'Why drugs won't destroy our town'

WAYNE must have been 14 or 15 when he started smoking dope. Like the rest of his mates in Seaham, County Durham, he didn't take drugs very seriously. It was just a bit of a laugh, something most people did. "We always used to smoke a bit of cannabis, we thought nothing of it," he says.

Wayne says he had no interest in heroin until a newcomer arrived from neighbouring Hartlepool a few years later. "When I was about 18, a new lad came on the scene who was a heroin addict. I didn't even know what it was."

The new 'friend' showed Wayne how to smoke heroin and that's when it all started. "It just took over from there. My life went totally downhill," he remembers.

"I didn't know what addiction was. I thought people could smoke cannabis and not get addicted so the same must be true of heroin. I thought drugs were drugs - you take them or you don't take them."

Now 27 and a successful graduate of a remarkable anti-drugs community project in Seaham, called Free The Way, he gets a haunted look when he remembers what it was like to be addicted to what users call 'gear'.

"At first you enjoyed it, you knew you were changing but you didn't realise what was happening - that you were getting hooked on heroin," says Wayne, who has managed to stay off heroin for three years after the Free The Way project took him under its wing.

The first thing was the need for money to feed his growing addiction to heroin. "At first you could manage, you could borrow money from people around you because they didn't realise you were an addict," he says.

WheN this source dried up, Wayne sold anything he could get his hands on, from his own clothes to household appliances. After a while, there was nothing left to sell and Wayne started lifting things from shops to get money for drugs.

"I wasn't a good thief - I didn't have the bottle so I hung around with younger ones who did. They did the thieving and shoplifting and I made sure I got a share."

Always a tough, heavily-built young man who wasn't frightened to use his physical power, he found that he could intimidate younger addicts and even dealers into keeping him supplied with heroin or the money to pay for it.

Trying to feed his escalating habit, Wayne started dealing in cannabis.

But one day he was picked up by the police, convicted of drug dealing and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.

When he came out of prison, he quickly slipped back into his old habits and went down and down. After couple of near-fatal overdoses and a break-up with his then girlfriend, who left him with their young daughter, Wayne became desperate to break with heroin.

"I had got to the state where I didn't want to see anybody. Everybody knew I was on heroin. I couldn't even get served in shops," he says.

At that time his mother, one of the founders of the Free The Way project, offered to help him get off heroin. She obtained a supply of 'blockers', medication used by the drugs service to help addicts come off heroin.

Unfortunately, Wayne told her that he had been free of heroin for some time when he took the first pill when, in reality, he had just injected some gear an hour earlier. "I reacted really badly and they had to rush me to hospital," he recalls.

"Within an hour I was like a zombie. My eyes sank into my skull. I was in agony because of withdrawal symptoms and throwing up buckets of black stuff."

Wayne became so ill that he couldn't even walk unaided. When he was eventually allowed out, he stayed on the anti-heroin medication for a year and beat his addiction, with the support of his family and Free The Way.

Now a volunteer at the Seaham project, counselling other heroin addicts, he's upbeat about his life.

"I've been clean for three years now and I feel that I have done more in that time than in the rest of my life," says Wayne, who is studying to become a qualified drugs worker. "I have now got some great friends. From where I have come from it is as good as winning the lottery. I have got everything I want and can honestly say that I will never take heroin again."

But while Wayne, like many other former addicts in the Seaham area, is off heroin, he believes the drug problem in the rundown, former mining town is getting worse. "I don't know the number of people using heroin now but it must be into the hundreds. When I started it was only a handful," he says.

That's certainly the view of Jimmy, another former addict who now counsels addicts at the Free The Way project in Church Street. "Heroin has ravaged Seaham. It is cheap and is widely available on the street," says Jimmy, 37, who moved to the town after hearing about the success of Free The Way in helping addicts get clean.

"That is why Free The Way is so important. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for these addicts. The staff are here every day dealing with the homelessness, hopelessness and low esteem of heroin addicts. They are mothers and counsellors all rolled into one."

Sandra Goggins, co-founder of Free The Way, had no idea that her son was a heroin addict until her daughter told her more than three years ago.

"My son had overdosed. He was actually pronounced dead but they brought him round. I felt I had no-one to turn to," says Sandra.

The spark that became Free The Way was ignited when she burst into tears at the care home she managed. "I was talking to my boss, Betty Geary, about my son and I just broke down. We decided that nobody else should have to suffer and we would form a group for parents, carers and anyone who wanted to support heroin addicts."

Betty, who does not have any family members directly involved in heroin addiction, used her connections with St John's Church to allow the new group to hold weekly meetings for parents in the church hall.

After a few weeks, the meetings took off, and soon the County Durham Drug and Alcohol Action Team and the Easington Primary Care Trust were offering financial support.

With a grant which allowed them to rent an office in the centre of Seaham and take on paid staff, the centre has played an increasingly important role in persuading local heroin addicts to seek help and putting them in touch with the County Durham drugs service.

But why the name, Free The Way? Sandra is blunt: "We tell addicts they can either follow the way out of addiction or end up dead."

With extra resources pouring into drug services in the North-East, addicts who come to the Free The Way office for help can now get on treatment programmes within days rather than months.

"Up to last October we had a long waiting list. People were waiting six months to go on a course of treatment. Kids are now getting treatment within two weeks of coming through the door," says Sandra.

In the last two weeks alone, seven young addicts who came to the centre for help have started on the programme designed to get them off heroin.

"Many people are back with their families for the first time for years," says Sandra.

The last word goes to Wayne: "Everybody who comes here is somebody's son or daughter. At least somebody is going to do something about heroin addiction and we are not going to just ignore it and sweep it under the carpet."

* Free The Way at 22 Church Street, Seaham, is open from 8.30am to 4.30pm every day except Sunday. To contact the office, ring 0191-581 3298.

* The names of the two reformed heroin addicts have been changed.