Pubdate: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 Source: Sunday Mail (UK) Copyright: 2005 Daily Record and Sunday Mail Ltd. Contact: http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2260 Author: Dennis Ellam Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) SMACK ALLEY Scandal Of Street Where Junkies Dump 70 Needles a Day AT 69, Josephine Rooney is a pleasant, respectable, retired lady - one of the few old faces left behind in a once-genteel street that is now a squalid and dangerous drugs ghetto. A former airline bookings supervisor, Josephine is the driving force behind a residents' group demanding action to reclaim the area. Astonishingly, she is also an angel of mercy who does her best to feed and comfort the hopeless heroin and crack addicts who knock on her door for help. Nowadays Hartington Street in Derby is known as Smack Alley, but it was still prosperous and middle-class when Josephine moved here 20 years ago - a parade of grand three storey terraces just a few blocks away from the centre of Derby. Then a "halfway house" hostel for homeless people and addicts on rehab opened at one end of the street, and one by one the old residents moved out. In 10 years, the street's decline has been so rapid that out of 50 houses, only eight are now owner-occupied - the rest have been bought up by absent landlords and converted into cramped bedsits and flats. The last family left more than a year ago. "It became too dangerous, as simple as that," said Josephine. "We were surrounded by addicts looking for drugs, and prostitutes looking to earn money for drugs, and dealers peddling drugs. "There would be syringes out the front every morning. I would walk the kids to school, telling them 'Don't stare at anyone, just keep going straight ahead', and they were clinging on to me in fright. There was just no hope it was ever going to get better. "Hartington Street has been turned into a dumping ground. You want to find the people that society tries to forget? Look around the back of this street... the council, the police, politicians... all seem content to leave things as they are. They're just happy to see the drug problem contained on our doorsteps." But even though she leads the campaign against them, Josephine feels sorry for the addicts washed up here. She used to watch them foraging in bins for food and couldn't bear to see their plight. Now she feeds them herself... handing out free sandwiches every day to junkies who knock at her door. No one, it seems, is turned away. Josephine spends &L&6 a day on loaves from her pension and savings. When I called, one addict with no money for a fix, shaking all over from cold turkey symptoms, hadbeen violently sick in her bathroom. Downstairs, a 19-year-old cannabis smoker was saying he has now tried heroin but is determined, he vows, with tears shining in his eyes, to keep himself off the habit. Why? Because his dad was a junkie. He went back home one day last August to find his father lying on the sofa, lifeless and blue, with the needle still in his arm, and a massive overdose in his veins. "Not me, please not me, I don't want to go that way," he says. In the last two years there have been four drug deaths in Hartington Street. "They tell me I'm crazy, to be supporting the very people we're trying to get out," says Josephine. "But they're victims like us. You can't help but feel sorry for them. "I don't want them here, but as long as they are here then they need help - and when you give help, then you can't judge them." One of the people she refuses to judge is Anthony Gilmour. As he shoots up a needleful of heroin in a filth-infested back yard, he admits it's a squalid way to live - and will be a squalid way to die. "It's killing me and I know it," says Anthony, 39, when the drug has done its trick and the sweats and shivering ease enough to let him speak. "Might be tomorrow, might be next year, but it's coming and it won't be long. I'm a dead man." Along Smack Alley, there are plenty more like him. Hollow-faced, sallow-skinned, ravaged young people made old before their time. In one small corner behind No 40, where Anthony goes twice a day to inject, I counted at least 30 bloodied, discarded syringes. In another there were 40 more - that's 70 a day. Some were stuck into cavities in the brick wall - - a thoughtful act by a junkie to keep them away from small children, says Anthony. Every few days, the city council's Needle Squad take away sackfuls of 300 or 400 at a time. The local action group - or what's left of it - have lobbied politicians, councillors, officials, you name it, but there are no promises, no action. Tony Blair's office passed a letter to John Prescott's, who never replied. From Tory leader Michael Howard, only silence. Local MP Margaret Beckett sent a bland note about ASBOs. The best they have heard is a vague suggestion from the city council, that it might try to halt any more houses being converted into flats. "Too late, too late," says Josephine. "We're already on the way to destruction. We have been left to fend for ourselves - normal rules of law and order don't exist here." At the opposite end of Hartington Street, 80-year-old Mary Beadsmore has lived in the same house for 70 years. She was there as a girl, as a wife and mum of two, and now as a widow with her photos of the place in happier days. The roses she and her late husband Robert planted in their tiny front garden in 1978 will bloom again soon, she says. She still tends them lovingly... pruning, clipping, and every so often picking out the used needles casually tossed around them. HEROIN.. THE FACTS - -A MILLION people are regular users of heroin and cocaine in the UK. - -DRUG-RELATED crime costs the UK taxpayer at least UKP20billion a year. - -THE UK heroin industry is worth more than UKP2.3billion a year. - -A "WRAP" of heroin can be bought for as little as &L&5. - -AROUND 90 per cent of the UK's heroin comes from Afghanistan. - -OPERATION Crackdown has led to around 2,000 arrests and up to 100 kilos of heroin and cocaine have been seized. - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager