HEROIN FILLS VOID LEFT WHEN PITS COLLAPSED

'Modern Plague' Hitting Villages Which Have Had Pride Removed

A roomful of ex-miners and their families sat in tears this week as a
neighbour haltingly described the latest agony to befall Britain's former
coalfields. Five young people have died from a "modern plague" of heroin
abuse in the string of villages round Worksop whose names, such as Manton
and Shireoak, recall the lost battles of the 1984-85 coal strike.

Across the road from the town hall, the People's Place drop-in, founded to
help young homeless, reports that 492 of its 546 users are on the drug. So
are 92% of clients brought before magistrates by the probation service. The
town's Labour MP, Jack Mann, reckons that every third constituent is
affected by either heroin abuse in the family or the crime wave needed to
meet dealers' bills of - at the minimum - UKP16,000 per addict per year.

Mann's unique three-day public inquiry at the town hall laid bare what he
described as "communities which have had their pride and prop removed". As
he and a panel including a clergyman, a young councillor, businesswomen and
a grandmother took evidence, a picture emerged which set conventional
assumptions about regeneration aside.

"Jobs are not the point," says Mr Mann during one exchange, when it emerges
that Worksop's pretty, tree-lined streets have only 3% unemployment which
would be nil if so many potential craftsmen and technicians were not knocked
sideways by unmanaged heroin. The new MP has encountered this directly as an
incomer from Leeds. "I've been through the whole thing setting up my
office," he says. "It's been a struggle to find a plumber, an electrician, a
joiner."

The weak spot, relentlessly targeted by pushers from Nottingham, Doncaster
and Leeds has been psychological, not economic, agrees Sandy Smith of Hope
for the Homeless, which runs the People's Place. She says: "There's a
failure of aspiration in families where dad, grandad and great-grandad were
miners, but now there's no pit to go to any more. There's no tradition of
moving away to try something else. And this is a generation which saw its
parents very obviously defeated."

A fat file of research compiled for the inquiry, whose written submission
include one from Tony Blair, paints the pit villages (in reality monotonous
housing estates) as islands with "a cohesion, a reliance on a single
industry and an independent existence. That was their greatest strength when
the mines were producing and is now their greatest weakness." Everything
collapsed with coal. As Mr Mann puts it: "We've got inner city problems but
we haven't got a city to deal with them." The gaps in provision will be the
second lesson to go from the inquiry to the Home Office.

As for official provision, Mr Blair's sympathetic letter speaks hopefully of
the local drug action team, one of 150 which are the government's main
structural weapon for combating drug abuse. Its budget, he says, has
increased this year from UKP791,000 to UKP1,132,000. But problems between
its multi-agency members (councils, health authorities, police) leave the
inquiry wondering how much of this money is going to estate agents and
surveyors: three years after starting to look for a local anti-drugs base in
Worksop, the team still has not found one.

"If this was a business, it would have gone bust," says Mr Mann, to growls
of approval in the town hall's assembly rooms. "If I hadn't found myself an
office here after three years, people would be looking for another MP.
What's going on?" A witness from Bassetlaw district council an swers
haplessly but honestly: "We're in the middle of a statutory public
consultation which means we haven't got an official policy on anything at
the moment."

The funding context is meanwhile a government-required system of bidding for
extra provision which leads to lurches between sudden extra resources and
equally sudden gaps. An addict can be released, heroin-free, from
well-funded Ranby prison to nothing, says Mr Mann. "Without help, the first
thing they do is buy a wrap. For God's sake, do we have to bid for GPs or
elderly people's services? Why for dealing with drugs?"

Meanwhile at the People's Place, where the roomful of addicts get a steaming
hot pie with potatoes and veg for 10p, talk is of "vigilantes" who ambushed
and beat up a series of heroin abusers. The criminal damage inflicted by
addicts, who need an estimated UKP70,000 in stolen goods to make their
annual UKP16,000, causes fury in the wider community. The drugs inquiry is
not popular with many passersby, who see resources going to wastrels.

But the report will ask less for money than for organisation. "Above all, we
need seamless treatment," says Mr Mann. The panel will also call for raising
aspirations in local primary schools, expanding them into village centres to
replace dead King Coal , and try to prevent a second lost generation.