FORMER PIT TOWNS SAY NO TO DRUG ADDICTION

A Locally Driven Action Programme Is Starting To Make Headway Against
One Of The Most Damaging Legacies Of The Miners' Strike

A tale of two families is doing the rounds in the former coalfields of the
north this week. On the one side are Donna Marsh and her son Gary; on the
other Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher's "children" Mary-Jane, Whizz
and Smack.

The last three are better-known as cannabis, amphetamines and cocaine,
which have ravaged pit villages for 20 years since the great political duel
of the miners' strike.

Donna and Gary, who live between the dead pits of Manton and Shireoak in
Worksop, Nottinghamshire, are among hundreds of their local victims. But
there has been a change. They are fighting back and, for the first time,
they scent success.

"Mining communities have always struggled," says Donna, who has just seen
two rollercoaster years end with 22-year-old Gary, a heroin addict for six
years, in long-term rehab treatment. "We've always had to deal with disaster.

"I remember when I was a little girl, my dad would have little blue marks
on his body where the coals had caught him. Now my son has marks. He has
heroin track marks. He has deep, red, raw marks. He's a great big strapping
heroin addict that sat and cried like a baby because his mum told him to go
to hell."

Mrs Marsh, partner of a former miner and helper at an addicts' night
shelter in Worksop, once the heart of north Nottinghamshire mining, sits
and cries herself now, but with relief. No one is falling for easy
optimism, but a unique campaign against the blight of coalfield drugs is
claiming its first practical results.

In a few weeks' time, John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw - the mix of
former pit towns and pretty villages around Worksop - will publish his
second annual audit of an anti-drugs drive that began with unprecedented
"hearings" in the town. At Mr Mann's instigation, a panel of local people
ranging from a vicar to an extremely robust grandmother took evidence in
public from addicts, doctors, councillors and police.

The drugs plague revealed was worse than in many large cities, with one in
three local families affected, 92% of people up before Worksop magistrates
on drugs and a crime wave fuelled by the addicts' need to find an average
?16,000 a year for Mary-Jane, Whizz and Smack.

Last August, in his first audit of progress, Mr Mann noted: "The community
has started to come together on this issue." But he derided one major local
treatment centre as "still a shambles" and school anti-drugs education as
"uncoordinated, ineffective and unacceptable".

Twelve months on, he says, the statistics are at last beginning to shift
fundamentally, helped by the constant focus on the issue which the hearings
and their relentless follow-up have guaranteed. Acquisitive crime in
Bassetlaw - covering the shoplifting and burglary which keep addicts in
cash - has fallen by 23.3%.

Local GPs Lisa Collins and Chris Stanley, who had four heroin addicts on
methadone in 2002, have jumped at courses and new treatments, and now have
164 drug patients on more sophisticated heroin substitutes, the start of
the long rehab process.

The key factor for change has been clanging the alarm bell, says Mr Mann.
"The only difference between Bassetlaw and everywhere else in the
coalfields is that we raised the issue and went on and on about it."

In practical terms, three reforms have followed: most importantly, drug
treatment in Worksop is becoming GP-led rather than a speciality. Mr Mann
foresees the 164 figure rising to 300 by September and 700 at the end of
the year. He said: "The key thing is for drug patients to be treated like
those with diabetes, where social factors often play a part as they do with
drugs, or asthma.

"If specialist services are needed, the GP can call them down, but the
local doctor is in charge. It has transformed the delay and muddle over
direct requests from addicts to specialist treatment services."

Normalising drug treatment in that way has gone hand in hand with a
targeted drive against heroin dealers. Nottinghamshire police have made 36
arrests in the past two months, several in raids accompanied by Mr Mann and
based on his contacts' tip-offs. Officers are bullish about convictions and
lengthy jail terms.

"We have even had days recently," said Mr Mann, still with an air of
surprise, "when there's been no heroin available anywhere in Worksop.
Obviously that helps addicts make the crucial, and hard, decision to seek
treatment."

Finally, Bassetlaw council and other agencies are working together on
"intermediate" jobs, based on the Remploy model for disabled workers, to
ease addicts in rehab into the local labour market.

Twenty years after the pit closures, this is at last on the brink of full
employment, with a B&Q distribution warehouse and the new Robin Hood
airport at Finningley busy recruiting.

The path ahead remains extremely tough, however, as the MP, the panel and
all the anti-drug agencies in Bassetlaw agree, and Donna Marsh echoes their
warnings. She will take centre stage in an ITV network documentary,
Children of the Miners' Strike, which underlines how painfully slow her
own, driven rescue of Gary has been.

. Children of the Miners' Strike is on ITV1 on Sunday July 18 at 10.45pm