CITY OF FALLEN ANGELS

New trend emerges in drug-related deaths as Grampian heroin epidemic hits
teenagers from affluent homes

Insert: Heroin seizures by Grampian Police 1992: 64kg; 1993: 441kg;
1994: 593kg; 1995: 705kg; 1996: 5,661 kg

The three might have been friends in different circumstances. Vicki Nash,
Malcolm Aslen and Elaine Barclay had a lot in common. They were all bright,
intelligent youngsters, from good middle-class homes in the prosperous
rural hinterland surrounding Aberdeen.

But pride over their children is not what unites the families now: their
bond has been forged in the grief of seeing their offspring lost to heroin
as the drug associated with the deprived housing estates of the central
belt tightens its grip on the affluent North-east.

While Neil Alsen, Malcolm's father, maintains his student son had
successfully kicked a habit forged in his home streets of Cairnbulg, a
village outside Fraserburgh, the police are still treating his death as
"drugs-related".

There is little doubt for Alan Barclay and his wife Ruth over what killed
their 20-year-old daughter Elaine, found dead in a flat in an Aberdeen
housing scheme frequented by drug-users the same night as 22-year-old
Malcolm's corpse was discovered in his university accommodation. Test
results will confirm what the couple already knew. She was an addict.

So was 18-year-old Victoria Nash, daughter of a Liberal Democrat councillor
from the middle-class suburb of Portlethen. After two years trying to offer
her help, they had lost her to the addiction she should never break.

There have now been six drug deaths in Grampian this year, a tally which is
already showing sinister signs of beating 1997's toll of 28.

"We are currently running at one death a week, which is an absolutely
shocking figure," says Detective Inspector Alan Smith, head of the Grampian
Drugs Squad and the man charged on an operational level with stemming the
flow of heroin. "We have a massive problem with heroin which in its
character is unique in Scotland."

Drugs seizures by Grampian Police have soared in the last few years
confirming Aberdeen's position as Soctland's new heroin capital.

Part of the fascination of the heroin epidemic in and around Aberdeen is
that its victims do not conform to the stereotype 'junkie' of popular myth,
shooting up to escape the no-hope confines of poverty on a bleak housing
estate.

Instead the North-east victims tend to be from 'respectable' families,
their only connection a taste for youthful rebellion which makes them prime
target of the dealers looking for new customers and find rich pickings.

At Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, consultant John Hiscox says: "Five years ago
you were unlucky if you saw one heroin case a month. Now it is completely
changed, and they happen evry other day."

It was the death of Victoria Nash two months ago which dramatically brought
home to the public what is now happening in Aberdeen. Barely three months
after her death, her mother Mhairi is still angry to drive on a special
trust she has set up demanding a drug rehabilitation facility. Addicts
currently have to travel to Glasgow to find the nearest residential centre,
and face a long wait for admittance unless they can pay for private care
which will buy immediate attention.

Like the Barclay family, from the outlying suburb of Newmacher, Nash
laboured to try and get help for her daughter. Like Elaine, Victoria failed
to complete a rehabilitation course then relapsed.

"We have to accept the nature of addiction means that people will relapse
and we must support both them and their families through this experience,"
says Nash. "But we don't. Instead society treats addicts like modern
lepers. Victoria tried really hard to kick the habit, but then people would
just destroy her self-confidence by treating her like rubbish."

Nash sought help through Aberdeen Drugs Action, which is seeing an
increasing number of young people, particularly women. Agency director
Keith Patterson reports that of the 148 new contacts seeking help for heoin
abuse in the second half of 1997, 60% were under 25, with two thirds of
that number under 20 years old.

Nash implicates changes in society for the pressures faced by her
vulnerable daughter. "there were more children at her school than lived in
the whole village in Argyll where I grew up. I used to go to dances where
children, parents and grandparents would mingle together.

"But because there has been a breakdown in communications between adults
and children as they grow into teenagers, teenagers tend to stick together
in large numbers when they go out at night."

Aberdeen's oil-based prosperity also means teenagers are likely to have
plenty of money to spend when they go into the night. Then the route to
heroin addiction is the same, with a free sample from a dealer to hook the
client. Smoking quickly becomes injecting in the search to achieve the buzz
the first hit provides.

Alan Smith knew Elaine Barclay and describes her story as typical. He says
she would have been offered heroin for nothing as a marketing ploy. "Most
first timers try it out by smoking rather than injecting in the belief they
won't become addicited," he said. "It doesn't take long before they switch
to injecting as they try and get the same buzz as they got the first time.
It never comes."

There are believed to be five or six large drugs suppliers in Aberdeen, who
buy supplies from contacts in Glasgow, Liverpool and Yorkshire for around
1,000 an ounce. The drug is then sold on at four or five times that price,
generating substantial profits. The local dealers, who tend to be addicts
thenselves, are largely controlled by contacts in the south. "The set up is
quite organised, and you have to say the dealers have been skillful in
creating a market for their products by giving it our free or cheaply at
first," added Smith.

When dealers are convicted, the respite tends to be brief as others
scramble to fill the lucrative vacuum left behind and meet the demand that
has already been created.

Alan Barclay and his wife Ruth have unwillingly picked up details of the
drug trade over the last two years as they battled to help their daughter.

He said: "You have to wonder what the government is doing to stop these
people. We lost a loved daughter when she took heroin for the first time.
Parents need to know the dangers that are possible. But what can you do?
You can't lock your children up."