INSIDE STORY: MY DAUGHTER, THE JUNKIE

It is every parent's nightmare: your child has become a drug addict and,
unable to break the habit, she's become a prostitute to pay for her crack
and heroin. JILL TURNER talks to Angela Harrison, who found that keeping a
diary of her daughter's spiral of self-destruction has kept her sane

Angela Harrison is in the front room of a Victorian terrace house in a
smart suburb of Stratford-upon-Avon, leafing through her photograph album.

Neat in skirt and sweater ensemble brightened with patterned scarf, pearl
earrings and gold-winged spectacles, she is the image of a Sunday school
teacher, or music mistress. But the story that unfolds as she flips over
the pages of pictures is a grim parody of middle-class family life. She
chronicles her daughter, Jamie's, development as she goes: 'Here she is
with her brother; and in her confirmation dress; here she is at 14, a bit
difficult she was then.

'And here she is getting ready for work. She was working all over England
as a prostitute at that time, but if you look at the young looking girl in
this other picture, you wouldn't believe it would you? Oh, and this is the
day she escaped from prison. We went to the park.' She turns another page.

A grey-faced, unhappy and undernourished girl in her early twenties squints
out of the photograph. 'This is her when she was on crack.' She points to
another picture, 'And this is when she was on heroin. You can see the
difference. She looks rougher, doesn't she? She acts rougher, too. Of the
two I prefer the crack. She always speaks better when she's on crack.' All
this is delivered in the bright, chirpy, 'chin-up' voice characteristic of
English ladies of a certain age and upbringing. Its breezy politeness is
eerily at odds with the story it tells; a story of drug addiction
(amphetamines, cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin), prostitution, crime,
prison, suicide attempts, violence, murder, poverty, abduction and
abandoned children.

Up until her teens, Jamie Harrison had led the life of a normal
middle-class girl - parties, ponies, the Guides, family days out, school,
music lessons, hobbies and a comfortable life with her mother, father and
older brother in a pretty, 17th-century house in the Warwickshire
countryside. As she grew older she became interested in art, dressmaking,
clothes and make-up and threw the occasional adolescent tantrum, but
nothing serious. Until one night nine years ago when Angela, in the process
of divorcing her husband and recovering from a kidney transplant, got a
call from the police to say her 15-year-old daughter had been arrested for
possession of cannabis.

Angela, now 53, remembers: 'It was horrendous, seeing my daughter down at
the police station, photographed and finger-printed like a criminal. I
didn't know anything about the drug world, I didn't know anything about
anything, and I believed her when she said it would be a one-off thing.'
Jamie went to art college, became pregnant by a known drug dealer and moved
into a home for single mothers with her new-born son. From there things
went downhill. Her mother discovered she was taking speed and learnt she
was working as a prostitute to pay for a drug habit that had stretched to
crack cocaine and, later, heroin.

After Max, now eight and in the care of his grandmother, two more children
were born - to two different boyfriends. Jamie resorted to crime and was
held in custody on numerous occasions, although she was luckier than some
of her friends who OD'd or were murdered.

Sitting back in her chair by the fire, beside which bookshelves carry drugs
information guides alongside biographies of Nelson and Churchill and
gardening books, Angela adds: 'I was very lucky, both with the drugs and
the prostitution, in that she was living away from home. It has kept it at
a distance. I know she's a prostitute but I haven't seen what she's done. I
have had the aggression and the lies but I have not had to see her taking
the drugs, or the immediate effects... Though recently,' she adds in her
bright, little voice, 'when she dropped her methadone bottle and it broke
but they wouldn't give her any more, I asked her home for a couple of days.
When I arrived at the flat to pick her up, the dealer had just delivered
some heroin and she took it there and then whilst I was in the room. She
just smoked it... '

Her voice trails off, but picks up again almost as if she is telling a
joke: 'She was heaving all the time, so I couldn't understand why she took
it. She didn't seem to enjoy it; but then I could see the relief in her
face. She has told me she enjoys it. I have asked her many times if there
was anything I could have done to have stopped her getting into drugs and
she says no. I think it was the excitement she craved.' When Angela talks
about Jamie working as a prostitute, it is as if she is describing a
wayward daughter getting dressed up for a night out at a disco. She even
jokes about finding huge packets of condoms among her daughter's
possessions. A couple of photographs show Jamie in lurid, almost clown-like
make-up, in short-skirt-high-heel street girl uniform, taken by Angela on
one occasion when she arrived as Jamie was leaving for 'work'.

'I was used to seeing her in normal everyday clothes but she was in a mini
outfit looking all glitzy, with her stockings halfway up her legs and when
she bent over you could see her bottom.' For a moment Angela's voice
breaks, becomes slower, softer, sadder.

'It became reality then. You know it happens but you don't think about it.
You have to joke, to laugh and close your mind to what happens when she
goes out there, what she does, who she meets. If any parent thinks about
the drug taking and the effects on their child, how they're feeling or the
prostitution, it would hurt so much you'd never survive.' Over the last
nine years, Angela chronicled her experiences and feelings in a series of
diaries, largely as a therapeutic exercise. She has now published them in a
book, Crackhead, which has been a source of information to parents and
grandparents in her position and a teaching and training aid in schools,
drugs action groups and among social services employees.

The last decade has been a long fight for Angela, who is now bringing up
Max on her own. Jamie's other two children, aged three and five, are in
foster care together.

Jamie, now 25, is still on crack and heroin and still working as a
prostitute. Before Christmas she was rushed to hospital after suffering a
minor cardiac arrest as a result of taking 'dirty' drugs. Angela hasn't
seen her since Boxing Day, or heard from her since mid-January. Promises
are broken, arrangements to meet never honoured, so Angela is forced to ask
the police or call the addicts, pimps and prostitutes she has come to know
through her daughter. The news has not been good, as she's discovered her
daughter is now needling heroin.

'I dread the phone. Every night I pull it out of the wall fearing a call
from Jamie, or one of her friends with yet another crisis she's in. The one
thing I had to learn was to say 'no', for my own sake and for the sake of
my grandson, because mentally and physically I can't cope anymore. It's
like a divorce. You have to make that final decision to pull away.' The
decision to distance herself was made last summer, when Angela's book ends
with Jamie on a methadone programme and promising faithfully,
enthusiastically, to go to college, clean up and train to be a counsellor.
'Within a few days, she'd disappeared and used the lot. I knew then... '
Angela makes a gesture of hopelessness. 'I knew then it was going to go on
and on and on.

'I would never let her down,' she adds, quietly. 'I'd like to go and see
her now, but I don't think I can face what I might find. I love her, but in
some ways the person she is now is not the daughter I knew and loved. In a
way I want to grieve for the daughter I lost, but I can't because she is
still alive.'

Crackhead by Angela Morrison is available for £9.99 plus £2 p&p from Debut
Publishing, PO Box 178, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, CV37 6WX
(cheques made payable to Debut Publishing). Grandparent and Grandchild
Support (for relatives of drug users), set up by Angela Morrison, can be
contacted at the same address.