THE TOWN THAT WAS LOST AT SEA

The picturesque, and once prosperous, little port of Fraserburgh is now the
heroin capital of Britain. Why are its young people so unable to escape the
drug's deadly grasp? Robert Chalmers reports

Sandy Wisley stops his car outside the house where he found a dead man
washing his hands. "It happened in there," says the Fraserburgh GP, pointing
to the upstairs window of a council flat. The deceased, he explains, was "a
fastidious man. Always immaculate in his clothes and his appearance". He had
been standing at the bathroom sink with the hot tap running, when he
overdosed on heroin. "He slumped forward," Dr Wisley explains, "and his head
became lodged between the wall and a cabinet, keeping him upright. At first
glance, from behind, you'd have sworn he was alive," he says. "But he was
dead. When we found him," he adds, "both arms had been degloved of their
skin. The needle was still in his arm."

Like their doctor, the people of the fishing port of Fraserburgh, in the
north-east of Scotland, have developed a certain tolerance for the grotesque
and the unexpected. As we drive through town on our way to a restaurant, we
pass the place where a woman was stabbed in the face by a drug user,
blinding her in her one good eye. Our route also takes us past a burned-out
terraced house -- a blackened shell with its windows boarded up. This used
to be home to Malcolm, a 23-year-old heroin addict. On the day I write this,
a man is being sentenced for attacking Malcolm with a samurai sword, causing
a foot-long incision running from his oesophagus to his abdomen. The blade
punctured both lungs, his diaphragm and his stomach. For a day or so Malcolm
was not expected to live. He eventually recovered after 11 days in intensive
care.

Discharged from hospital, he spent the night at a friend's house. In the
early hours, his own place was torched, by persons unknown. (Somewhat to the
surprise of locals unfamiliar with the subtleties of the legal profession,
the swordsman -- who was originally charged with attempted murder, then
pleaded guilty to a lesser charge -- was first freed on bail, then given the
Scottish equivalent of a conditional discharge.)

Worse things happen in Glasgow, of course, or Edinburgh, or Aberdeen. What
marks Fraserburgh out, Dr Wisley told me, as we sat down to dinner in a
peaceful croft just outside town, is the extraordinarily high level of
heroin use, especially among young fishermen. How many of the men on the
boats were using the drug? "In the 17-25 age group," he replies, "I would
say around 85 to 90 per cent."

A former athletics champion, Dr Wisley, 51, has been attacked by addicted
patients, one armed with a knife. He was briefly in the news two years ago,
in connection with his controversial practice of prescribing dihydrocodeine
tablets to fishermen, on the grounds that these opiate-based painkillers
(though unlicensed for such use) enable the men to continue working, and
deter them from taking heroin to sea.

In the past, Dr Wisley says, Fraserburgh's fishing crews spent their wages
on powerful cars. Most of its trawlermen, who have the unenviable
distinction of having more heroin users per head than any other trade in the
United Kingdom, have now sold off their vehicles to buy drugs. Dr Wisley
recalls one young man who disembarked at 6pm on a Friday after a week at
sea. "He went home to his mother's, and ate his tea," the GP explains. "Then
he went into town. At quarter to eight we picked him up, overdosed in a pub
toilet." Fraserburgh, in Dr Wisley's words, is experiencing "a bloody
disaster. If this was happening in Manchester or London, there would be a
national outcry."

Fraserburgh's unique tragedy is that it illustrates more powerfully than any
British town I've visited the catastrophic effect that an endemic heroin
culture can have on a community. Ten years ago, the letters page of the
Fraserburgh Herald was dominated by complaints about the fishermen's
drinking, and their habit of parading their cars round the flagpole on the
seafront. Now, the square round the flagpole is quiet and the dockside pubs
are deserted most nights. I walked into one of the bars, the Mariner's, at
nine o'clock one Thursday evening to find it empty except for one customer
who was staring at its large screen. It was showing MTV, on which Neil
Young, as if on cue, was singing "The Needle and the Damage Done". A church
and a hotel in the town have been burned out.

