ENTER THE DRAGON

In the early Eighties, the notorious Ford Estate boasted Britain's highest
rate of heroin abuse among teenagers.

Now, two decades later, Ursula Kenny discovers that many of these
youngsters have never escaped the spectre of drugs

'The Ford Estate was notorious in the Eighties. I wouldn't have wanted to
live there.

Always in the papers, always being vandalised, loads of drug use. One of
the worst estates in Birkenhead. There was no purpose for those kids, no
point, because there were no jobs. Norman Tebbit told us to get on our
bikes, but it's quite hard to ride a bike to London on heroin.

There was absolutely nothing for them. The services didn't get to them
early enough, there was no education then, and now they've been taking
drugs for years. They're a lost generation'

- - Lynn Clare, Parents Against Drug Abuse, Liverpool

In October 1981, The Observer Magazine published a feature called 'The
Writing on the Wall'. The piece featured children from the Ford Estate, a
run-down housing estate on the outskirts of Birkenhead, on the Wirral, a
peninsula in northwest England separated from Liverpool by the River
Mersey. Two 12-year-old girls had won prizes for poetry that eloquently
described their bleak surroundings, but the piece also painted a bigger
picture of a failed and failing community spiralling into decline.

John McDonald was 16 at the time and remembers The Observer taking his
picture. He didn't write poetry, he just happened to be sitting outside
that day, on a grass verge, with a handful of mates who had grown up
together. Photographer Mike Abrahams snapped them as they sat, smoking
cannabis and chatting, providing a backdrop of local colour and context for
the article. Twenty-three years later, McDonald wrote to us. He wondered if
we were interested in finding out what had happened to him and his friends.

He felt their stories needed telling.

He'd been looking at the picture, reminiscing - a bunch of Scouse teenagers
with their whole lives ahead of them.

What has happened to them is, for the most part, sad and grim. Of the 15
people in the picture, just three are not now using drugs - John McDonald
is one. Four are dead. The rest are addicts of one sort or another.

To say they never really had a chance is not completely true, but not
wildly wide of the mark either.

They were working class in an area of mass unemployment and low priority.
Traditional local employers such as the car plants were under real pressure
and the Cammell Laird shipyard was on its way out. At the same time a new
drug to relieve the boredom was on the way in.

In 1985, Howard Parker, then a reader in social work studies at Liverpool
University, wrote a book called Living With Heroin: The Impact of a Drugs
Epidemic on an English Community. Many of the case studies came from the
Ford Estate. Britain's heroin epidemic of the early Eighties, he says, was
part of a cycle that began in the US in the Sixties and Seventies. 'The
heroin epidemics in America had a natural life of 10 to 15 years.

And then demand started to go down. As with any drug epidemic, the next
generation won't go near it. They've seen the impact.

So the market was finished there, and Afghanistan and all those places
needed a new market.

They hit Europe. After heroin it was crack in the States and with it the
same kind of cycle.'

John McDonald's family moved to the Ford Estate in the Sixties. 'It was new
then,' he says. 'We'd been living in downtown Birkenhead, in a place that
was pretty bad. This was luxury by comparison. Three bedrooms and our own
bathroom.' Family life, he remembers, was pretty unremarkable. His dad
worked for the gas board, his mum for Cadbury's, and although things were
tough financially, they were a lot better off than some. There was a bit of
disruption, but that didn't come until later; he was 21 and had left home
by the time his parents divorced.

But they were supportive, there for him.

No, trouble started outside the house. 'There was a lot of violence on the
estate. Regular violence.

There was a pub opposite my school called the Buccaneer and we used to
watch them spilling out of there.

I've never forgotten one time seeing this really bad fight.

It went on for ages and it affected me a lot. I know it affected other
kids. I was in a gang, everyone was, we were always fighting and there was
always this feeling that this was a hard place to live.' Howard Parker says
that the Ford, in the Eighties, was one of the toughest estates on the
Wirral. 'We monitored the Multiple Deprivation Index done by Wirral
Council, and Ford was right at the top. Unemployment was high, there was a
lot of crime, vandalism.

There were gangs, tough men. It wasn't a place to mess with. I think that
there was quite a lot of dumping of problem families on to Ford. Certainly
it got into a mess for a while.'

As far as John McDonald and his friends were concerned, they might as well
have been living on a desert island. 'We did everything on the estate.

There was never any need to leave.' There was a shopping precinct, a school
and grassy areas for play. The estate was built in avenues, like the
American system. They were numbered 1 to 8. John's family lived on 1st
Avenue - the posh end, if you like; between 7th and 8th was where all the
bad stuff happened. John knew the estate like the back of his hand, all the
kids did. 'There were lots of alleyways that were used to get away from the
police.

I was never at home and my parents didn't have a clue what I was up to.'

He started smoking dope at about 11 and was a regular user by 13. 'The
older boys would always have weed to sell and a load of us would throw in
25p, and we'd get a ?4 or ?5 deal. And that would last a few days. We'd do
it round the back of school, or round someone's house, a single parent that
we knew. Get stoned, put some records on and just laugh.

It was all quite innocent.'

As John remembers it, 'the change' happened more or less overnight.

Howard Parker says that it took place over about 18 months. 'In the
Eighties, heroin hit the social exclusion zones of the Wirral and spread.

We call it micro-diffusion - it moves out to other communities and picks up
susceptible people. The alienated people, the unhappy people, the people
who are already using different drugs.

Heroin can be compared to an infectious disease,' says Parker. 'What is
extraordinary is the proportion of young adults on that estate who were
known heroin users.

Nine per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds on the Ford Estate were known to be
heroin users.

It was the highest rate on the Wirral, and the Wirral in turn was one of
the most heroin-affected areas of the country.

All McDonald remembers is that suddenly you couldn't buy dope. 'You
couldn't buy cannabis, couldn't buy weed. All you could buy was this cheap
brown heroin. Within six months of that photograph the estate was flooded
with heroin. Everyone started smoking it.' They thought it was a fad, John
says, and that heroin would disappear as quickly as it had arrived.

They thought the weed would come back. Inevitably, what actually happened
was that 'everyone got strung out, everyone got bad [drug] habits.

You need more and more, so you start to resort to crime; dealing or
begging, borrowing or stealing from your parents.'

John was 16 or 17 when he started to steal. 'I had a habit.

At first you are terrified, but after you've done it a couple times the
fear wears off.' Parents Against Drug Abuse (Pada) was started in 1984, by
Joan Keogh, who lived on the Ford Estate. She found out that both her
children were taking heroin and went to her GP for advice.

He said he would pass on her name to other parents with similar concerns.

She then went on Radio Merseyside and announced there would be a meeting in
a community centre on the Ford Estate for parents of children who were
using substances - 250 people turned up. Initially they were a lobbying -
rather than a support - group.

They lobbied for better drug services on the Wirral, because, as Lynn Clare
from Pada puts it: 'Basically, if you wanted treatment then, you had to go
to London.' It was only later that Pada began to offer support to families,
to the mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of addicts.

Joan Keogh died three years ago, but Lynn Clare carries on her work. 'We
help families to help users in their family, so that they know what to do
when the addict in their family decides they are ready for help. We have a
national helpline and we provide one-to-one and family counselling,
alternative therapies, respite.'

John McDonald came across Parents Against Drug Abuse when he was 19 and on
probation. He'd been in borstal for eight months and had come out clean,
off drugs for the moment.

He had a job as a trainee scaffolder. But then he started sniffing speed
and, eventually, using heroin again. 'Still my probation officer thought I
was clean, he saw me as a role model, so he asked me to speak to this
parents group.' The meeting was, unexpectedly, a turning point in his life.
One of the men in the group had a son who was using heroin.

He told John about an organisation called Narcotics Anonymous. 'He invited
me to a conference in London the following weekend.

