NO EASY FIX

The Effects Of Addiction Can Lay Whole Families To
Waste.

So why aren't we doing more for the relatives?

Ursula Kenny meets the 'kin carers' picking up the
pieces

I was bathing Lacey one night and she said, "Nanny, could Mummy die if
she carries on taking drugs and drinking?" And I said, "Yes, she
could, but we're going to work very hard to get her better." You have
to reassure them, but not lie to them. Anyway, she must have been
mulling it over because a few weeks later she asked me about it again.
"You know if Mummy dies," she said, "and you're getting older and you
die, who will take us?"' Jan Patterson, 61, pauses for a moment and
shakes her head. 'A lot of these children are really worried and
anxious you know... Traumatised, actually.' Jan is likely to be
traumatised herself and not just from fielding such stark lines of
inquiry. For the past five or so years, she has been a 'kin carer' to
her granddaughters, Lacey, 10, and Tia, 6, who she took from their
mother, her own daughter Heidi, after many years of trying to monitor
an increasingly chaotic and dangerous situation. Heidi and the girls'
father were long-term drug users.

They started with heroin and then moved on to crack cocaine which is
when, Heidi says, things really fell apart. 'I kind of got by before
that; you have a couple of bags of heroin every day and that's it.
You're OK as long as you have enough money to score, but when you use
crack you can never get enough of it... 20, 30, 40 stones, you just
want more and more. Hit after hit.' She started using crack after
giving birth to Tia and it wasn't long before she was selling it but
using more and more so that the profits were less and less and soon...
well soon, she says, in something of an understatement, they weren't
functioning. A rough sketch of life in the eye of the storm: 'I was
spending UKP 300 to UKP 500 a day on drugs, stealing because I never
had enough money.

All sorts coming through the house.

I weighed 3st less than I do now and at one point I got busted for a
large amount of heroin and only escaped prison by the skin of my
teeth.' She was also in charge of a baby and a toddler.

In this country, around 300,000 children are growing up in houses
where one or both parents are addicted to drugs.

Some experts put the number as high as 400,000, but no official
figures exist.

These children are typically exposed to drug taking, drug
paraphernalia, petty and serious crime.

One unsurprising outcome is that they commonly do less well at school,
often displaying signs of hyperactivity and attention deficit
disorder. They are also seven times more likely than other children to
use drugs themselves. Professor Marina Barnard from the Centre for
Drug Misuse at Glasgow University and advisor to the Home Office among
others, says that even a brief look through the literature on the
effects that drug problems can have on a family 'illustrates the reach
into every important aspect of family functioning and dynamic.
Children of parents with drug problems face numerous obstacles to
achieving even the basics needed for their safety and wellbeing.'

Lacey, in particular, was badly affected by her parents' drug use
because she is the oldest and so lived through much more of 'the
madness' as Heidi calls it. Heidi says she knows now that both girls
were 'seriously lacking in love and affection'. She tells me, appalled
herself now, that Lacey was often frightened as well. 'That poor
little kid was scared.' Of what, particularly? 'People who came round,
stuff like that.' When she eventually came to live with Jan, her
grandmother promised her: 'Nobody we don't like will ever come into
this house.

This is our house and we'll keep it just for us.'

Today, Lacey is a shy and preoccupied child who sometimes - less,
nowadays - displays considerable anger towards her mother.

She doesn't like talking about her mother's drug use but Jan says
Lacey has given her snapshots from her childhood - of having to get
biscuits from a high cupboard if 'Mummy and Daddy wouldn't get up and
I was hungry'. Of leaving a stool she took down from the bathroom
wedging the front door open when she went out to play, because her
parents - when they were out of it - couldn't be relied upon to hear
her knocking to get back in.

Over the years Jan tried on a number of occasions to get social
services involved. 'As I got increasingly concerned I approached the
police and social services, but nobody seemed to want to know. I've
found, along with other grandparents I know in similar situations,
that social services are reactive, not proactive.'

In fact they did visit sporadically but Heidi was always prepared, had
food in the cupboards, appeared to be functioning. ('I was a good
liar,' she says). But one morning Jan could take the torment and worry
no longer. ('I lay awake for months and months waiting for the police
to come round and tell me that something had happened to Heidi or the
kids.') Enough was enough.

Arriving unannounced, Jan's sister found Heidi unconscious in bed and
her partner in a similar state.

