"WHEN I first heard my son was using heroin, I thought 'He can't be - he's never been to London'."

Coming from the mother of a 21-year-old man who died from a heroin overdose last year, this might seem a little naive.

But to a generation of working class North-East parents, who grew up largely free of the drugs menace, the thought of a loved-one injecting a Class A drug into their body is as alien to them as the glamour of the West End, or race riots in Brixton.

Paul Knox, a promising amateur footballer and a lab technician earning a decent wage, had been smoking cannabis since he was 14.

He was one of a group of friends who were offered it for free outside their school gates.

Four years down the line, the same friends were offered free heroin and a promise of "the ultimate high" - too strong for impressionable teenage lads to turn down.

"We never thought of heroin until it happened to us. Now I am training to be a drugs counsellor and I cry about my son every day," said Paul's mother, Josie, a care worker and mother of five other children.

"You hear about heroin addicts stealing from their parents to buy for a hit, but Paul was different. We used to agonise about it, but we would sometimes give him money for his habit. The agony he would be in if he was off the drug was too much.

"My husband even drove him to Bowburn and Ferryhill to get wraps of heroin before he went into a rehab centre."

Sedated for four days, Paul's body was free of opiates when he returned from the £2,500-a-week residential detox centre in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

A self-imposed prisoner in the bedroom of his family home in Coxhoe, near Durham City, for a further two months, Paul kept himself free of temptation.

That was until one evening last year when, with Christmas money in his pocket, he was pursuaded by an acquaintance, a drug dealer, to inject some "rocket-fuel" - a particularly potent form of heroin.

It was his clean state before that "hit" that probably killed him. His body wasn't ready for the shock. If he had been using heroin regularly, he might still be here today.

His father, Terry, a long-distance lorry driver, condemns the dealers who preyed on his son and his friends. He says they should be charged with manslaughter.

But he is realistic and honest enough to admit the war on drugs is not black and white.

"The whole issue needs to be looked at," he said.

"My son used to smoke cannabis sometimes, but to get that he had to go to people who had other, much more dangerous things to sell.

"They would say 'I haven't got any cannabis today, but you can try some of this heroin for free'.

"As long as the same people sell both drugs, people will die."

Eighteen months after Paul's death, his mother still clings to one crumb of comfort.

"The doctor told me that he didn't suffer. He would have fallen asleep on a high and quietly slipped into a coma. Then his body would have slowly shut down.

"In my quiet moments, I sometimes think of this."