COAL'S GONE, HEROIN'S IN

Sunday Mirror, Feb 1, 2004 by COLIN WILLS

THE young bodies are discarded as casually as sweet papers. Crammed into wheelie bins or left in sheds, shop doorways and derelict houses.

These grim surroundings have become the last resting places of a lost generation. They should have grown up to be proud, productive men, following in their fathers' footsteps, hacking coal from the ground. Instead at the Hope drop-in centre in Worksop - once the pulsing heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfield - the talk is only of funerals.

Twenty years after the the most bitter dispute of modern times, the 1984 miners' strike, children and grandchildren of the defeated miners are dying. Virtually all the youngsters at Hope are victims of a drugs crisis of epidemic proportions.

Heroin addiction in Britain's coalfields, where the pits were ruthlessly closed by Margaret Thatcher, is running at 27 per cent above the national average. In Wakefield heroin cases have soared by 3,361 per cent in four years. In South Wales drugs campaigners say the valleys are "awash with heroin."

MP John Mann describes the situation in his Bassetlaw constituency in Nottinghamshire as "appalling." Everyone here has lost at least one friend, their names recited quietly, the terror of their last moments recalled almost in whispers.

One was 29-year-old Kelvin Baker whose death shocked people who thought they had become unshockable.

"Kelvin? Oh yeah, they found him in a rubbish skip next to a block of flats," says 19-year-old John Proctor, thin as a stick under his England football shirt. "He collapsed and died after shooting up. It was his mates who dumped him there. Desperation really.

"They didn't want to phone the police 'cos a lot of drugs were being done in the house where he'd been staying and they were scared of being charged with something. Maybe manslaughter or attempted murder if they'd helped him inject.

"I heard they tried everything to bring him round. Ran a cold bath and threw him into it, burned him with a cigarette lighter to try and shock his system back to life. But it was no good. So they got him out of the house and that's where he ended up."

John Proctor knows all about death and funerals. "I went to Stuart Turner's not long ago," he says. "He was a good friend. I didn't stay long as his mum wasn't keen on having drug addicts hanging around. I went back later and left a bunch of flowers."

Thirty-year-old Stuart's death three months ago illustrates how heroin maintains its grip to the end. He was in hospital with pneumonia and kidney failure as his body finally gave up after years of heroin abuse. Yet a craving for heroin drove him to get out his hospital bed and discharge himself to get one last hit. Within 24 hours he was dead.

In the face of such events, no-one is under any illusions about the risks they run. John Proctor is typical of many living in a community where the dream of a secure future has disappeared. The son of a miner who lost his job, John now lives with his mother, Dawn, 37, who is also a heroin addict.

They are trying to get off it together...so far unsuccessfully. Most days they survive on a prescribed heroin substitute, but they still need heroin to sleep at night. "It helps blot out the pain and makes you forget," says Dawn.

There is much to forget in both their lives. Dawn, an attractive woman, worked in saunas and massage parlours to help finance her habit. John has been jailed three times for shoplifting and is banned from every shop in Worksop. They both need around pounds 60 a day to feed their addictions.

Dawn has no doubt the personal disasters that have befallen so many here stem directly from the strike. "There were six pits around here," she says. "After the strike they closed one after the other. There was no work, nothing at all. A lot of marriages broke up because of the strain of it all. Mine did. All we seemed to do was argue and fight."

Worksop, outwardly a serene market town, is surrounded by pit villages, housing estates grouped around mine workings now landscaped and flattened. When the pits closed, a way of life that had sustained generations of families disappeared overnight

"When lads reached 16, an official from the National Coal Board would come to the school to sign them up," said Mr Mann. "The following Monday they reported to the pit."

And there was genuine pride in the work and a degree of togetherness unequalled in any other industry. Miners walked to the pit together, drank together, looked out for one another underground.

When the "Pit Closed" notices went up, all this evaporated. "Heroin filled the gap," says Donna Marsh, whose son Gary, 22, is an addict.

She has paid pounds 250 for Gary to have an implant which temporarily stops the craving. "It gives me six weeks of peace," she says. "Six weeks of not having to worry where he is at 3am. The trouble is it wears off." Donna, a helper at Hope, knows the real solution goes beyond implants. "The problem runs deep in a community," she says. "When they shut the pits a whole way of life finished. These were one-industry villages and youngsters were left stranded. There was no work - and there were no role models for them either.