The girls, then one and five, were effectively looking after
themselves. They were removed from the home there and then and have
lived with Jan ever since.

We have here in the UK an unusually severe drug problem when compared
with the rest of Europe. To address this, policy and service provision
has predominantly focussed on meeting the needs of the drug-taking
individual, in the hope and belief that helping the addict will help
everyone involved, and in the process put a stop to the attendant
crime and health issues that often accompany drug use. So far, so
good, but there is now plenty of evidence to suggest that we have been
leaving other affected family members sidelined, invisible even, by
not having the resources available to make them a focus of attention
as well.

In her book Drug Addiction and Families (Jessica Kingsley, 2007),
Marina Barnard talks of 'a lamentable myopia that has led to a
situation where the harm that accrues to families through a close
relative's drug problem remains hidden, not because they are not there
to view, but because we have chosen not to see.' A Channel 4
documentary called Mum Loves Drugs, Not Me (screened November 3) seeks
to redress the balance a little, focusing as it does on the children
of drug users and their kin carers (typically grandmothers), who take
over when a user stops functioning.

Heidi is 40 now and stable.

She has been clean for 14 months and wants eventually to have her
daughters living with her. She would like to go back to being an
interior designer, as she was before she began taking drugs.

She tells me she didn't really want to do the programme or this
article, but respects her mother's wishes to draw attention to the
lack of support both she and the children have faced in their
extremely challenging circumstances.

Jan and other grandmothers in the programme have fallen foul of the
lack of clear and cohesive legislation around financing for women (and
it usually is women) who suddenly find themselves faced with the
prospect of bringing up a family for the second time. One of the key
complaints most often vocalised by these grandparents is that they
have to fight to get any payment at all and then don't get as much
money as foster parents.

An irony indeed when you consider that often the only thing between
the child of a drug user and care is a grandparent. Yet we won't pay
them as much as the foster carer the child might end up with if they
weren't prepared to step in.

When Jan took on the girls she didn't even have a home. 'I'd been
working abroad and living with my sister since I'd been back. I did
get a Salvation Army Housing Association place quite quickly, but it
wasn't big enough - Tia had to sleep in with me for a while.

I had nothing to put in the place.

I relied on charity and friends and family donations, after I'd spent
all my savings.

Foster carers get around UKP 350 per week per child.

I get UKP 200 for both of them.'

The whole area of financial support for kin carers is fraught with
incoherence and confusion. In some rare cases grandparents are
initially assessed and paid as foster carers, but they are more
usually encouraged to apply for Residence Orders because this gives
them more parental rights over their grandchildren at a time when
stability is desperately needed.

The catch 22 is that once a Residence Order has been established,
carers are moved on to a system where any payment that might be made
(and many kin carers get no payment at all) is discretionary. The
Residence Order generally marks the end of practical social work
support as well. 'You walk in and the government walks away,' as one
grandmother puts it.

Inevitably it is charitable and voluntary organisations that fill the
void. Jan now does a lot of campaigning work on behalf of kin carers
with a support group that has been of particular help to her: Pada
(Parents Against Drug Abuse), now a national organisation which has a
group in Liverpool near where she lives. 'I don't think I'd be where I
am today without them,' she says. 'I go once a month for a pamper day.
I get my hair done, have a facial or a massage.

They're are wonderful.'

Pat McDermott, 52, is from Burnley in Lancashire and has a similar
story to Jan's, except that she has no contact with her daughter now
('I don't want to see her, she doesn't exist for me any more'). She
has been the sole carer for her grandsons, Daniel, 13, and Kyle, 12
(whose father died of an overdose in 2001), for seven years now, since
social services took them away from her daughter, who had used drugs
on and off for years. Pat receives UKP 541 a month Residence Allowance
for the boys and she also works as a part-time cleaner.

She is desperately put upon and alone in her circumstances, aside from
a local support group called New Era that she visits once a month.
'Apart from that, I get no help at all. When I phone social services
they say the case is closed.'

What seems to go largely ignored is that these children are clearly
damaged by their experiences and yet we expect ageing and exhausted
grandmothers to deal with this on their own. When I ask Pat what the
boys want to happen in the future, she laughs. 'They want to go on The
Jeremy Kyle Show,' she says, 'because they've got questions they'd
like to ask their mum.' In the Channel 4 documentary, Kyle describes
his mother as, 'Horrible. Violent. She locked us in our rooms.' He
worries that she might find out where they live, 'come in the back,
get some ladders, break in and take me and Daniel.'