I have to declare an interest at this point. I have friends in Fraserburgh.
This small, hard-working town, handsome rather than picturesque, which is
not even mentioned in passing by the Rough Guide to Britain, is easily my
favourite place in Scotland, if not the UK. It's true that when residents
are speaking to each other in the local Doric dialect, your standard English
is about as much use as a half-forgotten French O-level in the bars of
Marseilles. This is a tight-knit, fiercely proud community of around 14,000.
While locals privately concede that there is not one extended family that
has remained untouched by drug addiction, they are -- to use a cliche where
no other phrase will do -- sick and tired of heroin; sick and tired of the
stigma and creeping ruin it has brought to their community.

Fraserburgh -- where members of the Closed Brethren still serve tea in a
separate room for guests who are not of the faith -- remained barely touched
by the cannabis culture of the Sixties and Seventies. The current epidemic
of heroin addiction has been greeted with bewilderment and disbelief. It's
rather as if vampirism had descended on a remote town in a horror movie. And
strangers who arrive asking questions are about as welcome as someone in the
first reel of a Dracula film wandering into the local village and asking for
a lift up to the castle.

The situation started to become acute seven years ago. Residents vary in
their theories as to why things got so bad so fast. Some say that a dealer
was dispensing heroin to clubbers coming down off ecstasy. People had money.
Prior to the recent devastating cuts in fish quotas, Fraserburgh was a
defiantly prosperous place, with the most fish-dependent economy of any town
in Britain.

The nature of its trade is central to its predicament. Anybody who has ever
been on a trawler will need no help in imagining the appeal of a drug that,
on landing, can give the user the mental equivalent of immersion in a warm
bath. The national policy on heroin treatment is to dispense methadone to be
consumed orally, every day, in the presence of the pharmacist. It's a
strategy clearly unsuited to the lives of working fishermen, who may be at
sea for a fortnight at a time. It was the uniquely problematic character of
their trade that prompted Dr Wisley to turn to dihydrocodeine. His policy
(supported by the handful of doctors I consulted in my own unscientific poll
- -- one described it as "eminently sensible in this exceptional work
environment") -- led one voluntary drug worker to mount a tireless, but
abortive attempt to get Dr Wisley struck off.

The national press, who were briefly in town two years ago to cover the
dihydrocodeine row (which has subsided, though Dr Wisley still prescribes
it), are long gone. And yet -- though you'd never guess it, looking at the
solid granite cottages and the magnificent pelagic, or ocean-going, boats
tied up in the harbour -- Fraserburgh's slow tragedy rolls on. The dead man
at his sink, with his apparent air of scrubbed normality, is a curiously apt
symbol for the town.

"The truly dreadful thing," said Sarah, a woman in her mid-twenties whose
younger brother has overdosed five times, "is that, for young people in
Fraserburgh, heroin use has become the norm. I am abnormal because I don't
take heroin. Everybody is on it. Everybody." She paused. "A few days ago, I
came across a photograph of my class at primary school. I looked at every
face, and every pupil in that picture but one is taking it. There are more
people dead from my younger brother's class than there are from mine," she
went on, "and there are more dead from mine than there are from my
mother's."

A Substance Abuse Service clinic, opened last year, has taken some pressure
off the local doctors. But it has been housed in a decrepit disused garage
next to a carpet wholesaler on an industrial estate -- a site hardly
calculated to boost the self-esteem of potential clients. It's not a place
where anyone would even begin to consider putting a specialist clinic for
asthmatics, or diabetics. One great virtue of its site is that it's hidden
away. The mother of one heroin addict lost her voice from shock when she
found out he was using, four years ago, and she has not spoken a word since.
Many in Fraserburgh still believe that silence and concealment remain the
most appropriate responses to their difficulty.

Jane, a mother in her late thirties, took several days before deciding to
talk to me. "If I'm honest, this is not something that I want to do," she
said, "but I feel that I should. Somebody has to. Many people here," she
added, "get annoyed if you even speak about heroin. They feel you are
betraying the good name of the town. Their attitude is that these people are
just a load of junkies, and the sooner they're dead and gone, the better."

