Special Report - Part Four of Five: Losing The War On Drugs

THE FIGHT TO SALVAGE WASTED LIVES

Almost Unnoticed, A Small Band Of Volunteers And Specialists Struggle With
Scant Resources To Do What They Can To Help Addicts Return To Normal Life

The litany of rape, homelessness, abuse, squalor, suicide, jail and death
begins in Peterhead and ends in Stranraer. This catalogue of horrors was
the result of a week spent with Turning Point, a charity and Scotland's
main drug crisis service for the country's 56,000 addicts.

In Peterhead I meet Terri, a pretty 23-year-old who used to be a model.
She's been on drugs since she was 12, and started using heroin when her
boyfriend began beating her senseless. Once she became an addict her
daughter Aoife was taken into care by social services.

She thought moving to Edinburgh, away from all her junkie pals, would help
her to get clean. She fell in with three Jamaican guys who introduced her
to crack. One night when she was high they taped her mouth and tied her to
a bed. For the next two days they took turns raping her.

Terri's father was a heroin addict, and so is her cousin. She took her
first hit when her own brother rolled up her sleeve and fired a syringe
barrel filled with heroin into her arm. 'I brought myself up,' says Terri.
'Everyone did drugs. I never even knew it was bad.' Terri is pretty much
your average addict.

Turning Point has given her the chance to put her life back together .
Staff got her on methadone, and although she's had two relapses with smack
she's been effectively straight for 25 weeks. It wasn't easy getting on to
methadone, however. No GP in Peterhead would prescribe it for her, and she
had to travel 10 miles to Mintlaw to get a prescription. 'Doctors need to
open their eyes and realise that they are wasting a generation,' she says.

Hardly any GPs in Peterhead prescribe methadone -- the opiate substitute
acknowledged by most drug experts as stabilising addicts' lives and
therefore a key to cutting crime -- according to drug workers. Along the
coast in Fraserburgh, some addicts are waiting seven months to get
methadone from GPs.

Terri's now living in a B&B. It's filled with other formerly homeless young
people and packed with addicts. 'I have to get straight to get my daughter
back,' Terri says.

The head of Turning Point's New Horizon project in Peterhead is Christine
Griffiths. She takes in 90 people a month for counselling and stabilisation
- -- primarily addicts who have been referred to her by police after arrest.
She's mainly funded by the Scottish Executive and the regulations make it
almost impossible for her to take in anyone who comes to the project of
their own accord.

'That means we have to wait until someone is inside the justice system
before we can deal with them,' she explains. This leaves an untold number
of addicts in Peterhead with no option but to commit a crime so that
Griffiths can help them. Her limited resources mean she can reach only 10%
of the town's addict population.

People from the street have to go to the Community Substance Misuse Team
(CMST) -- part of Aberdeenshire Council -- but it has a waiting list of
four weeks. 'Death and crime are the knock-on effects,' Griffiths says.
Part of her work is simply helping long-term addicts. 'Many have no idea
how to pay a bill. Some haven't even heard of September 11. That's not
because they are ignorant -- it's that they've been living a life revolving
round drugs for years.'

New Horizon was refused permission by the CMST and the health board to set
up a needle exchange -- a vital service to stop the spread of illnesses
such as hepatitis C and HIV -- on its premises.

Tommy, one of Griffiths's users, offers to take us round Peterhead. It's a
bleak town. 'There's nothing but smack in this place,' he says. 'I actually
don't know anyone who's not using. I know of whole families who are
addicts. Yet I had to go to Leeds to a detox unit. There's one place in
Aberdeen that I know of that does detox, but it is primarily for drunks and
has only one place for addicts. People use drugs here 'cos there is
literally f*-all else to do. We don't even have a bowling alley, let alone
a cinema.' He started dealing to fund his own habit; by the end he says he
was selling 'gear' to prison officers.

In Leith, Martin Bonnar, who manages Turning Point's Links Project, a
residential unit which can take around 12 addicts in for a month, is
terrified about the rise in crack use and the limited resources he has .