Said he would pay my fare - the idea was that I would come back and set up
an NA branch in the area. Nothing like that existed in Birkenhead at the time.'

It is a warm day at the start of May when photographer Mike Abrahams and I
drive on to the Ford Estate. It isn't called the Ford Estate any more - in
an effort to divorce itself from its messy past and move on, it has been
renamed Beechwood. Money has been spent on improvements and most people
agree that it is better these days, or at least not as notorious.

Driving towards it you're struck by the affluence that surrounds it.
Moneyed areas such as Bidston, although Lynn Clare says that Pada helps as
many parents from those places nowadays.

The estate itself is pretty unremarkable to behold - a vast expanse of
identikit housing, the size of a small village. Some of the flats have been
rebuilt, the new red brick stands out, but not all - apparently, they ran
out of money.

But what strikes you most is the isolation.

Stuck in the middle of nowhere, with its own school, desolate pub and
shopping precinct. 'A prison with no walls,' as McDonald puts it. Crack
cocaine is the drug of choice nowadays, but there's not much sense of that
at the moment, in the sunshine; the place is deserted, apart from us and a
mother pushing a pram.

We're here to recreate the picture that appeared in this magazine 23 years
ago, as best we can. Five people from the original 15 have been willing and
able to turn up. One of them is John McDonald. The others - Julie, Carl,
Micky and Louis - have all been on drugs of one sort or another ever since
that picture was taken.

Heroin for a long time, but mostly the heroin substitute methadone for some
years now, regularly topped up with, variously, crack, alcohol, weed. It
would be an understatement to say their lives have been difficult.

Life has winded them repeatedly, and it shows.

Julie is 40 now and remembers the day the picture was taken. 'I was only
using a bit of pot at the time... everyone was on something then... pot and
then heroin.

I don't know why we did it. I think it was just because we were young. But
I haven't used heroin for six years now, I've got me methadone.

I just use that now and the odd go on the rocks [crack].'

Julie left the estate 20 years ago. She married and moved to Birkenhead
town centre. 'I stopped using at that point.' She smiles ruefully, 'but not
for long... not long. I had three children and I started again after the
birth of my last child.' Her children, 21, 20 and 19, don't take drugs.
'They've seen what I've been through and they wouldn't touch it.' She is,
she says, in a better place these days. 'You should have seen me five, 10
years ago. I've had a few bad patches.

I've been on the game, kids have been in care. I've put on weight now, though.

I don't do any shoplifting any more and it's just getting the last little
bit of coke away. I'm working with the Arch Initiative [a substance-misuse
agency on the Wirral].' She thinks times are better for the kids on the
estate nowadays. 'I don't think these kids are into what we were into,' she
says. 'They can get jobs now, we were all just dossing about.

No one would touch us.'

Micky is 37. 'I think we all got ambushed,' he says. 'No one in school said
anything to me like, "Now here's a lesson about drugs." None of that. I
smoked gear [heroin] every day for four years and I didn't really know what
I'd got into until I went to jail.'

He recalls the estate in the Eighties: 'People would come from miles around
to score here. From Wales. They'd arrive in a taxi and keep it waiting.' He
has never worked, 'never in my life. I've been in and out of jail.' He
says, profoundly sadly, that he never really wanted to be anything when he
was a kid. 'I got caught robbing me own school uniform and me dad wrote a
letter to the court and I got put in a home. Then I got detention centre
for robbing a car and I just wanted to leave school, because I loved taking
the gear that much.' He pauses and shakes his head. 'We were all angels
compared to what's going on now, though.

There were some kids trying to sell a crossbow on my way up here.'

Micky doesn't take heroin nowadays. 'Just a few bevvies and the weed.' And
the methadone he has taken every day for 14 years. 'Everyone uses methadone
and everyone is scared to come off it,' he says. 'You're just too scared to
knock it on the head...'

