil, the junkie-dealer, knows of two users in Hampshire who are 13 and 14.
In Bristol there have been reports that 10-year-olds are involved. The vogue
is to smoke a "bag" of brown. It comes in a small twist of plastic and costs
as little as UKP10, though London dealers have been selling at UKP2 a bag.

You cook the heroin by holding a lighter underneath some silver paper -
Kit-Kat foil is popular - and run the molten drug in a "z" shape before
snorting the fumes.

It's hard to cut the drug if it's being bought to be smoked, though some
dealers use a baby laxative called Manitol, unavailable in this country.

Experienced users like Phil can tell if it's spiked: the edge of the bubble
is transparent, not brown. It was the only time in our chat when he spoke
with animation and authority.

The first hit, they say, is "100 times better than sex". What they don't say
is that heroin is corrosively addictive, that very soon more and more gives
you less and less buzz, and that, sooner or later, you will end up injecting.

A very well-off junkie with a good source of clean heroin - someone like
former addict Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones - can live to a ripe old
age, but the drug wrecks the lives of 99 per cent of people who get into it.

The groin is a popular place to inject; the neck also. Doctors in the West
Country have reported the case of a junkie injecting into the side of his
eye. It was the last clean vein he had left.

Three decades of draconian legislation banning the use and sale of heroin
has not prevented its spread. You can now get it anywhere in Britain.

It is hard to tell how many users there are out there but a good index is
the presence of needle exchanges.

The Isle of Wight is famously dull, protected by four miles of water from
the wickednesses of the mainland. Last week morris dancers whacked their
sticks and did the traditional rural thing. But a new rural tradition has
developed on the island. According to a recent newsletter from the local
Drug and Alcohol Action Team, there are 12 needle exchanges on the isand -
two in Newport and Sandown, one in Cowes, Shanklin, Ventnor and Freshwater,
and four in Ryde.

As yachties yackered on the streets of Cowes, a pharmacist confirmed the
town ran a needle exchange. Another pharmacist in Ryde said: "The age of the
people using the exchange is coming down. A few years ago most of them would
be in their late twenties or early thirties. Today we are seeing a lot in
their early twenties."

On the other side of the Solent things are far worse. According to Det Supt
Nigel Midgley of Hampshire Police, 15,000 needles are changed a month in the
Portsmouth conurbation. Some are used by amphetamine and steroid users, and
heroin injectors are advised to use one needle for each hit. One can pare
down the figure to, say, 5,000 needle-users - still hard evidence of a
terrifying problem.

Midgley says: "These days a lot of young people in regular work have been
using heroin to come down off ecstasy. They have been high all weekend and
take heroin to calm down so that they can get to work on Monday morning.
With one user I know, the heroin worked to begin with. He had been taking so
much ecstasy his speech was slurred.

"He seemed to get better. Then he got hooked on heroin. He's lost his
business and now he and his partner are utterly hooked.

"His partner had a child recently. It was born a heroin addict and spent the
first two months of its life in intensive care. Heroin is something you
cannot control."

Heroin is now cheaper than any other drug on the market. An ounce wholesales
in London for UKP800 to UKP1,000. Currently the main suppliers are Turks,
operating out of the Green Lanes area in north London, trading Afghan heroin
which has come through the Balkans.

At the Hampshire street - or farm gate - level, "brown" is sold in UKP10
bags, each of a twentieth of a gramme. A dealer can sell his ounce for
UKP5,670, making a profit of UKP4,670. Nearly all dealers in the Solent area
squander their profits on their own addictions, though one of the biggest
does not. He lives on the Isle of Wight, mainly because of the low crime rate.

That user-dealers need to sell to youngsters underneath them - creating more
addicts - has caused some experts to question the Government's absolute
prohibitionism. Some believe the solution is to return to what was called
the "British system", whereby proven addicts can get heroin on prescription,
so that they would neither deal nor steal.

Last week the Government's "drugs czar", teetotaller Keith Hellawell, ruled
out such a deal in an interview with The Observer.

The Government churns out anti-heroin rhetoric but has failed to close down
the dirty money tax havens in the Channel Islands and former British
colonies which the drug barons use to hide their profits.

Meanwhile, the gangsters prosper. Not long ago a Manchester syndicate
expressed an interest in a caravan park on the Isle of Wight. Sell up, or we
kill you, they told the owner. He went to the police, who warned off the
syndicate. They didn't put that on the English Tourist Board posters, either.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett