WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS EACH OTHER

IT would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Even the failed robber's father
admits as much: ""It wasn't so much a stick-up as a muck-up,'' he says.

For a start the young bloke came to rob the Ampol Road Pantry in Wendouree
that night in March on his pushbike.

He was pretty badly bombed on pills and as he handed over the note saying
""Give me all your money'', he jigged and shivered in a nervous palsy.
Which meant the starter's pistol he was pointing at the counter attendant
dipped and danced about too.

Suddenly, out of the haze came the realisation that he knew the guy he was
holding up. They'd been schoolmates. He was already wearing a balaclava,
but now fumbled to jam a pair of dark sunglasses over the thick-knit mask.

He was yelling at the fella to hurry, starting to spin out, so he snatched
up a bag and bolted. It wasn't until he'd pedalled all the way home that he
saw there was no money in it.

So he rode back to the pantry and played the rubberneck, asking the coppers
what had happened. A robbery, they said. Well, attempted robbery really.
Clown ran away with the wrong bag, leaving one full of cash on the counter.

But perhaps, he thought, there might still be a way to turn a profit. So
next morning he went to Ballarat police station and said he might be able
to help with their inquiries and, um, were they mentioning anything about a
reward?

The detectives looked at him fidgeting and sweating there and saw right
through him. It didn't take much pushing before he rolled over and
confessed.

It would have been funny if it wasn't so sad. If it wasn't so dumb and
pathetic and tragic.

But that's what drugs can do to you.

FOR all but the last of his 24 years he'd been a good kid: school, footy,
steady work, loving family, nice girlfriend. So his decline into dope and
pills and speed, into such a shabby shadow of his old self, was so sudden
and absolute it took everyone by surprise.

When he fell he dropped like a stone.

Call him Sean. He grew up on the family farm at Buangor, out near Ararat,
went to school in Ballarat and moved there for work after finishing his
VCE. Just builder's laboring, but he was good at it and it took him all
round Australia on working holidays.

Last November he came home from such a trip to Western Australia and moved
to Melbourne to be close to his girlfriend. He took a job with a delivery
company and a little room just around the corner from her in Mentone.
They'd stuck together three years, despite his trips away, but now, when
they were so near, she said she wanted to break up.

It shattered him. He told his sister he didn't realise how much he'd loved
her until she didn't want him anymore.

A doctor prescribed him Valium for his anxiety, depression and for
pre-existing claustrophobia. Guys he knew said that wouldn't do the trick
and turned him on to speed. He learned how to doctor-shop for prescription
drugs. He'd been smoking a bit of marijuana for years, but now he got stuck
in.

His family back in Ballarat had stayed close-knit, despite the parents'
divorce, but they had no idea of the state he was in until December. Sean
didn't come home for Christmas dinner. When they rang to find out why, he
was in tears.

""He just didn't know whether he was coming or going,'' says his eldest
sister, Madeline, ""and I think that was the first day we realised
something was seriously wrong.'' At first they put it down to the
relationship break-up. His mum asked him about drugs but he denied having a
problem. Just that bit of Valium, he said, and because they loved him they
believed him.

""We were naive,'' says his father now. ""I never thought much about drugs
before, to be quite honest. I never gave them much consideration because I
just didn't think they were part of our family.''

But Sean was collapsing. In January he quit his job and in February wrapped
his car around a power pole. Then on Friday the 13th of March he phoned his
mother. He said: ""Mum, you've got to come and get me. I tried to kill
myself last night.''

""We went down and brought him home lock, stock and barrel,'' says his
mother. ""And he was terrible.''

Her boy was haggard, ragged and malnourished. Since Christmas almost 20
kilograms had melted off him. He alternated between a stumbling, mumbling
dazed state and bouts of weeping depression and paranoia. He was
hallucinating, snatching for a dog that wasn't there, setting fires in the
tinder of the backyard. And he was stoned all the time.

If he kept falling he was going to die. His mother, father and three
sisters decided to save him. ""The thing about us, we stick together,''
says his dad. ""If anyone in this family goes down, the rest of us will be
there for them.''

But they had no idea how hard that would be.

A SON and brother had gone away and only six months later a stranger had
come home. And, except for rare moments of clarity, this person didn't want
their help, couldn't see he needed it.

Still, the Monday after he returned, Madeline dragged him off to her
doctor. It was only now he revealed the extent of his addiction.