'Once we've done our bit and straightened people out, we need the social
work department and the health board to provide them with aftercare --
otherwise they just relapse again and our work becomes pointless,' he says.

In Edinburgh, unlike Peterhead, many GPs believe that prescribing methadone
is the best option available, but addicts can wait for up to three months
to get a methadone prescription from NHS agencies such as the Community
Drug Problem Service.

In the residential unit is Seamus, 35, who' s been on heroin for seven
years, since the death of his wife and children in a car accident. He was a
sports instructor until then. He's been through eight detox sessions and
failed each time as he had no aftercare from social workers.

He's realistic about methadone -- it's harder to come off than heroin, he
says, and it can damage you (most long-term methadone users have lost most
of their teeth) -- but at least it stops him offending as he doesn't have
to steal to buy 'kit' to beat the cravings. Nor does he have to inject.
That's important to Seamus, as he has hepatitis C.

Then there's Karen, who says she went to the city's Harm Reduction Team --
run by Lothian Primary Care Trust -- and was given 130ml of methadone, even
though she was injecting only one UKP20 bag of heroin a day. 'They were
giving me about the equivalent of six UKP20 bags, they were way
over-prescribing me. This stuff is hard enough to come off without being
given this much of it. I know other girls who were on 180ml and when they
said they wanted more they got more.'

They all favour dihydrocodeine as an opiate substitute over methadone, as
it has fewer side effects and is easier to come off -- but it's very
expensive, so few have ever been prescribed it.

Davy talks about his time in prison. He was arrested on a Friday and held
until Monday. 'I was on methadone, but the cops wouldn't get my
prescription for me, so I was going through cold turkey for more than 48
hours. I was on my knees crying and begging them. I eventually walked out
with two black eyes after they beat me up.

'One of my friends hanged himself in Saughton Prison. He'd been on meth but
when he went inside they gave him nothing. He got into debt buying smack
from prison dealers. The debt got so deep that he knew he couldn't pay it,
so he killed himself. He was 19.'

Many tell stories of how their dealers gave them heroin for nothing the
first few times, until they were hooked. Some were spending up to UKP6000
in three months on heroin. Nearly all were dealers themselves.

Andy shuffles in, limping. He was clean for two years after leaving jail --
where he'd spent 12 years and gained a heroin habit. He got hooked again
when he broke his leg and his doctor prescribed him eight dihydrocodeine a
day for the pain, then stopped the medication with no reduction. 'He made
me an opiate addict again and I had no alternative but to go back to
smack,' he says.

In Stranraer, Tom McIntosh is fire-fighting on behalf of Turning Point. Of
the six addicts I speak to, only one is on methadone. The rest are still on
heroin as they can't get prescriptions.

Young mothers who are addicts are stuck in a dreadful Catch-22 situation.
If they go to a social worker they will have their children taken away; if
they don't go to social work they can't get access to the help they need to
get off drugs. Donna, who's 26, desperately wants to get into rehab, but
the fear of losing her child means she can't ask for help from the state.
The only time she was offered methadone was when she was pregnant. 'They
would have been happy for my baby to be born rattling from methadone
addiction,' she says.

Drug workers in the port are angered at the almost complete lack of
facilities for addicts. They blame the local Drug Action Teams, which are
meant to co-ordinate local drug policy, for inaction. Most GPs here don't
prescribe methadone either, and many are written off as 'bumpkins' for
failing to see that it's a doctor's duty to help people. McIntosh believes
we should treat drugs like homosexuality. 'I think it's worth taking the
law away from issues of personal choice. We have to learn as a society that
people will go on taking drugs. We need to learn how to take drugs safely
to reduce harm,' he says.

Shaun, one of the Turning Point addicts, has been waiting for a methadone
prescription for two years. Stranraer Turning Point is planning to open its
own medical practice so that addicts can get methadone within two weeks.
Shaun was once accepted into a rehab centre for a year's stay. He was still
stealing to support his heroin habit while waiting to be admitted. Two
weeks before he was due to go into rehab, he was arrested and jailed for 13
months. 'The time I could have spent in rehab getting off drugs was spent
in jail using drugs,' he says.

