"I can't believe I got back on the stuff"

IT'S 6 o'clock on Wednesday, March 26. I'm having a coffee and tackling a game of chess with my younger brother, Ronan. How I manage to win, I don't know.

It's 11 days to the launch of my new film, Stranded On Cloud 9, and today has been the weirdest day.

I'm frantically trying to set up an exhibition, Lost Time, to run parallel with the launch of the documentary. It is all part of an awareness project in which addiction, to heroin in particular, is the epicentre.

The aim is simple: to educate people about the dangers of drug misuse. And individuals who are, or have been directly affected by the issues covered in the film, entirely inspire the project's content.

So today I hurried into York with my stills camera, hoping to capture more material for the exhibition. The photos are to be presented along side a series of poems, short pieces of writing, art and posters all revolving around heroin addiction.

The first person I meet is Kelvin, who stays at the Arc Light centre. He is 24 and has been homeless for 18 months. I manage to catch his attention by calling his name in the street.

I remember thinking, right in that moment, how he must wear away the streets, pacing up and down, day after day. "Do you want a coffee Kelvin?" I ask. "Oh thanks, that would be great": his smile speaks a million words. I ask him if he would like to be in a photo for the exhibition I was doing on heroin addiction. Happily he obliges.

If you look, you can read a story in a face, but the motive of this project has been to explore beyond the surface, past the face. To look inside the life of the broken homeless man who drinks his sorrows into oblivion, to understand why a 23-year-old with a lifetime in front of her injects £20 pounds worth of heroin into her groin every day.

To ask what makes them cry, what makes them laugh.

And maybe, just maybe, if they trusted me enough, I would learn something about addiction and the emotional roots beneath the surface issue of drug abuse.

Kelvin stays with me all day, telling me, while smoking all my cigarettes, how he was struggling with his heroin addiction. Then I realise something is wrong. Pam's problems were about to overshadow everything.

Pam, a 33-year-old from York, fighting an almost hopeless war with heroin addiction, is the next person who I meet on my journey.

A mother of two, she sits on Parliament Street, head in her hands, accompanied by everything she owns contained in two ragged black bin-liners.

"It's buried me this," she weeps. "I can't believe I got back on the stuff."

She is crying because her flat, where she is staying with her two daughters and another single parent family, has been robbed and ransacked by two heroin addicts.

"You should see the place, it's horrible. They have sold everything and trashed the place."

By coincidence, Pam is a family friend who would baby-sit for my younger brothers and me some years ago, before my own chaotic years of drug use began. I was addicted to amphetamines after a family tragedy, and it took the help of my friends to bring me through.

It hurt seeing the exuberant woman I knew broken by drugs and trapped in a matrix of colossal problems, such as impending deceit charges and the care of her children.

I drove her to her house and I was horrified by what I saw. The door was scarred by graffiti and smashed. Inside the place was dark and damp: only the living room has a light.

The kitchen light fitting has been filled in and a board covers the broken window, fixed with ugly nails. There is broken glass on the floors, and in the bath; the bathroom is filthy.

She doesn't want to live like this, it was breaking her heart: "You know how much I love my children."

Around 30 heroin addicts became involved in the Lost Time exhibition with the motive to change society's pre-conception on these issues, and to educate people about their way of life.

More importantly they felt that expressing heroin addiction on their level might reach kids and help prevent the evil cloak of heroin addiction from consuming anyone else.

"It just creeps up and grabs you" says Jimbo, an ex-heroin addict who features in the film. "You think you're strong enough but you're not. It completely grips you."

Exploring emotional issues, such as relationship breakdown, domestic violence, and sexual, physical or psychological abuse, is not something I took lightly. I can relate to the issues.

What the Lost Time exhibition and the documentary, Stranded On Cloud 9, convey is a message about heroin addiction, voiced by real-life people who have first hand experience with heroin and the extent of the consequences when you get addicted.

Having worked on the project for several months, engaging with an array of characters, each with a different story to tell, I have seen and heard how bad things can get.

And the more that I found out about the person behind the drug problem, the more I realised that drugs were a surface issue.

"Let's be careful we don't focus to much on the drugs," says Paul Johnson, of North Yorkshire CID, also featured in the film and who pioneered the Arrest Referral Scheme aimed at putting individuals caught up in drug-related crime straight into drugs services.

"Drugs can be a reaction to an otherwise wretched life. You can't fail to understand how people can take a drug that takes away all the worries of the world, when all you have are all the worries of the world."

Again he's talking about heroin, and with more than ten years' experience in the force, he knows exactly what he's talking about.

Reflecting on previous attempts by the Government to prevent drugs-misuse and heroin abuse, Paul says, "I remember the adverts, 'Heroin Screws You Up'. It didn't work. We have got to find new ways to educate the youth about drugs."

Paul became involved with the film because he felt it was time that the message got across and people listened. "What it comes down to is telling the truth. We have got to start telling the truth."

Kevin's film Stranded On Cloud 9 premieres before an invited audience at City Screen, York, on Sunday. Its first public screenings will be at City Screen between May 19 and 22. The exhibition, Lost Time, opens at City Screen this weekend. Call (01904) 541155

Updated: 10:57 Friday, April 04, 2003