COMMENT

The crime is ignorance

Lack of facts, not drugs, killed my friend, writes Mike Hancock MP

I HAVE worked closely with drug addicts and people seeking to get a quick
cure from the habit through my work at the Alpha Drug Rehabilitation Unit.
I have tried to bring forward initiatives to support families affected by
drug abuse. I've been involved in helping schoolchildren get away from the
cruel and painful experience that can be the result of drugtaking.

I do this with memories of my closest friend Les at the back of my mind. A
lad I grew up with in Portsmouth in the 1960s, he was the brightest,
bestlooking and most congenial of friends. He had everything going for
him. He was popular with everyone. He was clever enough to have got and
held down a very good job. Despite all that, drugs took his life. His story
is one that I have told many times in the hope that it would convince
others that it wasn't a path that needed to be followed.

Les, along with myself and a group of loyal friends, were regulars at
allnight parties and nightclubs in Portsmouth, Brighton and London. Les
always needed to have just that bit more excitement that the rest of us
first purple hearts, poppers and whatever else he could get to stay awake,
then on to "junk" as we used to call it. It was through smoking marijuana
in his early twenties that Les started to run foul of the law. He was
arrested twice. The first time he was cautioned because he simply had one
joint and the police didn't think it warranted prosecution. The second
time, it ended in a court appearance and Les, against all the odds and all
the advice he had been given, was jailed. He had just got married and
become a father Unfortunately, the experience of going to prison put him in
contact with hardline drugusers, and within weeks he was telling me he
had access to heroin, and had tried it for the first time.

On his release from prison, I remember meeting Les and walking back with
him to Winchester station to catch the train home to Portsmouth. As we
walked up the hill, he told me he had been given contacts so that the
harddrug habit he had now acquired would continue to be readily fed.

>From then on, Les deteriorated fairly swiftly. He became involved in petty
crime, he borrowed money from anyone who stood still long enough to listen
to his pleas. He fell out with his family, he left home, and he started to
look terrible, despite the fact that he had always been this handsome lad
who was the envy of his friends. He became a recluse, and far from enjoying
life, it had slipped into a pretty awful pattern of sleeping off one heroin
fix and awaiting the short buzz from the next. The inevitable came when,
one evening, he overdosed and died.

I often thought the system failed Les and it will undoubtedly fail others.
It failed because few of us knew enough about the issues he had to come to
terms with. Few people recognised those early symptoms and his cry for help
which undoubtedly came from his willingness to experiment with drugs.

I support an informed debate with the hysteria cut away. The Government
owes it to the nation to have this debate. It also owes it to the parents
of all the Les's who are going through this painful and debilitating
experience. It should get information out to the community and give support
to families and advisers who are working in the field. It should allow
reformed addicts into schools, and encourage schools to be freethinking on
the subject. It should encourage more people to spot the signs and to do
what they can to help. We need to get youngsters proud to speak up and save
a school friend from going down the same road as Les.

Maybe, just maybe, if I and some of my friends had had more courage, if we
had been prepared to tackle Les, to take the drugs away from him, force him
into rehabilitation, and give him more hope. All of these are questions
that have haunted me for more than 25 years. I bitterly regret that I let
down a friend simply out of ignorance at the time. I swore after his death
that I would never again let ignorance over the use and misuse of drugs be
an excuse.

The author is the LiberalDemocrat representative for Portsmouth South.