Pubdate: Sun, 26 Sept 1999
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/

HEROIN USERS START AT EIGHT 

It's pounds 5 a bag. We'll need body bags, too

So far this year 108 addicts have died on the streets of Glasgow. The
107th was a Minister's son. John Sweeney reports

Macduff Street's finest hung out of the top-floor window of number 53
in a rundown part of Glasgow as the Government Minister's son left
number 49 in a black body bag.

A taxi drove up the street, past the houses as blank and terrible as
faces without eyesockets, their windows blinded by metal sheets, past
the reinforced steel doors, past the litter of plastic cones and bags
and the broken Hoover, past the shards of shattered glass, past the
human excrement and the syringe needles, past the grafitti backing the
IRA, and a pitifully thin pasty-faced wreckage of a man came out.

The wreckage took in the silent, clumsy procession of coppers,
ambulancemen, hangers-on, corpse in body bag and all, and then the
junkie walked up to number 53 to score. The cycle of heroin purchase,
injection, rapture, overdose and death continues, every bit as bleak
as the final scene in Roman Polanski's Macbeth .

Hugh McCartney was 23, recently released from prison and the 107th
drugs death in Strathclyde so far this year. His passing made the
headlines simply because he was the youngest son of Cabinet Office
Minister Ian McCartney. You won't have heard of number 108, Craig
Montgomery, a 29-year-old junkie from a former Ayrshire pit village.

Hugh's mother, Nett, 57, spoke for the Minister and every parent of
the 1,000 or more young Britons who will die similar deaths this year
when she said: 'He was not just a junkie. He was my son. He was my
baby.'

The Minister is hugely liked in Westminster. He and Hugh's mother, his
first wife, divorced in 1986. They have both remarried. By all
accounts, both Hugh's parents fought very hard and long to keep Hugh
from his cycle of heroin addiction, decline, poverty, petty crime,
shoplifting and more heroin.

The cause of his death has not been officially established yet. Heroin
is corrosively addictive. The drug switches off the body's natural
painkillers, leaving the addict craving for it. No heroin, and all the
pain centres in the body start almost 'screaming'. This is 'cold turkey'.

Not that many people can bear to come off it for good. Although heroin
is notoriously available in British prisons, the quality is often
extremely poor. It is a commonplace that junkies who have been in
prison crave good heroin when they are freed. They take too much, like
a starving man bursting his belly with too much food, and overdose.

One of the grim ironies of Hugh's life was that he was named after his
grandfather, Hugh McCartney, Labour MP for Dunbartonshire East from
1970 to 1987. Another was that he was desperate to get out of Macduff
Street. He had just come out of Barlinnie prison, a four-month
sentence for carrying a knife in public, but Macduff Street was worse.

It is not hard to discover why. The 'weegie schemers' at number 53 are
contenders to be the ultimate neighbours from hell, a threatening gang
of teenage junkies, out-of-control, seemingly beyond the law, dealing
heroin and other drugs to, among others, children as young as seven.
The police were around Macduff Street for a few days after the body
was found last week. Then they left. They would return to drive past
the house in a large Transit van, and then go off again. I hid in a
house overlooking number 53, and watched a stream of junkies turn up
for drugs, as the youths inside screamed, swore and sent bottles
crashing on to the pavement and apparently made a large amount of
money for the dealer who controls them.

One old lady, Shirley, has lived on Macduff Street for 18 years. She
eases her racking cough with 10-minute bursts on a ventilator and
watches them and their clients via a gilt-framed wall mirror.

'Hugh was a nice boy, very quiet. He was small and stocky, always neat
and tidy,' she said. 'He used to disappear every now and then when his
mum took him away. She was running herself off her feet to help him.
I'm very sorry for the family.'

A stream of swearing from across the street interrupted her. 'It's
them,' she said. Through the window you could see three lads, aged
around 15 or 16, play-fighting in the top flat.

'If I had the puff, I'd bomb them. I've seen girls of 13 and 14 stay
there overnight. I've seen a mother with a toddler come to that place.
And I've seen boys of seven, eight, 10 turn up.'

She told me the story of Wee Willie, one-time neighbour of Hugh
McCartney, who lived on the bottom floor of number 53: 'He's a wee
man, a bit simple. He can't read or write and has a speech impediment.
But he's a gentle soul. They came down to him at all hours, asking for
matches, for spoons, for foil' - the classic implements for cooking
heroin prior to smoking or 'jagging', or injecting, it. 'Wee Willie
was terrified. He managed to escape, to get a new place to live in.
But no one dares cross them.'

A new figure turned up on the street. The dealer. His head was shaven
bald, with heavy, black eyebrows, suggesting the Hood in Thunderbirds
- - thick-set, hefty, with more meat on him than any of the junkies or
the lads we had seen so far. He wore a blue puffer jacket and
box-fresh khaki yellow designer boots, and he strutted up and down
bellowing orders to the gang in the top flat.

There were no police around, only a frightened old lady watching
through a mirror. As the dealer bawled, she switched on her ventilator
and placed the plastic mask to her mouth.

The economics of heroin dealing were explained by a drugs counsellor,
Michael Czerkas, who works 300 miles away on the Knowle West council
estate in Bristol. 'The wholesale price of an ounce of pureish heroin
is around pounds 800. Dealers never sell pure heroin. They cut it,
say, five times. So for an outlay of pounds 800, the dealer sells 500
small bags at a tenner a bag: pounds 5,000. He's making a profit of
pounds 4,200 on every ounce of smack.'

Czerkas is paid pounds 12,000 a year for his work among the young
junkies of Bristol's most notorious estate. So with three one-ounce
heroin deals - taking perhaps half an hour - a dealer can make more
than a committed drugs worker does in a year. As Margaret Thatcher
said: 'You cannot buck the market.'

'Prohibition isn't working,' said Czerkas. His fears are backed up by
colleagues in Sheffield, Bury and Glasgow, all of whom told The
Observer that heroin use was becoming more widespread and the users'
average age falling.

The grim news is confirmed by research carried out by Professor Neil
McKeganey of Glasgow University. He said: 'We' asked drug-using 11 and
12-year-olds in Scotland if they had tried some form of heroin.
Between 5 and 6 per cent of them said yes. Five years ago, the
percentage would have been zero.

'We now have to start looking at eight-year-olds. It used to be
assumed that you wouldn't find any heroin users of that age. I do not
think that is now a reasonable assumption.'

The news from Afghanistan is bleaker yet. There has been a bumper
opium crop this year. You can buy pounds 5 bags of heroin in Britain;
the price may well fall next year. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Derek Rea