Pubdate: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 Source: The Guardian, UK Contact: INSIDE STORY: MY DAUGHTER, THE JUNKIE It is every parent's nightmare: your child has become a drug addict and, unable to break the habit, she's become a prostitute to pay for her crack and heroin. JILL TURNER talks to Angela Harrison, who found that keeping a diary of her daughter's spiral of self-destruction has kept her sane Angela Harrison is in the front room of a Victorian terrace house in a smart suburb of Stratford-upon-Avon, leafing through her photograph album. Neat in skirt and sweater ensemble brightened with patterned scarf, pearl earrings and gold-winged spectacles, she is the image of a Sunday school teacher, or music mistress. But the story that unfolds as she flips over the pages of pictures is a grim parody of middle-class family life. She chronicles her daughter, Jamie's, development as she goes: 'Here she is with her brother; and in her confirmation dress; here she is at 14, a bit difficult she was then. 'And here she is getting ready for work. She was working all over England as a prostitute at that time, but if you look at the young looking girl in this other picture, you wouldn't believe it would you? Oh, and this is the day she escaped from prison. We went to the park.' She turns another page. A grey-faced, unhappy and undernourished girl in her early twenties squints out of the photograph. 'This is her when she was on crack.' She points to another picture, 'And this is when she was on heroin. You can see the difference. She looks rougher, doesn't she? She acts rougher, too. Of the two I prefer the crack. She always speaks better when she's on crack.' All this is delivered in the bright, chirpy, 'chin-up' voice characteristic of English ladies of a certain age and upbringing. Its breezy politeness is eerily at odds with the story it tells; a story of drug addiction (amphetamines, cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin), prostitution, crime, prison, suicide attempts, violence, murder, poverty, abduction and abandoned children. Up until her teens, Jamie Harrison had led the life of a normal middle-class girl - parties, ponies, the Guides, family days out, school, music lessons, hobbies and a comfortable life with her mother, father and older brother in a pretty, 17th-century house in the Warwickshire countryside. As she grew older she became interested in art, dressmaking, clothes and make-up and threw the occasional adolescent tantrum, but nothing serious. Until one night nine years ago when Angela, in the process of divorcing her husband and recovering from a kidney transplant, got a call from the police to say her 15-year-old daughter had been arrested for possession of cannabis. Angela, now 53, remembers: 'It was horrendous, seeing my daughter down at the police station, photographed and finger-printed like a criminal. I didn't know anything about the drug world, I didn't know anything about anything, and I believed her when she said it would be a one-off thing.' Jamie went to art college, became pregnant by a known drug dealer and moved into a home for single mothers with her new-born son. From there things went downhill. Her mother discovered she was taking speed and learnt she was working as a prostitute to pay for a drug habit that had stretched to crack cocaine and, later, heroin. After Max, now eight and in the care of his grandmother, two more children were born - to two different boyfriends. Jamie resorted to crime and was held in custody on numerous occasions, although she was luckier than some of her friends who OD'd or were murdered. Sitting back in her chair by the fire, beside which bookshelves carry drugs information guides alongside biographies of Nelson and Churchill and gardening books, Angela adds: 'I was very lucky, both with the drugs and the prostitution, in that she was living away from home. It has kept it at a distance. I know she's a prostitute but I haven't seen what she's done. I have had the aggression and the lies but I have not had to see her taking the drugs, or the immediate effects... Though recently,' she adds in her bright, little voice, 'when she dropped her methadone bottle and it broke but they wouldn't give her any more, I asked her home for a couple of days. When I arrived at the flat to pick her up, the dealer had just delivered some heroin and she took it there and then whilst I was in the room. She just smoked it... ' Her voice trails off, but picks up again almost as if she is telling a joke: 'She was heaving all the time, so I couldn't understand why she took it. She didn't seem to enjoy it; but then I could see the relief in her face. She has told me she enjoys it. I have asked her many times if there was anything I could have done to have stopped her getting into drugs and she says no. I think it was the excitement she craved.' When Angela talks about Jamie working as a prostitute, it is as if she is describing a wayward daughter getting dressed up for a night out at a disco. She even jokes about finding huge packets of condoms among her daughter's possessions. A couple of photographs show Jamie in lurid, almost clown-like make-up, in short-skirt-high-heel street girl uniform, taken by Angela on one occasion when she arrived as Jamie was leaving for 'work'. 'I was used to seeing her in normal everyday clothes but she was in a mini outfit looking all glitzy, with her stockings halfway up her legs and when she bent over you could see her bottom.' For a moment Angela's voice breaks, becomes slower, softer, sadder. 'It became reality then. You know it happens but you don't think about it. You have to joke, to laugh and close your mind to what happens when she goes out there, what she does, who she meets. If any parent thinks about the drug taking and the effects on their child, how they're feeling or the prostitution, it would hurt so much you'd never survive.' Over the last nine years, Angela chronicled her experiences and feelings in a series of diaries, largely as a therapeutic exercise. She has now published them in a book, Crackhead, which has been a source of information to parents and grandparents in her position and a teaching and training aid in schools, drugs action groups and among social services employees. The last decade has been a long fight for Angela, who is now bringing up Max on her own. Jamie's other two children, aged three and five, are in foster care together. Jamie, now 25, is still on crack and heroin and still working as a prostitute. Before Christmas she was rushed to hospital after suffering a minor cardiac arrest as a result of taking 'dirty' drugs. Angela hasn't seen her since Boxing Day, or heard from her since mid-January. Promises are broken, arrangements to meet never honoured, so Angela is forced to ask the police or call the addicts, pimps and prostitutes she has come to know through her daughter. The news has not been good, as she's discovered her daughter is now needling heroin. 'I dread the phone. Every night I pull it out of the wall fearing a call from Jamie, or one of her friends with yet another crisis she's in. The one thing I had to learn was to say 'no', for my own sake and for the sake of my grandson, because mentally and physically I can't cope anymore. It's like a divorce. You have to make that final decision to pull away.' The decision to distance herself was made last summer, when Angela's book ends with Jamie on a methadone programme and promising faithfully, enthusiastically, to go to college, clean up and train to be a counsellor. 'Within a few days, she'd disappeared and used the lot. I knew then... ' Angela makes a gesture of hopelessness. 'I knew then it was going to go on and on and on. 'I would never let her down,' she adds, quietly. 'I'd like to go and see her now, but I don't think I can face what I might find. I love her, but in some ways the person she is now is not the daughter I knew and loved. In a way I want to grieve for the daughter I lost, but I can't because she is still alive.' Crackhead by Angela Morrison is available for £9.99 plus £2 p&p from Debut Publishing, PO Box 178, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, CV37 6WX (cheques made payable to Debut Publishing). Grandparent and Grandchild Support (for relatives of drug users), set up by Angela Morrison, can be contacted at the same address.