I met Jane on the seafront at Rosehearty, a mile or so up the coast from
Fraserburgh. She came with her son Stephen, a 22-year-old heroin user. We
sat facing the sea, near a cafe called the "Tuck Inn". Its front is
decorated with two painted dolphins: they stand on their tails, beaming
waggishly, a knife and fork in their flippers, beckoning passers-by. The
inside of the diner is now a sombre ruin.

A trawlerman since he was 16, Stephen has overdosed seven times, four times
at his mother's house, and is now too ill to go to sea. He has had no heroin
for a fortnight, though he's taking a cocktail of tranquillisers. It's not
that cold an afternoon, but he's visibly trembling as he draws on a
Marlboro. His mother is an articulate, engaging woman; her expression shows
the extent to which she has had to draw on her considerable reserves of
courage and determination over the past six years. Recently, she says, she
has come close to taking her own life.

Stephen has stolen thousands of pounds from his mother. "In the end," Jane
said, "I opened a special account and put UKP3,000 in it, to pay for his
funeral. I thought I had to keep money safe for that, at least. Then one day
I came in, and the card for that account had disappeared. The bank told me
that there was UKP900 missing."

She still keeps the funeral money aside. "The other night," she says,
quietly, we had a row. I found myself telling him: "Look -- if it has to
happen -- if you have to die -- let it happen now. Let me grieve. Because
I'm grieving already. I'm grieving every day. And yet you are still alive."
A pause. "That," she says, "is how we live now."

Stephen, an intelligent, likeable young man, has had numerous threats from
dealers. "If I have money in my hand, it's like having the drugs in my
hand," he says. "I can't handle money at all. A hundred pounds or a
thousand, I would spend the lot on heroin, then just start taking it, and
keep going, without sleeping, until it was all spent. I live for the day,"
he says, "not for the following morning."

Stephen first encountered heroin when he was 16: a fellow-crew member gave
him a wrap and showed him how to inhale it. "I'd heard other people say how
good it was," he remembers. "If I hadn't heard them talk that way, I would
have said no. Instead I said OK -- I'll try it. It's the worst thing I've
ever done in my life." He stops to light another cigarette. "But if I could
buy a bag tonight, I'd take it tonight."

As a boy, Stephen says, he was terrified of needles. "But it gets to the
point where you are spending UKP300 a day if you are just chasing it. Then
someone points out that if you start injecting, you'll only spend UKP40 a
day." He rolls up his sleeve. "Look at my arms. It's been that way for three
years."

What, I ask Stephen, does he see as his best possible future?

"I see no future," he says. "Unless I could go somewhere where nobody knows
me. Where I'm Stephen again, not Stephen the drug addict."

"But you are not capable," his mother says, "of taking that step."

Stephen, like other young fishermen I spoke to, said that addicted crew
members from Fraserburgh, like their counterparts in other seriously
affected areas such as the Shetlands or North Shields, routinely take drugs
with them on fishing trips. Heroin, I suggest, must be incredibly dangerous
when used at sea. Stephen gives a hollow laugh. "It is an incredibly
dangerous drug on land. It is suicidally dangerous at sea. There is always a
risk of the whole boat going down."

For an addict facing withdrawal in the already oppressive surroundings of a
fishing boat, one of the best opportunities to take heroin comes when they
are on watch, in sole charge of the vessel. In one recent incident, another
fisherman had told me, a crew member found the skipper on the floor of the
wheelhouse. "He was lying there blue, OD'd," he'd said. "With a needle in
his arm. This man was in charge of six other men's lives. Other members of
the crew were drug addicts, and they had what they needed to bring him
round."

Eighteen months have passed since my last visit to Fraserburgh and -- though
its essential character as a charming, welcoming place has not been
altogether destroyed -- I can see a marked deterioration in the
infrastructure of the town. Many small businesses have closed down. Numerous
"For Sale" notices show that others are clearly on the point of taking the
advice on a sign posted in the local travel agent's: "Get Packing".