He was doing grass, cocaine and speed and gobbling prescription
benzodiazapines - Valiums, Rohypnols and Serapax - a packet at a time. He
was greedy and indiscriminate, mixing cocktails of junk. Just lately he'd
begun dabbling in heroin, smoking it off the blade of a knife.

They took him to Robyn Jordan, a drug and alcohol counsellor with the
Ballarat Community Health service. He lasted one session and refused to
return.

""The next two weeks was the biggest nightmare,'' recalls his mother. ""I
was making a dozen phone calls a day, trying to get him to different
people. But nothing. No one could help.''

They tried desperately to book him into a residential detoxification
treatment. Again without luck. Ballarat has hundreds of serious drug
abusers, 60 registered methadone users, but no acute drug detox beds. There
are four in Creswick, 20kilometres north, and another four an hour away at
Western General Hospital in Footscray.

Skete Carter, who runs the methadone program, says drug abuse is growing
throughout regional Victoria, particularly Ballarat and the lack of detox
beds is an ""absolute disgrace''. But Debra Bernard, manager of the
Community Health Service, argues that there is a range of services
available, including youth outreach workers and the Rural Withdrawal
Service. Further, she says, not all the detox beds available to Ballarat
clients are being used.

""(But) if the client refuses to attend the service, if this person doesn't
wish to go to detox, what can you do? They're voluntary, you can't force
someone to accept help. The reality is, (Sean) was over the age of 18.''

In the depths of their frustration, that was an argument the family found
hard to grasp. He wasn't in any state to volunteer for anything, says his
mother, he was being ridden by the monkey on his back. If they could, they
would have committed him. ""He was a risk to both himself and the
community,'' says his sister. ""If someone's so mentally unbalanced that
they can do harm to both themselves or their community, they're committed.
And he was exactly the same. But because he was driven by drugs it didn't
apply.''

""I told Robyn Jordan one day, "I'm scared he's going to do something
stupid','' says his mother. ""And she said "Oh he will. He could overdose,
he could commit a robbery, he's going to want drugs and he'll do anything
to get them'.''

And so it was. About 9pm on Wednesday 25 March, less than two weeks after
coming home, he took his father's starter's pistol, hopped on his bike and
rode off to pull his addle-brained stick-up.

The family didn't know he'd been arrested until two days later.

They were even more stunned to find he'd been granted bail on his own
surety. But the shock had done nothing to reign in Sean - if anything he
was running even further out of control.

""He went from bad to worse. By the Sunday night he couldn't walk, could
barely stand, could barely even speak,'' says Madeline. There were people
coming and going from his room and they found out he'd been financing his
habit by acting as a go-between for a local dealer.

Their GP rang every acute detox centre in Victoria pleading for a bed for
him but to no avail. Western General wasn't interested in him because of
his ""erratic behavior''. They even phoned the Community Services crisis
assessment team, but they couldn't help because he didn't have a mental
problem. It was just the drugs they said.

They even considered letting him overdose if that was the only way they
could get him in to hospital.

In the end it was the police who saved him. They found out he'd been
dealing small amounts of marijuana and rearrested him. Stuck in the police
cells, at last he began to detoxify.

""In a funny way,'' he wrote to his family later, ""I'm glad I was remanded
in jail. I was going downhill fast and things were only going from bad to
worse.''

GRADUALLY he began to wean himself off the drugs until now he is taking
only two Valium a day and hoping to kick that. Late last month he pleaded
guilty to the attempted robbery and was remanded for pre-sentence
assessments.

Writing from Port Phillip Prison, he has high hopes. ""I know
I will
regain complete control of my problems and regain complete sanity and go on
and work a job properly and live life to the fullest. Play football, have a
girlfriend, be fit and healthy and enjoy life.''

His family just want their boy back.

""At times I think I'm really glad my brother did something wrong,'' says
Madeline. ""I wish it hadn't been that stupid armed robbery, but I'm really
grateful that he did because otherwise I don't think he'd be here today.

""People don't understand how many families and lives and dreams are
shattered by drugs. You see it on TV, you read about drugs in the papers,
but no one realises until you're caught up in it what it's actually like,
the misery it causes. We've had a huge crash course in the drug problem.''

Last week she went to a meeting of Families Anonymous, a support group for
the families of drug abusers.

""And you know the scary thing?'' she asks. ""There are people in this town
going through much worse than we ever did.''

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)