This is the Gallowgate Family Support Group and we support and help the parents and families of drug addicts.

We’ve been in existence since about 1991. We came together to help each other because we realised that we couldn’t help our children. That was kind of frustrating for us and we didn’t understand it at first. Through the years we started to understand about addiction and we came to realise that we couldn’t help our children. We give each other moral and spiritual support and practical help.

Through the years we have concentrated more on practical help; more than shoulders to cry on. Once you’ve been coming here for about six weeks you start to understand the things that an addict will do to you and if you let them do it, it’s not the addicts fault, it’s yours.

We received some money from the National Lottery about six years ago and managed to buy a minibus and get three years running costs. Over the last three years we have managed to get money from other charitable organisations. We use the minibus to run families to see their addicts in prisons, hospitals and rehabilitation units. Glasgow’s a funny city because the rehabilitation units are outside the city so it’s hard for the families to visit. With the minibus they can visit now with no problems.

We live in a city area at the far east end of Glasgow. Straight across the road is Celtic Football Club. There are large employers such as Barr’s Iron Brew factory, the Ford Shopping Centre – one of the biggest shopping centres in Glasgow. The housing estates around here are completely run down. There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of addicts. There’s a lot of stealing and vandalism. A lot of the shops are locked because they’ve been held up by addicts with dirty needles and knives. To get a hair cut in these communities you’ve got to tap the door before they let you in. There has been two muggings actually inside the bank in the last two months. That’s the kind of community we live in but the east end people are in fact a decent people. It’s the drugs that have decimated the communities.

Parkhead was a thriving and busy place at one time. The shopping centre is named after the Ford Steelworks that employed about seven thousand men here and there’s another steelworks down the road that employed another six or seven thousand men. Then the steelworks started shutting up in the Eighties. When everybody became unemployed that’s when the drug menace came to the fore here. It created plenty of kids with no hope for the future, no chance of a job. People were saying to them, ‘Take these drugs and you’ll feel great’, and they did take them. We’ve been left to pick up the pieces over the last eighteen to twenty years.

I think it was the Thatcher years that really put the kibosh on this city. There was that much unemployment and no decent standard of living. The young people were easy prey for the drug dealers. I can see drugs being a menace here for the foreseeable future.

There are no treatment centres in the east end of Glasgow. There’s a twelve bed centre in the south side and that’s for the whole of Glasgow. That’s the problem we’ve got. There are plenty of addicts wanting treatment but we’ve not got sufficient facilities for them. The hospitals don’t want to know. We’ve got a psychiatric hospital on the corner here but they won’t take drug addicts because they are hard work.

We’ve got the worst rundown housing in Glasgow. There are high rise flats that are basically just slums. All the homeless addicts from all over the city get dumped into the east end because we’ve got all the hostels for the drug addicts and the alcoholics. So we have a situation were most of the high rise flats are full of alcoholics and drug addicts. We’ve had an addict/alcoholic flinging his two year old son out of a high rise flat, eighteen storeys up. Four or five addicts have jumped to their deaths. Most of those people came from outside the area. That’s the killer because we have enough problems of our own as it is but they just keep sending them here.

The difficult for parents is they could have an addict in the house and they’ve not even noticed it happening. Usually the stealing starts at home, it doesn’t start outside with shoplifting. You start to notice that valuables are disappearing. You don’t notice at first because they take cameras that you keep in the wardrobe. That happened to me. I convinced myself that I’d lent it to somebody. I was phoning up my brothers and my brother-in-law looking for my camera. It gradually gets worse. It depends what kind of family it happens in. I’m seventeen stone and six feet high so I never get any bullying but we’ve had mothers and grandmothers in here who’ve been attacked. We had one grandmother in here who had brought her grandson up since he was a baby and he was putting pillows over her head in the middle of the night to get money off her. That’s the kind of stuff we get and it’s very hard to deal with. We advise them and say do this and do that. The bottom line is how do you live with and addict if you’re terrified of them? It’s alright saying no, tough love, but how do you say know to a nineteen year old addict whose putting a pillow over a seventy-two year old grannies head?

