Movie Underscores Scotland’s Heroin Plague

This is a city that has resigned itself to live, and die, with heroin.

Long before “Trainspotting” shed its surreal light on the problem, Glasgow was acknowledged as a European capital for heroin and hopelessness.

In Scotland’s biggest city, whose hard industrial past is eulogized in the song “Dirty Old Town,” about 7,000 to 10,000 of the 650,000 residents are hooked on heroin. Each year, 80 to 100 die of overdoses.

Fewer addicts afflict Edinburgh, where Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel “Trainspotting” was set. The film also was set in Edinburgh.

Heroin took root in the 1980s in the drab towers of public housing rising among the freeway overpasses.

To a greater degree than elsewhere, authorities say Glasgow’s users freely mix cocktails of drugs--prescription pills, booze, marijuana and heroin. Domestic production of amphetamine sulfate--”speed” or “whizz” on the streets--complements heroin imported from former Soviet republics, Pakistan and the Middle East.

“Today, you’ve whole communities on drugs of one sort or another,” said Walter Bell, 37, a Glaswegian who is trying to stay clean after spending half his life stealing and dealing, craving three or four injections per day.

“You’ve some young kids who are scared to take heroin--but speed’s seen as OK. And you’ve wee women with kids on drugs who are taking Valium like there’s no tomorrow.”

Bell bears slash scars on his face and a missing tooth from street fights he has lost: “On heroin you feel like you can beat up anybody you want. But you rarely get fistfights--it’s straight into knives, and sometimes into guns. The boys who get into heroin today won’t reach my stage. Won’t live that long.”

He saw the movie “Trainspotting” with friends and, like many Scots with real experience of heroin, was disappointed. “It showed them making easy money all the time. The film did show them robbing the tourist and stealing the telly off the old folks--but it was all set to music. And you don’t see babies crawling on the ceiling when you’re detoxing yourself. You’ve real bad hallucinations, and you won’t listen to anybody. It’s far more revolting than what they showed.”

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Scottish authorities have responded with one of the world’s most liberal programs of methadone treatment, needle swaps and counseling centers. Their policy of “harm reduction” aims to control, not stamp out, the problem.

“We probably have more heroin injectors per capita in Glasgow than anywhere else,” said Dr. Laurence Gruer, director of the Glasgow Health Board’s network of drug addiction centers. “Glasgow is the most deprived part of Scotland, so it provides the best breeding ground.”

Gruer said his department’s aim is “to help the drug user move away from the most dangerous forms of drug use”--namely, injecting heroin with other people’s needles.

The city has nine centers where used needles can be exchanged for new, no questions asked. In 1994, Gruer said, 30,000 people visited the service but that has dropped by a third, as addicts fearful of catching HIV have switched from injecting to the smoked form of heroin, “smack.”

Despite protests from some doctors and conservatives, since 1993 Glasgow has followed Edinburgh’s lead by implementing citywide distribution of methadone, a heroin substitute.

About 2,000 heroin addicts today pick up methadone from 70 participating pharmacies and take it orally.

“In Britain we’re leading the way with our methadone program. It’s attracted interest from American drug-treatment programs,” Gruer said. “We allow addicts to get hold of large quantities in a controlled way, and they have to take it then and there.”

This prevents addicts from taking half-doses and storing the rest for later, Gruer said. “If you get the right dose, it’s sufficient to block off the parts of the brain that respond to heroin, so there’s no craving. It’s the people who get too little methadone who end up craving more heroin.”

He said the social benefits are obvious in less addict-related crime and a low rate of HIV among injectors, and the police accept this by not arresting those who participate in the city’s heroin programs.

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“They call it harm reduction. But the city has set up a system where if you want to stay on drugs, everything is provided for you--all the methadone and free needles you want. If you want to come off drugs, there’s very little help,” said Maxie Richards, the city’s best-known anti-drug crusader.

Six years ago, while volunteering in a drug detoxification center, Richards opened her middle-class home to addicts seeking personal support. It was a huge change for the 60-year-old former principal of a private school for girls.

“Some people think I must have lost a screw to invite these people in,” she said, gesturing to the guests in her home in Bearsden in northwest Glasgow. “Others think it’s my egotism run riot.

“People have to think what Christianity is supposed to be all about.”

That day, two teenage girls withdrawing from heroin were sharing her spare bedroom, a teenage boy slept on the floor beside the dining room, and three “graduates” were chatting in the cozy living room with its grandfather clock and flop-eared black dog. Sometimes the addicts contact her directly, but worn-out parents also bring their children around.

“I’ve had hundreds through my house and fewer than five have stolen anything, and nothing I couldn’t replace anyway,” she said.

“People assume it’s all down to them being bad people. But if you take the drugs away you’ve got a lovely, lovely person back. The first step is to build up a trusting relationship. They get back some self-esteem right away because you’re trusting them.”

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Paul Silk hasn’t seen “Trainspotting,” because he’s busy dealing with the real thing. As Glasgow’s senior social worker, he is responsible for the city’s detoxification units and 200 counselors in 14 community-based drug projects--each with 400 to 500 clients.

He said Richards “achieves a lot for one person. But it’s just a drop in the ocean.” And many who go through Richards’ house, as with the city programs, end up back in the street, he said.

“There’s a particular culture of drug use in the west of Scotland, where people often start with heroin at an early age,” he said, noting that three in every hundred Glaswegians in their early 20s are involved in heroin.

“For whatever reason, we have a long-standing history of attachment to drugs. For many years it was alcohol, and for many people it still is. But there is a cultural willingness here to experiment with drugs, which moved seamlessly from alcohol in one generation to heroin and speed with the next.”