Sandy Wisley says that the cycle of heroin dependence in first-time users
has been accelerating. Young addicts, whose elder siblings already have the
habit, are, as he put it, "going faster to the needle. The overdoses come at
any time of day now. In the beginning, it was generally a nocturnal
activity."

Several people spoke of a feeling of having been catastrophically failed by
the public services. The Substance Abuse Clinic, despite its squalid
position, has a lengthy waiting-list. Several parents of users complained
that, if they reported a drug dealer to the police, the criminal would go
unpunished while their own house would be raided. "It is generally expected,
and seen as a punishment for talking out publicly," one father told me. "It
happened to us, and I would never, never report a dealer again."

One well-known dealer here has CCTV cameras around his property, which warn
him of approaching traffic. There has been violence -- one young man had his
legs run over by a car, and another was stabbed repeatedly in the legs, then
dumped on a local beach and left for dead -- but such assaults, locals say,
were the work of gangs from the Midlands who have since left the area. Some
believe the police reluctantly tolerate local user-dealers, to discourage
the intervention of more ruthless operators. At Fraserburgh police station,
Inspector Duncan refuted these allegations with some warmth. "We welcome any
information," he said. "We implore people to come forward."

If there is a sense of mounting despair in Fraserburgh, it is not entirely
unrelieved. I met one couple, Alex and Diane, whose two sons have given up
heroin and remained clear of drugs for two years. Before that, the couple
had their carpets burned, their television sold for UKP20, and their windows
broken by dealers. They finally turned their sons out, on the grounds that
keeping them at home was simply subsidising their habit. "I told the boys
they could never come back through the door," Diane said, "till they were
clean."

The two followed a residential rehab programme organised by Teen Challenge,
an evangelical group that runs a drop-in centre called the Solid Rock Cafe,
which is packed every night at weekends, despite its worthy name. (The
American-founded organisation has plans to establish a detox centre in a
remote location out of town.) Alex admits that he is not wild about the idea
of Christian rehab. "The truth is," he says, "that I'd rather have them
happy-clappy than injecting heroin."

But the intense spiritual focus of Teen Challenge isn't for everybody.
Stephen, for instance, told me that he got a place on a religiously oriented
rehabilitation course, but, "I ended up in a room with this guy telling me
he could see Jesus behind me, and could I see him, too? I left thinking,
well, this man's in a worse state than I am."

It has not gone unnoticed in Fraserburgh that, while public money was found
to construct what one resident described as "a 30-grand sculpture of a
fucking fish", there is no sign, as yet, of the kind of large-scale,
government-funded residential rehab centre that this area requires as a
matter of urgency.

Some argue that Fraserburgh's heroin problem will only decline when the
community is starved of funds, as is currently threatened by the stringent
reduction of quotas in the fishing industry, and the steady decommissioning
of boats. "Perhaps the destruction of our livelihood will turn out to be the
only cure for this," Alex said. "But what a sad way for a town to end."

It's a routine experience in journalism to meet people in extreme states of
distress, and walk away. But Fraserburgh -- in my experience -- stays with
you. I had to break off from finishing this article to send a letter of
condolence to a woman there; as I write this, in London, I should be at her
son's funeral. My most enduring memory of Fraserburgh is of standing in the
High Street, looking on as, a few yards away, outside the church, they were
preparing for another of what locals have come to call simply "The
Funerals". The service was for a young man perceived, though not proved, to
have been heavily involved with dealing. As the last of the mourners
arrived, an old man turned to me and launched into a lengthy monologue, in
Doric, that I found incomprehensible except for the words "bloody drugs".

There was a brief commotion in the main square, caused by the large number
of cars and coaches that had brought mourners from Aberdeen. A couple of
uniformed officers arrived, to issue parking-notices and marshal the
vehicles. From the point of view of road congestion, it must have seemed, if
only for a moment, just like the old days, except that this time, the cars
set off at walking-pace, following the hearse; it may be a while before
Fraserburgh is disturbed by some less sombre form of traffic.

Some of the names in this article have been changed.