I watched my mother-in-law die of cancer last year and it’s much the same as living with an addict except she died. Addicts are terminally ill for ten, fifteen, twenty years. I’ve had two of them for eighteen years. One of my sons is on a methadone script in a hostel waiting to get into a rehabilitation unit. He’s been waiting six months and I’m not sure how long he’s going to last. The other one is in prison and me and his mam put the flags out when that happened because he’s safe, he’s alive and he’s warm. When he was in the hostel he was just totally chaotic. When he got caught taking other drugs they would increase his methadone script so that he didn’t need any other drugs. That’s what happens in Glasgow. It gets to the stage were they are just zombies. It’s hard to watch your son or your daughter dying by inches.

We’ve been saying for years that we need treatment centres. That’s the first thing we need. We need crisis centres. They say we’ve got twenty-five thousand addicts in Glasgow. Twelve beds doesn’t even scratch the surface. There are actually ninety-four rehabilitation beds for the Glasgow area but the crisis beds are for the chaotic addicts. They’ve had kids in who they say are not a crisis and after two days they’ve been dead. How do you define a crisis? Nobody can assess an addict. I’ve had two heroin addicts for twenty years and I can’t assess them so if I don’t know then I don’t think any school boy or school girl will know. We believe everybody should have a chance. Only certain addicts get a chance. The vast majority don’t. People say they should just stop using. It’s not that easy. If you’ve ever tried to stop smoking you know that it’s not easy. You need help. If it was easy everybody would stop. If you need medical help for cancer, leukaemia you get the best help available but if you’re a drug addict you can forget it. It’s hard for parents because you see other families getting the best treatment and your own can’t even get medical help. If they go to the hospital they can’t wait to get rid of them because they’re a nuisance. I don’t blame them for that because addicts are a nuisance. So, we’d like to see more treatment centres and treatment administered through the courts. Then if the going gets a bit tough for someone after a few days they would say to him you either complete your treatment or you’ll get five years in prison. They need to make them realise that they’d better sort themselves out, instil a bit of discipline. I’ve got two lads who’ve done two hundred prison sentences a piece. If it costs five hundred pounds a week to keep someone in jail then my boys have cost the public purse an awful lot of money. It wouldn’t have cost a fraction of that to give them treatment.

We’ve now got a Drug Court in Glasgow. It’s the American idea. A habitual addict criminal goes in front of a judge and he’s given probation and treatment orders. It’s doom to failure because there’s no stick. It should be like the American system were you go in front of the judge every two weeks and the first time you mess him about you’re back in jail. You need to give them proper sentences. The sentences my boys have done have been three months, six months and they can be out in six weeks. They don’t get a chance to get off. We’ve got loads of drug counsellors but nobody is getting clean. It’s time we looked at this. Why do we pay all these millions for centres and counsellors when there’s no end result? Give us the money, we’ll spend it better.

The other thing about our family support group is that we’re a therapeutic group but we don’t believe in big salaries. The people who work here are unpaid volunteers. I bump into the voluntary sector in Glasgow and they’re all getting £30,000 a year! Everybody who works here are parents of drug addicts. We don’t want paying for it. We look for about £8,000 a year to pay the rent and the rates, the phone and the postage. We don’t want money for jobs. We want to help each other without any of that coming into it.

I once fell out with a Cardinal in Glasgow. We had a few words one time. I was at a memorial Mass for the dead. Glasgow is the worst city in Europe for drug overdose deaths. Every year they have this Mass to pray for all the dead addicts. We were asking the Cardinal if he was coming back next year. It’s like a Christmas disco, you’ve got to order it a year in advance. I just asked him why he didn’t do something to change it so that we didn’t have to come every year and pray for another hundred dead. I asked him to give us something – beds, a building or whatever. So, me and him fell out. I actually wrote an apology because I was terrified he might be the next Pope and I’d swore at him. He sent a nice letter to say keep doing what you’re doing.