SPRAY CANS, HEAVY HEADS AND DESPERATE LIVES

Chroming freezes your brain. That's one thing Jenny can remember. "You feel
your head is all heavy," says the 15-year-old from the western suburbs, as
she bounces her daughter on her knee. "You see things that aren't really
there."

One day when she looked in the mirror. "I couldn't see my body," says this
short, articulate teenager, with a round face. "All I could see were veins."

She says she can't recall ramming her best friend's head through a window,
but friends tell her that is what she once did during a chroming bout.

In this flat, humbled suburb, they keep the solvents behind the counter at
the local supermarket. Some of the smaller shopkeepers can spot a potential
market when they see it, though. "They just sell it to you in boxes," says
Jenny. "They don't care about the purpose."

Her boyfriend and the child's father, Ben, 19, sits beside her wearing
track pants and a baseball cap. He speaks slowly. He's on prescription
medication to maintain his former heroin and chroming highs.

Jenny talks the most. She has lots to say. She was addicted to chroming for
two years. She began at 13 and continued on "four or five" occasions after
learning she was pregnant. At the peak of the addiction, her head was in
plastic bags or up against a freshly sprayed wall all day, every day.

While politicians and social workers argue over the merits of supervised
chroming in state-funded centres, the bigger picture is becoming clear.
Chroming is Melbourne's new youth epidemic. It afflicts the very youngest,
including the pre-teens.

"It's now worse than heroin," says Open Family Australia worker Jim
Markovski. He means that the drug is worse in terms of the effect it has on
users' mental health and levels of violence.

The epidemic's beginnings were evident 10 years ago. Authorities and retail
traders never really listened then, says Mr Markovski, but the situation
has never been quite this bad.

Jenny says she stopped chroming when a social worker at the hospital told
her that the potential for deformity was greatest during the first 12 weeks
of Lily's gestation. Ben encouraged her to stop, as well. They're living at
Ben's parents' place, but looking for their own flat.

Ambitions? More kids, they say. Work? Maybe later.

The pair consider themselves luckier than the rest of those in their
chroming circle. There was another big user, a girl, who got pregnant. The
girl has no idea who the father was. "You don't know what you're doing or
who you're doing when you're chroming," says Jenny.

That baby was aborted. Ben snorts. "Probably would have looked like a
rainbow," he says.

Then there was the chromer they knew who died when he fell from a roof. Did
he fall, or was he pushed? Ben and Jenny argue the point. That's the thing
about chroming. The black spots. The potential to do anything. And the
potential harm to oneself. Another chromer friend of Ben and Jenny's has
been a user for seven years. He stutters now. His speech is slurred. He
can't think of the right words. "He's got the personality of an
eight-year-old," says Jenny.

Ben puts his chroming days down to boredom. Jenny admits she was out of
control, and had emotional problems at home. She ended up in a hostel and
says she has been expelled from every school in the immediate area.

She often can't recall what she did yesterday. Sometimes, Jenny won't be
able to remember something Ben said just five minutes ago.

Jenny would chrome at school, in parks, in groups or on her own. She thinks
the problem is growing worse, given the accessibility of spray cans. "It's
a $2.50 high," she says. "Some people get desperate and use fly spray or
deodorant."

Ben becomes the protective, angry father if he sees chromers when he is
with Lily. Contact with users happens a lot in this suburb.

But Jenny looked on with some sympathy when she recently found a
10-year-old chromer on the train, with spray paint down his front. She took
the can off him.

Few non-users might appreciate that there is a hierarchy among drug users.
Mr Markovski says the chromers are considered the lowest. There are "chrome
bashers" who target them. Sometimes, these people are heroin users, who
need to feel superior to someone.

Police have had to be educated, he says. To disturb someone in a chroming
trance can lead to violent outbursts, to self-harm or to harming others.
Chromers, meanwhile, have been taught to chrome in groups and look after
their mates.

The answers to why chroming happens are disturbingly simple - lack of hope,
boredom, accessibility of spray cans and a lack of adequate social
services, say Jenny, Ben and Mr Markovski.

Jenny looks at her daughter, dressed in pink bonnet and coveralls. "I hope
she gets through school," she says. "I hope she finishes what I started."

Names have been changed