EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 23

October 2000

ON THE STREETS OF GLASGOW
The city where we will be holding our Year 2000 Conference

IS THERE A WAY OUT OF THIS?

James Marshall - Aged 28

I have been homeless in Glasgow for the last six years. I first became homeless when I fell out with my mother and father, I was twenty-two years old at the time. We fell out due to family matters and because of my drug taking. It has been really bad over the last five years because I’m wandering the streets and feeding a drug habit. It’s worst when you have to sleep out on the streets in the winter with the rain coming down and the cold nights.

I grew up in the Possel Park area of Glasgow which is pretty rough. It’s full of drugs and the people are not very nice. I would say that it is one of the worst areas in Glasgow.

I’m a heroin user and I use as much as I can possibly get, it could be thirty pounds or it could be forty pounds a day.

My day starts when I wake up in the morning and I go out begging on the streets in Glasgow city centre to try and get money for my drug habit, my food and my tobacco. I can earn twenty to twenty-five pounds a day, or even thirty pounds a day, through begging. It is best to beg at the weekends because through the week is not that good. I sleep under the motorway. I have a couple of blankets and I use the bushes for shelter when it’s raining.

I have been in prison a number of times. It started when I turned sixteen and I got into trouble with the law for vandalising, shoplifting and eventually drug dealing. I was selling drugs and I ended up getting caught. They gave me a eighteen month prison sentence for twenty pounds worth of heroin. I have been in and out of prison for the odd theft and that. Prison has not really helped me much because there are more drugs in prison than there are out on the streets.

I do need a rehabilitation programme to help me get off drugs. I would love to give it a try anyway. There is not much here in Glasgow for people trying to come off drugs. There is the Mission and they try to take you in and help you out. I’m an only child, it’s just me, my mother and my father, but I don’t see them now so I’m on my own. I do have a lot of friends on the streets, people who are in the same position as myself. Glasgow is one of the worst places for people out on the streets.

There is a soup run on every Monday to Wednesday night. Then there is a place called the Wayside, that’s a place you can go to where voluntary workers give you soup and tea. We also have a soup bar that moves around, there you can get rolls, cakes, orange juice, coffee and tea. They’re really helpful.

I first started taking drugs because the crowd I was involved in was taking them and it has just carried on from there. I was fifteen when I first started dabbling in cannabis and then I went on to LSD, Speed and then heroin. With heroin when you wake up in the morning you feel in a right bad way because you haven’t had a fix. I need a fix in the morning because I feel totally ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. I usually have my first fix at about nine in the morning. I try to make enough money the night before begging so that I’ll have a fix for the morning. Normally three fixes a day will do me, with one at night before I go to sleep. It puts your mind at ease and you stop worrying about things like the past.


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