HEROIN'S CHILDREN

There Are Too Many Brandon Muirs

It Is cold and wet tonight and Lauren Campbell is the only girl on the
street in Glasgow's drag, the area round Bothwell Street where the
city's prostitutes work. She stumbles along in her jeans and woolly
hat, not entirely steady on her feet. Thirty years ago she might have
been out here working to put food in her children's mouths, shoes on
their feet. Now, like most of Glasgow's working women, she is out
trying to earn enough money for her drugs - just as Brandon Muir's
mother was, the night before he died.

Campbell is only a heartbeat away from being Heather Boyd, who this
week was cleared by the courts of killing her son but may not have
been cleared by her own conscience. Her partner, 23-year-old Robert
Cunningham, was convicted of culpable homicide after hitting the
little boy with such force that his intestine ruptured. The night it
happened Heather Boyd was in nearby woods having sex with a punter.

The professional liberal classes may refuse to be judgemental, but
Lauren Campbell is not so hesitant. "If that was my wee boy and I was
with a partner who was doing that to him, I think I'd get an instinct
that something was wrong with him," she says. "Why did she never once
hear him hitting that wean? I just don't get it."

Maternal instinct may be over-rated in some women. For most drug
addicts the main priority in life is getting the next fix, not looking
after their children. "One has the impression that they barely even
notice they have children," says Professor Neil McKeganey of Glasgow
University's Centre For Drugs Misuse Research.

Professor McKeganey's team estimate that there are 50,000 children
living with drug-addicted parents in Scotland. That's 50,000 children
living with the possibility of disorder, indifference, violence -
fractured relationships and fractured limbs. "Their children are so
peripheral to their interest," says the professor. "They may be left
unfed. They may be taken out at night looking to find where drugs are.
Yet this person who's failing in almost every imaginable way to look
after them is still the only person in their world and they're afraid
to tell anyone for fear of losing them."

On the surface there is not too much difference between Lauren
Campbell's life and that of Heather Boyd. Like Boyd, 28-year-old
Campbell has lived a chaotic lifestyle dominated by the need to fund
her drug habit. She has just come off a curfew (from 6am to 6pm)
ordered by the courts after she failed to attend meetings with her
probation officer. Her child is in the care of her own mother and she
herself has an infantilised life, living in her parents' home along
with two younger siblings.

She grew up in high flats in Glasgow's east end, a childhood that she
says was a good one. "I've got two brothers and two sisters and not
one of them takes a cigarette," she says, her words coming out slowly,
and slightly slurred when they do emerge. "My mum isn't happy because
I'm the eldest. She doesn't understand why I'm the only one that
smokes cigarettes and takes drugs. She wants to know how she went
wrong with me, but it's not her fault. It's just the way I went, just
the life I chose at that time."

Lauren Campbell first smoked heroin at the age of 14, when her friend
Amy asked her for the loan of UKP 5 to buy a tenner bag of smack. Amy
put the drug on tinfoil and was smoking away happily. "I says, just
give me a line. Then just give me another and another one. Before I
knew it I'd had about four lines," recalls Campbell. She was violently
sick afterwards and didn't touch the drug for some years. She only
started taking it seriously when she got involved with her son's father.

In a pattern that is common among the street women, she soon found
herself working to finance not only her own habit, but her partner's
as well. Such symbiotic relationships often provide the catalyst for
escalation of the chaos, violence and danger surrounding drug
addiction. These women are out on the safe city centre and out to the
dark and lonely streets of the east end. The women call it "the
Green", meaning Glasgow Green, but really they mean along London Road,
where there are long empty stretches of road, long, empty stretches of
wasteland. Few of their men protect them by coming out with them.

I vividly recall meeting Gordon Fraser, the partner of Jacqueline
Gallacher, one of the seven women murdered in a seven-year period in
Glasgow during the 1990s. He was garrulous, self-pitying, shambolic,
describing his dainty girlfriend in the most romantic of terms -
despite the fact that he had lived off her earnings as a prostitute.
"She gave me the best of her loving," he said. "That's what I feel so
grateful for. What she gave other people wasn't loving."