In 2003 Marina Barnard and her colleague, Professor Neil McKeganey,
contributed to a major government inquiry into the impact on children
of drug-using parents - a report called, appropriately enough, Hidden
Harm. 'I do think it's shameful,' McKeganey says now, 'that apart from
a statement to say that they (children) are a priority, nothing has
changed.

It's exasperating and intolerable. The government has failed them
because addressing their needs is expensive and there is no short-term
answer... some of these children will need help into their teens.

There is a lot of rhetoric around this, but really these children are
no better off than they were five or six years ago.'

In their new 10-year drug strategy launched last February, the
government did outline a commitment to putting families first when
dealing with drug problems.

When I asked the Department for Children, Schools and Families how
this commitment would be honoured with specific regard to the children
of drug users and their kin carers, a spokesperson said: 'We are
working with parents to improve the training available to children's
services to help them spot the signs and get these children the
support they need.' They are also currently 'developing support
materials and advice for grandparents and other family members who
take on a caring role for the children of someone with a drug
problem.' They also observed that, 'In order to continue to make a
sustained difference and long-term impact we have to engage better
with families.'

Carmella is the youngest child of a drug user to appear in the
documentary. She was born on 6 August this year and lives with her mum
April, 21, at her grandmother Sherrie's house near Nottingham. April
went off the rails at 15, almost certainly as a result of a
catastrophic incident in her childhood.

When she was six her father murdered her older (step) sister Leah,
while she was asleep in the same room. Sherrie doesn't really know why
he did it. 'He rang me at work - I was doing the night shift at a
local hospital - to say he'd done it because he had found some condoms
on her and that was what he stuck by in court, but I have my own
theories.' She describes the effect over the years as like a stone
skimming across water - 'The ripples just carry on and on and on.' For
one thing, April loved her father very much and looked up to him. 'I
was a daddy's girl,' she says. 'And my sister looked after me a lot
when my mum was at work. I lost them both at the same time, so it was
hard, yes.'

When she was 15, April met and fell in love with a much older man who
took drugs and invited her to inject heroin with him. 'It took all my
feelings away, just took it all away and I wanted it more and more,
and I just carried on taking it from that day.' For six years
thereafter April lived the toughest of lives, an existence that
revolved around her addiction to drugs.

She slept rough (in a skip for a while), robbed and shoplifted, lived
with a series of pimps who beat her if she didn't earn enough money
for them by selling her body for sex. ('One of them used to strip me
when I got in to make sure I wasn't hiding money from him.')

She has experienced unimaginable horror in her relatively short life
and yet, with a lot of support from Sherrie primarily, she is
miraculously showing every sign of coming out the other end. 'I was in
prison when I found out I was pregnant,' she says. The discovery
changed her life. 'I went on the methadone [a heroin substitute] and I
was poorly for a few days, but it was worth it. I don't want to take
drugs again because of how depressed they made me. I started on them
because I was depressed, but they just made me more depressed.' When
she got out of prison she found out that her midwife had been in touch
with Sherrie, who she was then estranged from. 'She said mum wanted me
to come home and live back here with her and that's all I needed to
decide I wanted this baby and wanted to get clean for her.'

When Carmella was born she was addicted to the methadone that her
mother was taking, and had to withdraw in hospital over six days. 'She
had a high-pitched scream, runny nose and eyes, tummy cramps,' April
recalls. 'But when I got her home I was just so happy.

I want to come off my methadone now and be a proper mother to her.'
Obviously it is early days, but when you meet the three of them there
is such a palpable atmosphere of care and support from Sherrie and
determination from April that you come away feeling positive about the
possibility of a happy ending. 'I fought for this,' says Sherrie.
'That girl walked through the door with nothing, five months pregnant
and only the clothes she stood up in. But still we had to go to appeal
before we got any financial support. I just kept saying everything is
going to go down the pan if somebody doesn't help, because if I'm not
here for April it will all fall apart.'

In the end her saviour appeared in the form of a man called Craig from
local support group, Hetty's. 'It took him fighting the social
services for us. He's been brilliant. What strikes me though is that
until things change you're going to need an awful lot of Craigs.'