Louis says he's '42 or 43', lives at his mum's, hangs out. He's lived in
London and the US, but drugs have always got the better of him. 'I worked
on building sites in London, but I got into too much trouble.

They put me in prison down there for robbing the bingo.

I was off me head.' He came back to Liverpool in 1993 and has been using
methadone - 'along with hash and booze' - ever since.

He seems the most interested in talking to John about the treatment centre.

He says he wants to get clean and he'd like to work with other addicts.
'But I'd have to be clean for about a year. I try and warn people, you
know. But it doesn't go in their heads.

It's like '82 again here. They're all at the rock now.'

Carl is the only one who still lives on the estate. 'I've tried to get off,
and me and my girl were going to move, but she's in hospital now. Never got
away from here. Only in jail.' He looks at the picture from 1981; he's 37
now. 'When I was a teenager I wanted to be a footballer,' he says. 'A lot
of people said I could have made it as a pro. But it hit me too young.

I was 14 when I started taking heroin.' He's been taking drugs ever since.
'You just wish it would disappear, but you know it's not going to happen.

Sometimes I go into jail for a break.

Just to get myself off the gear, to get myself back up again.

And then I come back out and before I know it I'm back at square one.'

John is the one who got away. He won't thank me for saying that, because he
worries that his friends from the estate will feel slighted; the ones that
didn't get away. 'Still, occasionally, I feel very strange when I'm here
because of the intense life I had. It was such a community, you can see
from the photograph; despite all the madness, you know there's a real
togetherness.' But as is the case for many ex-addicts, moving was crucial.
'I got clean, and to stay clean I knew I had to leave the area.' He has
lived in London since he was 21, going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and
living his life the 12-step way. 'The last time I used heroin was the day
before I came down [to London]. The last time I smoked dope was on the
train down.'

It might not be an exaggeration to say that NA has saved John's life. It
has certainly transformed it. He's married now and has a six-year-old son
and a private practice as a therapist.

He's found his niche.

He's been a resident social worker, a clinical manager.

He set up a rehabilitation project in a prison in Surrey and was
subsequently asked to set up four more. He has worked at the Priory. And
the real reason he wants to do this piece is to publicise his latest project.

Working with an agency called Sharp (Self-help Addiction Recovery
Programme), he is going to open a treatment centre at the end of July in
Rodney Street, in Liverpool's city centre.

The 12-week day programme will be abstinence based - an approach that he
says is missing on Merseyside.

The abstinence issue is part of a much wider debate in the
addiction-recovery field about prescribing practices.

Methadone is commonly prescribed to long-term addicts to help them break
their street-drug habit and stabilise their lives.

But it's highly addictive and as Pete Lock, a probation officer in
Liverpool, points out, 'A lot of people end up being on high levels of the
stuff for years and years, and that's not really what it was intended for.
I know people who've used methadone purely and simply for what it was
intended for - as a short-term means of detox.

It's hard though; it's not a magic bullet and if you're giving someone
methadone and they're still using heroin, they end up addicted to both, and
getting them to stop is then even harder.'

As we walk away from the estate, talk turns to the others in the picture.
Joanne, Julie's best friend, who died in a drink-driving car crash.

A boy who hung himself in prison.

Another who over-dosed. Another who was murdered, the victim of a gay hate
crime.

The rest, the ones that lived and aren't in this piece, are still using
either drugs or alcohol, all bar two.

Julie asks if we'll come back in another 20 years to find out what has
happened to them. Take another photograph. We all smile.

As we go our separate ways I ask Carl if he thinks he'll give John's
treatment centre a go. He says he'd like to. 'Every day is just sitting in,
go out to score, smoke, that'll be it. I'm tired of this. I've been doing
it since I was 14.'

. The Parents Against Drug Abuse national helpline is 08457 023 867; or go
to www.pada.org.uk. For information on Sharp call 020 7351 0217. For
information on Narcotics Anonymous call 020 7730 0009, or go to
www.ukna.org. Thanks to Tony Martin