He put a gold necklace in her coffin but gave her little support while
she was alive. He said he loved her, but it was clearly not enough.
(He is now dead himself.) That illusion of love is what keeps many of
the street women with men who are drug users, often violent, and
always completely hedonistic, which in effect is what drug users
become. They are consumers, the ultimate product of the capitalist
system. The effect on the children who live with them is catastrophic.
"They die," says Professor Neil McKeganey. "They die physically on
occasions but they die emotionally. The children talk about the
realisation of coming second to this grubby brown powder. Somehow or
other this thing is more important to their parents than they are
themselves.

"My team has had situations described where children have been
threatened by drug dealers looking for drugs, who come smashing into
their houses. The mothers are threatened with the loss of their
child's life if they don't reveal where the drugs are being stashed -
yet they don't tell the dealer. The reaction of the child is to
realise how much more important the drugs are than they themselves
are."

The irony for Lauren Campbell is that it was only after the loss of
her partner that her child was taken into care. Her son's birth was
not planned, but she was pleased when she heard the news. Her partner
seems to have been less enchanted, leaving her when the baby was only
a year old. Five months later the boy was given into the care of his
grandmother. "I was gutted at the time but if I had him full-time I
don't think I would manage," admits Campbell, huddling into her padded
jacket for warmth. "It was in case I went out in the town and left him
with strange people. I never done anything like that but they were
just concerned in case I ever did want to go out and work or have
somebody in the house or go out and leave my wee boy."

One of the paradoxes of a life of full-time drug use is that it can
provide a kind of crazy routine to the addict's life. Campbell does
the same things practically every day. She gets up around 11.30am and
smokes her first heroin of the day. "Without drugs I don't feel
normal," she says. "My drugs is like my breakfast. I take them as soon
as I open my eyes. I feel normal, happy that I've got my drugs in me.
I go down and make a cup of tea and something to eat. It fulfils your
day. It passes your day. When you've got no drugs in you, when you're
rattling, it's like the day goes by very slow. If you've not got drugs
you're very, very moany. You've got no energy. You're totally drained.
You just can't be annoyed getting ready. You haven't the energy to get
yourself dressed.

"When you've got drugs the day goes by quicker for you. You can do
anything. You'll clean up. You'll get in the shower, get dressed, make
yourself look presentable. Without drugs you just don't care about
life. It's as if there's no point."

In the course of her day Campbell goes out on the streets twice - once
for the afternoon trade at "the Green", and once at night. She needs
to make UKP 110 a day to feed her habit - more than UKP 40,000 a year.
It seems she has never paused to reflect on what that money could
provide for her son. She has now been issued with a drug-testing order
which means she will be tested for drugs twice a week, an option she
has refused before. "I was scared to do it in case I failed," she
says. "If you fail it means you're going to prison." She will now be
given support by social services, help with finding a house, emotional
counselling through group work. "I really want to get myself sorted
out for my wee boy," she says.

Heather Boyd too claimed that she would have done anything for her wee
boy. That "anything" did not include providing basic human shelter,
nor basic protection. There was no electricity in her house for the
week before his death, no sheets or blankets on the bed - Brandon
slept on a bare mattress.

On the night he died it was Robert Cunningham's sister who was worried
that Brandon was pale and sickly, not the little boy's mother. Ann
Cunningham put him down on a bed and tried to clear his mouth of
vomit, then moved him to an armchair to keep him upright. The adults
then left him while they partied on drink and drugs. He needed to go
to the toilet but had to go on his own. Yet he was a little boy who
was always reaching his arms out for love to the people around him.

"The children of drug addicts have a profound lack of self-worth,"
says Neil McKeganey. "I think that they grow up with a real deep sense
of loss inside them and that it touches their lives not just through
their adolescence but into young adulthood and maybe beyond."

There was help available for Heather Boyd but she refused it because
it would have interfered with her lifestyle. "My mum never knew about
the drugs," she told a national newspaper. "She would have gone mental
and taken the bairns off me."

She loved her son, but just not enough.

Some names have been changed.

Jean Rafferty is working on a book about street prostitution.