As in Peterhead, there are few detox facilities and no aftercare. James was
lucky and got the one bed in Crichton Royal Psychiatric Hospital which is
used for detoxing addicts. He came out with no support and relapsed
immediately. 'I'd have been as well off detoxing at my mum's,' he says.

The total failure of the system in Stranraer has had a devastating effect
on the lives of addicts. Katrina, who was a victim of child abuse and then
abused while in a care home, talks often about killing herself. Katrina's
friend Emma also says she told her doctor she was suicidal. He told her
'Don't worry, you won't kill yourself' and did nothing else for her. Emma's
one experience of methadone ended abruptly when her doctor tested her
positive for opiates. She'd relapsed once and taken a hit of heroin. By
then she'd got herself a job and a house, but her doctor threw her off the
methadone course and she ended up back on drugs.

Things work a little better in Glasgow. Turning Point's offices near the
Clyde see 200 people a day come through the doors, many for methadone. It
also runs a 24-hour needle exchange. If Stranraer and Peterhead had the
money and support they could do the same. Glasgow also has a residential
12-bed crisis unit which takes in the most 'chaotic' addicts for 14 days.
Thirty per cent of all addicts seen here are homeless.

George Hunter, who runs the service, says: 'We have up to 15 people chasing
a bed at any one time. We work on the basis that when one becomes available
we take in the very worst case, one in danger of dying. Many leave and go
back to being homeless or end up in hostels, which are drug environments.'
Turning Point in Glasgow is the busiest drug service in the UK.

Glasgow's Drug Problem Service, which is run by the health board, has a
methadone waiting list of a few months. Andrew Horne, the effective head of
Turning Point across Scotland, believes methadone is the best way of
"reducing harm to society and the individual', although he would prefer
prescription heroin. 'If you have a clean supply you can be a functional
adult, holding down a job and a family -- despite still being an addict,'
he says.

'Once you prescribe opiate substitutes,' he says, 'you see crime cut. For
every seven crimes there were, there will only be one. I often believe that
addicts in areas like Peterhead, where they are not prescribing methadone,
could take the NHS to the European Court and ask 'Why does someone in
Glasgow get methadone but I don't?' It seems that the NHS is from the
cradle to the grave -- unless you are a drug user.

'There's also a dearth of social workers in this city. How can we do the
intensive work with addicts if there aren't the people qualified to do it?
Society has brought this problem on itself. We tried to open premises in
Paisley but the local paper ran a campaign saying 'No Junkie Rehab Here'.
We pulled out eventually because of this nimbyism. Paisley is poor, and it
was addicts from that area we would have been helping. In the end I thought
'f* the bastards'. We have to realise that this isn't just a problem for
the addicts we are treating today. In 10 or 20 years time I'm going to be
caring for their children too. We have to wise up.'

In the residential unit at Turning Point in Glasgow, Anne-Louise is
comforting Paula, a pretty but weary 20-year-old who's just arrived here
after five years spent working as a street prostitute. Paula, who was in
care and now has her own child in care, is trembling and wearing a t-shirt
which reads Drop Dead Gorgeous. Her child's name is tattooed into a heart
on her arm.

Anne-Louise is telling Paula how she used to sleep in closes with her
boyfriend for two years. Paula's not listening: she's rattling for her
methadone and tranquillisers and has 35 minutes to wait. She gets up while
Anne-Louise is in mid-sentence, saying she's going to beg staff to give her
some early. They'll refuse.

'Two people lifted a spoon to shoot up with yesterday and just walked out,'
Anne-Louise says as Paula leaves. 'F*ing smack. I wish it didn't exist.
It's the devil's drug. It only brings heartache and pain and waste. It took
my whole life -- and hers by the look of it -- and left us with nothing.'